I’ve long been fascinated with complex, self-organizing systems in the presence of an “energy” gradient. It now seems to me that the processes involved can best be thought of as “economies”, in that they are about how all the universe’s critters make their individual and collective livings. I suggest that this metaphor can stretch to cover all members of the above class of systems, be they biological, chemical, sociological, political, or even meteorological (hurricanes, too, organize systematically in the presence of harvestable energy to produce work). If this idea is even close to correct, then the tools of economics can profitably be brought to bear on a large variety of extremely interesting (and important) questions. (Just because argots differ does not mean that processes are not the same. Economists use the term “incentives” in much the same ways that philosophers discuss “intentionality”, but I suspect they are talking about approximately the same thing.)

Here is one set of questions, involving oatmeal, that keeps me awake nights. The complexity/emergence theorists often speculate about how systems self-organize, but, for the most part, they don’t say much about the energy gradient propping up the “economies” involved, and, even when they do, it is all about what happens when there is an abundance of exploitable energy (I think your typical economist look at matters equivalently). Fine, but that is only part of it—and it says nothing about how evolution could possibly score the power to pump (probably) adaptive characteristics such as tribalism, cooperation, and religion.

My question, then: What happens to complex organization when there is, as in crystalization and cooling oatmeal, not enough energy to go around, to provide new layers of complexity? Again, if the metaphor holds, such fallbacks (and die-offs) do happen, not only at the chemical level, but at the political/social scale as well. Sunlight, money (in all its forms), food, and oil all provide the energy needed to structure some institution or another, many of which are especially important to modern-day humans. And the sources of said energy do, sometimes, dry up or get ruinously expensive. What then? A rising tide may lift all boats, more or less, but when the tide goes out…?

Catastrophes do befall individual and collective lives; what difference does the slew rate make? That is, how does a rapid onset, one-shot catastrophe (like Katrina) differ in result from one coming on over one or more generations (like, surely, global warming)? And, since one critter’s poison is another’s meat (doomsday for some isn’t the end of the world for all), how do the various “life forms”, whether biological, social, or virtual interact in the teeth of various catastrophe scenarios?