Zurtlespace

Note: Edited, retitled and re-posted from October 21, 2013

Lately, I have been making the most of my work commute by getting a subscription to audible so as to catch up on the reading I would otherwise rather be doing in place of the 1-2 hours daily I spend on the road.

I was listening to the audible edition of Basic Economics, by Thomas Sowell, when a thought occurred to me: The economic environment is a not so surprising parallel to the natural environment. (To be fair, thoughts occur to me all the time while reading/listening to books, which is often highly distracting). This may not come as much of a revelation to most, and in truth I had made this connection before; but, for some reason this time I saw it in a way I hadn’t really understood before; The economy cares about individual businesses, their successes and failures, to the exact same degree that nature cares about individual species—not at all. Species thrive; species die. Businesses thrive; businesses die. The world keeps turning and the market keeps moving.

It is not enough to say that both environments run on the Darwinian principle—survival of the fittest. While true, this statement does not go deep enough. Most people do not understand the exact degree to which this is the case.

For example: When Arnold Schwarzenegger announced c.2003 that he was considering making Warren Buffett his economic advisor to help California through it’s financial crisis, many people were quite excited at the prospect. Even some of Schwarzenegger’s harshest critics had little to criticize about such a possibility. In fact, whenever Buffett makes comments about matters relating to business, people attend his words as to Moses at Sinai. And why wouldn’t they? The man is the most successful individual investor in the world; clearly he knows what he is doing. If he can run such a successful business, then he must know everything there is to know about how to manage an economy! Predicting the economy is what he does for a living—and he wins!

Nevermind that no one can possibly know everything, and even Buffett makes mistakes, this sort of logic is what allows for brigands like Donald Trump, (whose entire existence is built on plying money from his investors and then filing bankruptcy in his corporations, leaving them in the lurch after absconding with the profits—and I use the term ‘profits’ loosely; these companies never make a dime in profit, but his corporate salary is nevertheless his from the outset) to constantly threaten to run for president on an economic platform based entirely on their reputation for business acumen, expecting that people will believe such an attribute to be applicable to the economy at large.

The truth is that Buffett—and Trump, in his own way—is a businessman, not an economist. These two things are not the same. The purpose of a business is to make a profit, and a businessman does his best to steer the business in such a way that it is most likely to succeed in this task; an economy—increasingly The Economy—is the environment in which this happens. But the environment owes nothing to its denizens and operates under its own set of rules, independent of what the businesses under its aegis might desire. Outside factors—the government, for example—can try to affect The Economy to its own ends, but ultimately it is simply outside of anyone’s ability to command; to command it one must command the trillions of individual transactions that occur daily as the result of the interactions between the millions of active participants within it, as well as control their needs and desires to a degree of exactitude impossible outside of an Orwellian nightmare-state, and maybe not even then.

The economic environment is indifferent to the concerns of business, or rather, individual businesses. Whether they succeed or fail, so long as activity continues, the economy thrives—and activity always continues.

The parallels with the natural environment are so obvious that any concrete examples risk belaboring the already extended point. You need only notice the stunning biodiversity of your immediate location, expand that to the entirety our little blue marble, and then realize that the vast majority of these species are relatively young, and have little to nothing in common with their ancestors. The species that exist today are nothing like the species that once were, and for good reason; 99% of everything that has ever lived is dead. Gone. Extinct. Several times over. Extinction events have happened multiple times in the course of terrestrial history. And each time, nearly everything was wiped out. I suppose we could retroactively blame the mass extinction of very nearly everything that has ever lived on the malfeasance of human activity echoing backward into the distant past (since there is simply not enough room in our current era to contain all of our combined environmental evil), but that seems like a bit of a stretch (though a great premise for a sci-fi novel). The simple truth, as George Carlin said, is “we didn’t kill them all.”

We are not the culprit; Nature is.

Nature does not care about individual species, if it can even be said to possess such a human quality. It simply is. It grows and changes, and the species that can adapt to these environmental changes survive; those that cannot, die. And nature goes on, uncaring and unending, until the stars burn out.

Attempts to command nature or control an economy invariably meet with embarrassing results, as Xerxes and the various communists discovered. Examples of the consequences of this sort of folly are found everywhere, from real life to the wildest science fiction: killer robots, inefficient factories, mad scientists, pervasive poverty, overwhelmed dikes, sunken ships, rampant AIs, the zombie apocalypse—all of these examples of the catastrophic failure, real or imagined, of human ingenuity serve to underscore a fundamental truth; some things are just too big to fuck with.

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