Simple Health Care Supply and Demand Interactions

That efficiency gains achieved by employing technological solutions often have a negative effect has been known since 1856 when William Stanley Jevons described this counterintuitive situation, which has become known as ‘Jevons Paradox’. This simple graph illustrates this effect. Be it extraction of a mineral or the production of a product, employing technology will make the process more efficient, initially, and lower the price of the product produced. However, the lower prices will increase demand and, therefore, the use of the resources employed. Unless more or better technology is employed, the extra demand is likely to lead to a price increase cancelling the initial beneficial effect, and in addition, the resource may be pushed to exhaustion. The technological fix will have failed. Note, ‘solar’ and ‘wind’ are also subject to a ‘Fixes-that-Fails’ structure, but this requires a separate illustration. 

This simple model will attempt to demonstrate how modern civilization's groundwater practices are unsustainable and how they are affected by the changing climate.

HANDY Model of Societal Collapse from Ecological Economics Paper 

This is a heavily simplified model of the revenue generated by oil extraction and the pension fund. The oil reserves are a stock already considered in monetary value. Every year part of this stock goes to people working in the oil industry, the shareholders, or directly into the pension fund. Part of the workers' wages go to the pension fund as long as there are wages coming from the oil company. This money flow is stopped once the oil reserves are depleted. The payouts to the shareholders are not taxed, however the wealth of the shareholders is flat-taxed with a fixed percentage. This flow is nicknamed "Tax the Rich".

That efficiency gains achieved by employing technological solutions often have a negative effect has been known since 1856 when William Stanley Jevons described this counterintuitive situation, which has become known as ‘Jevons Paradox’. This simple graph illustrates this effect. Be it extraction of a mineral or the production of a product, employing technology will make the process more efficient, initially, and lower the price of the product produced. However, the lower prices will increase demand and, therefore, the use of the resources employed. Unless more or better technology is employed, the extra demand is likely to lead to a price increase cancelling the initial beneficial effect, and in addition, the resource may be pushed to exhaustion. The technological fix will have failed. Note, ‘solar’ and ‘wind’ are also subject to a ‘Fixes-that-Fails’ structure, but this requires a separate illustration. 

The theory underlying the digital sustainability platform

HANDY Model of Societal Collapse from Ecological Economics Paper 

Fig 3.1 from Jorgen Randers book 2052 a Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years

Challenges in sustainability are multilevel.
This diagram attempts to summarize levels of self reinforcing destructive dynamics, authors that deal with them, and point of leverage for change.

The base of the crisis is a mechanistic rather than ecological worldview. This mechanistic worldview is based on outdated science that assumed the universe to be a large machine. In a machine there is an inside and an outside. The health of the inside is important for the machine, the outside not. In an ecological view everything is interconnected, there is no clear separation in the future of self and other. All parts influence the health of other parts. To retain health sensitivity and democracy are inherent. The sense of separation from other that keeps the mechanistic worldview dominant is duality. Being cut off from spiritual traditions due to a mechanistic view of science people need access to inter-spirituality to reconnect with the human traditions and tools around connectedness, inner discovery, and compassion. Many books on modern physics and biology deal with the system view implications. "The coming interspiritual age" deals with the need to connect spiritual traditions and science.

At the bottom for the dynamic is an individual a sense of disconnectedness leads to a dependency on spending and having rather than connecting. The connecting has become too painful and dealing with it unpopular in our culture. Joanna Macy deals with this in Active Hope. 

This affluenza and disconnection is worsened by a market that floods one with advertisements aimed at creating needs and a sense of dissatisfaction with that one has.

National economies are structured around maximising GDP which means maximising consumption and financial capital movement. This is at the cost of local economies. These same local economies are needed for balanced happiness as well as for sustainability.

Generally institutions focus on maximising consumption rather than sustaining life support systems. David Korten covers this well.

Power and wealth is confused in this worldview. In striving for wealth only power is striven for in the form of money and monopoly.

Those at the head of large banks and corporations tend to be there because they exemplify this approach. They have few scruples about enforcing this approach onto everyone through wars and disaster capitalism. Naomi Klein and David Estulin documented this.

Power has become so centralized that we need this understanding to be widespread and include many of those in power. Progress of all of these levels are needed to show them and all that another way is possible.

Simple box-model of the global carbon cycle

Derived from a model at the Meadows institute. http://bit.ly/zI4axo.

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•Average (Status Quo) Case

This model incorporates several options in examining fisheries dynamics and fisheries employment. The two most important aspects are the choice between I)managing based on setting fixed quota versus setting fixed effort , and ii) using the 'scientific advice' for quota setting  versus allowing 'political influence' on quota setting (the assumption here is that you have good estimates of recruitment and stock assessments that form the basis of 'scientific advice' and then 'political influnce' that desires increased quota beyond the scientific advice).