A simple model of economic growth where a government taxes the economy, and spends it on capital and revenue goods.

Economic growth cannot go on forever, although politicians and most economist seem to think so. The activity involved in economic growth necessarily  generates entropy (disorder and environmental degradation). Entorpy in turn generates powerful negative feedback loops which will, as a response from nature, ensure that economic activity will eventually grind to a complete halt.  In these circumstances organised society cannot persist and will collapse. The negative feedback loops shown in this graph have already started to operate. The longer economic growth continues unabated, the more powerful these negative feedback loops will become. How long can economic growth continue before it is overwhelmed? It may not be very far in the future.

IM-168155 Summary of Ch 27 of Mitchell Wray and Watts Textbook see IM-164967 for book overview with simplified Mike Radzicki's 2003 Evolutionary Economics history article added

The statement that there can be no economic activity without  energy and that fossil fuels are finite contrasts with the fact that money is not finite and can be created by governments via their central banks at zero marginal cost whenever needed.

An important fact about COAL, GAS and OIL (especially when produced via fracking) is that their net energy ratios are falling rapidly. In other words the energy needed to extract a given quantity of fossil fuels is constantly increasing. The falling ratio 'EROI' (Energy Return on Energy Invested ) provides yet another warning that we can no longer rely on fossil fuels to power our economies. In 1940 it took the energy of only one barrel of oil to extract 100. Today the energy of 1 barrel of oil will yield only 15. We cannot wait until the ratio falls to 1/1 before we invest seriously in alternative sources of energy, because by then industrial society as we know it doday will have ceased to exist. An EROI of 1:1 means that it takes the energy of one barrel of oil to extract one barrel of oil - oil production would simply stop! 

This is part of series of model implemented from "Thinking in Systems" book by Donella Meadows

​Farmers use intensive pesticides to harvest cotton, which is harmful to not only the health of the farmers using them, but also our environment as it pollutes rivers and groundwater that negatively interfere with the ecosystem. Even though these farmers know of the health and environmental risks, they still use harmful pesticides to produce cotton, but why is this so. This stock and flow map should explain what impacts farmers to use pesticides to grow cotton despite the risks and explain the cause and effect relationship their use has on the cotton industry and the environment.

THE BROKEN LINK BETWEEN SUPPLY AND DEMAND CREATES TURBULENT CHAOTIC DESTRUCTION

The existing global capitalistic growth paradigm is totally flawed

Growth in supply and productivity is a summation of variables as is demand ... when the link between them is broken by catastrophic failure in a component the creation of unpredictable chaotic turbulence puts the controls ito a situation that will never return the system to its initial conditions as it is STIC system (Lorenz)

The chaotic turbulence is the result of the concept of infinite bigness this has been the destructive influence on all empires and now shown up by Feigenbaum numbers and Dunbar numbers for neural netwoirks

See Guy Lakeman Bubble Theory for more details on keeping systems within finite working containers (villages communities)

How education causes the gap between socio-economic status?

The World3 model is a detailed simulation of human population growth from 1900 into the future. It includes many environmental and demographic factors.

Use the sliders to experiment with the initial amount of non-renewable resources to see how these affect the simulation. Does increasing the amount of non-renewable resources (which could occur through the development of better exploration technologies) improve our future? Also, experiment with the start date of a more environmentally focused policy.

The Logistic Map is a polynomial mapping (equivalently, recurrence relation) of degree 2, often cited as an archetypal example of how complex, chaotic behaviour can arise from very simple non-linear dynamical equations. The map was popularized in a seminal 1976 paper by the biologist Robert May, in part as a discrete-time demographic model analogous to the logistic equation first created by Pierre François Verhulst. 

Mathematically, the logistic map is written

where:

 is a number between zero and one, and represents the ratio of existing population to the maximum possible population at year n, and hence x0 represents the initial ratio of population to max. population (at year 0)r is a positive number, and represents a combined rate for reproduction and starvation.
For approximate Continuous Behavior set 'R Base' to a small number like 0.125To generate a bifurcation diagram, set 'r base' to 2 and 'r ramp' to 1
To demonstrate sensitivity to initial conditions, try two runs with 'r base' set to 3 and 'Initial X' of 0.5 and 0.501, then look at first ~20 time steps

Ocean/atmosphere/biosphere model tuned for interactive economics-based simulations from Y2k on.

WIP of several books of Karl Polanyi's thoughts and papers around social science economic history and capitalism. . See also Summary of the Great Transformation IM-10640

This is a simplification of the Austerity vs Prosperity model in the hope that it will be easier to understand.

Butterfly Effect
Sensitivity To Initial Conditions
(sensitive dependence on initial conditions)
Navier Stokes Equations
Lorenz Attractor
Chaos Theory, Disorder and Entropy



If M is the state space for the map , then  displays sensitive dependence to initial conditions if for any x in M and any δ > 0, there are y in M, with  such that

Goodwin business cycle model, modified from Keen and Blatt