Burgess COMMENTARY
An interesting read ... but my take on the conclusions is that they have to be incredibly unreliable ... interesting but essentially worthless. As I understand the mathematics of complex systems, the computations are problematic at best. But the situation is really a lot worse than that. Technology is changing very rapidly and this is changing the fundamental characteristics of the economy, and factoring this into predictions about the future is largely ignored. But worse again, the mechanisms that drove the economy in the past when productivity was quite low are fundamentally different from the mechanisms that drive where productivity is high. The measures we use for economic performance are archaic and extremely clumsy ... and which largely ignore most of the things that really matter. There are dangerously too many people in extreme poverty and exposed to the dangers of failed systems. Mass migration nay well change the relationships used in economic models in unpredictable ways. There are changing climate systems and sea level rise that are going to change the physical landscape in ways that have not been seen in millions of years. We can fiddle with the money system while there are cataclysmic changes going on in the real world that don't link any more with the models from yesterday. Looking into the future is an important exercise ... but it must be done, in my view, with an appreciation of how significantly important real things are changing Peter Burgess truevaluemetrics,org
Peter Burgess