Timothy Wilken
A reader named Mark comments: “I hate false originality. With this thesis, his essay should have been full of references to at least F.A. Hayek, Michael Rothschild, and Nelson & Winter. I just looked, and his essay doesn’t contain a single reference to any of these. Nor to “Austrian”, “Bionomics”, or “agorics”.”
Wayne Perg replies:
Dear Timothy:
Much thanks for forwarding Mark’s comment to me. I had not connected with Bionomics or Michael Rothschild. Now that I have, I will be able to differentiate what I am doing from Bionomics. This is very important because, as Mark observed, we seem to be talking about the same thing. However, we are actually proceeding from entirely different world views and, as a result, we could hardly be more different.
In the preface of his book (accessible from the web site for the Bionomics Institute), Michael Rothschild writes “Technology, not people hold center stage.” He states also in postings on the web site that he sees information as the essence of both biological and economic systems.
In contrast, in my world view, people, not technology hold center stage in our economic system. And I see relationships as the essence of all life, including biological systems and economic systems. I see information as being merely a tool of evolution, not the essence of life.
The impact of this different foundation is huge. Michael Rothschild mentions that cooperation (tension, pull, female energy) is a part of biological systems, but his total focus is on competition (compression, push, male energy). This results in unbalanced forces!
He recognizes the negative impact of adversarial relationships that result from power-over structures, but fails to consider the synergic power of cooperation. As a result, his vision of internal restructuring stops at the neutral – internal markets.
I do appreciate your continuum of relationships (adversity-neutrality-synergy) — I am just beginning to integrate it into my thinking and it is already having a large impact on my work in economics.
Because he sees technology as the center, not people, he stays with a capitalist structure (ownership by the providers of property, rather than the workers). He merely substitutes intellectual property for physical property. This substitution requires the assumption that intellectual property can be separated from the people who create it.
However, this assumption requires the ability of a given store of intellectual property to maintain its value, which is not possible in the dynamic world that he assumes – a separation fallacy consistent with his making information (which is separate items) the foundation of his work rather than relationships (connectedness), thus missing the unity that underlies the apparent separtion (and the unity of opposites found in both modern science and spirituality) in our dualistic universe.
With much gratitude, Wayne
Thanks Wayne, I look forward to more of your writings. You can read Wayne’s original essay here.
Timothy