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SD and critical pedagogy
Posted by Dan Proctor on 10/7/2008
Attached File: http://clexchange.org/ftp/K12Listserve/771_MILLBrief.pdf
“nearly all the models I see being published are about these isolated problems of making supply chains work better and increasing profit margins”
How far would SD have gotten if it didn’t have the power of increasing profits? Are you familiar with its development starting 50+ years ago, and specifically how its development and propagation have been and continue to be financed? System dynamicists are in much the same predicament as economists with regard to who pays the piper and what the tune consequently sounds like.
Yes, Marx was a powerful systems thinker, but at bottom he was a vengeful moralist, and that resulted in all sorts of mischief. Adam Smith was also a powerful systems thinker (I will provide examples to the curious), but John Stuart Mill has more to say that is more directly relevant to our situation today (which I term “peak capitalism”) and less liable to lead off into a morass.
It’s quite a coincidence that Mill’s Principles of Economics was published in 1848, the same year the Communist Manifesto appeared. You can download the full text of one of the many editions of the former from http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/mill/prin/book1/index.html.
I attach several pages of key excerpts from the 2-volume work (but I don't know if this listserv conveys attachments). For instance:
“All this, however, has only put us in possession of the economical laws of a stationary and unchanging society. We have still to consider the economical condition of mankind as liable to change, and indeed (in the more advanced portions of the race, and in all regions to which their influence reaches) as at all times undergoing progressive changes. We have to consider what these changes are, what are their laws, and what their ultimate tendencies; thereby adding a theory of motion to our theory of equilibrium the Dynamics of political economy to the Statics.” [emph mine, dp]
“That they [finite natural resources] are the ultimate limits, must always have been clearly seen. But since the final barrier has never in any instance been reached; since there is no country in which all the land, capable of yielding food, is so highly cultivated that a larger produce could not (even without supposing any fresh advance in agricultural knowledge) be obtained from it, and since a large portion of the earth's surface still remains entirely uncultivated; it is commonly thought, and is very natural at first to suppose, that for the present all limitation of production or population from this source is at an indefinite distance, and that ages must elapse before any practical necessity arises for taking the limiting principle into serious consideration.
“I apprehend this to be not only an error, but the most serious one, to be found in the whole field of political economy [how much more accurate is this statement today than when originally written!]. The question is more important and fundamental than any other; it involves the whole subject of the causes of poverty, in a rich and industrious community; and unless this one matter be thoroughly understood, it is to no purpose proceeding any further in our inquiry.”
“Towards what ultimate point is society tending by its industrial progress? When
the progress ceases, in what condition are we to expect that it will leave mankind?” [This is roughly the question posed by the Club of Rome 120 years after Mill wrote this, and Forrester’s methodology was used to produce an answer]
Happy cogitating,
~dan
“nearly all the models I see being published are about these isolated problems of making supply chains work better and increasing profit margins”
How far would SD have gotten if it didn’t have the power of increasing profits? Are you familiar with its development starting 50+ years ago, and specifically how its development and propagation have been and continue to be financed? System dynamicists are in much the same predicament as economists with regard to who pays the piper and what the tune consequently sounds like.
Yes, Marx was a powerful systems thinker, but at bottom he was a vengeful moralist, and that resulted in all sorts of mischief. Adam Smith was also a powerful systems thinker (I will provide examples to the curious), but John Stuart Mill has more to say that is more directly relevant to our situation today (which I term “peak capitalism”) and less liable to lead off into a morass.
It’s quite a coincidence that Mill’s Principles of Economics was published in 1848, the same year the Communist Manifesto appeared. You can download the full text of one of the many editions of the former from http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/mill/prin/book1/index.html.
I attach several pages of key excerpts from the 2-volume work (but I don't know if this listserv conveys attachments). For instance:
“All this, however, has only put us in possession of the economical laws of a stationary and unchanging society. We have still to consider the economical condition of mankind as liable to change, and indeed (in the more advanced portions of the race, and in all regions to which their influence reaches) as at all times undergoing progressive changes. We have to consider what these changes are, what are their laws, and what their ultimate tendencies; thereby adding a theory of motion to our theory of equilibrium the Dynamics of political economy to the Statics.” [emph mine, dp]
“That they [finite natural resources] are the ultimate limits, must always have been clearly seen. But since the final barrier has never in any instance been reached; since there is no country in which all the land, capable of yielding food, is so highly cultivated that a larger produce could not (even without supposing any fresh advance in agricultural knowledge) be obtained from it, and since a large portion of the earth's surface still remains entirely uncultivated; it is commonly thought, and is very natural at first to suppose, that for the present all limitation of production or population from this source is at an indefinite distance, and that ages must elapse before any practical necessity arises for taking the limiting principle into serious consideration.
“I apprehend this to be not only an error, but the most serious one, to be found in the whole field of political economy [how much more accurate is this statement today than when originally written!]. The question is more important and fundamental than any other; it involves the whole subject of the causes of poverty, in a rich and industrious community; and unless this one matter be thoroughly understood, it is to no purpose proceeding any further in our inquiry.”
“Towards what ultimate point is society tending by its industrial progress? When
the progress ceases, in what condition are we to expect that it will leave mankind?” [This is roughly the question posed by the Club of Rome 120 years after Mill wrote this, and Forrester’s methodology was used to produce an answer]
Happy cogitating,
~dan
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