Socio-Economic Metaphors:

Socio-Economic Metaphors:Machine or Ecosystem?

Common Metaphors

• Family

• Hive

• Machine

Society/Economy as Ecosystem

• The machine metaphor is getting most of the traction right now in economy, society and community.

• It’s a bad metaphor. Why?

• Society/Economy as ecosystem is a superior metaphor. Let’s explore.

Society as Machine

A sensation when it was unveiled at the London School of Economics in 1949, the Phillips machine used hydraulics to model the workings of the British economy but now looks, at first glance, like the brainchild of a nutty professor. Where the Bank’s [of England] team of in-house economists are equipped with state-of- the-art digital computers, the profession’s first stab at modelling was very much a do-it-yourself affair ….

The prototype was an odd assortment of tanks, pipes, sluices and valves, with water pumped around the machine by a motor cannibalised from the windscreen wiper of a Lancaster bomber. Bits of filed-down Perspex and fishing line were used to channel the coloured dyes that mimicked the flow of income round the economy into consumer spending, taxes, investment and exports. Phillips and Walter Newlyn, who helped piece the machine together at the end of the 1940s, experimented with treacle and methylated spirits before deciding that coloured water was the best way of displaying the way money circulates around the economy.

- Elliot, Larry. “The Computer Model that Once Explained the British Economy,” The Guardian, May 2008.

Society as Machine• Paul Krugman says he was

attracted to economics because it seemed to reveal "the beauty of pushing a button to solve problems.”

• J. M. Keynes and F.D.R. insist the economy is a “pump” that needs to be “primed.”

• A CNN headline reads "Obama's priority: Fixing the economy."

Mission control

Machine: 3 Imbedded Assumptions

1. First, if an economy behaves according to certain laws, it is deterministic;

2. Second, if the economy is deterministic, the intricacies of its complex relations are, in principle, knowable; and

3. Third, if its intricacies are knowable, the economy is manipulable—where manipulation can be carried out for the sake of an ideal social outcome.

Community & Society• Bad metaphors don’t just muddy

economic matters.• Societies and communities are

also victims of these metaphors and their related assumptions.

• Witness urban planning fetishism and the associated top-down economics. Costs largely unseen.

• All of these depend on the 3 assumptions imbedded in the machine metaphor.

Non-Determinism

• Epistemic Non-Determinism

(Knowledge Problem)

• Systemic Non-Determinism

(Metaphysical)

Spanners in the Works

1. If socio-economic life is non-deterministic, then it is neither knowable nor manipulable in important respects.

2. Too many plans and designs make us vulnerable to unintended consequences.

3. We suffer under the “Intelligent Design” problem of politicians and planners.

Indicators of Economic ID

• Epicyclical Thinking and Policy

• “Market Failure” & the God of the Economic Gaps

• “Market Failure” & the Nirvana Fallacy

• Corporatism & Public Choice Problems (Parasitism and Dependency)

• Crests, Troughs and Business Cycles

• Butterflies & Black Swans

In Search of New Metaphors

Sorry, George…

Society as Ecosystem

What are the parallels?

Society as Ecosystem

1. Undesigned, yet ordered2. Unknowable in its totality3. Complex, as in CAS

- nested subsystems - open boundaries - holistic - non-deterministic - self-organizing - emergent

4. Networks over hierarchies

Networks over hierarchies

Society as Ecosystem

5. Rules-based, not directive-based

6. Locally purposive, globally plural

6. Result of iterative processes

7. Structured around scarcity

8. Specialization and adaptation

9. Organic unity

Let’s Use Better Metaphors

Thank You