Economics of Abundance

The rules of wealth are written in the biosphere, by the biosphere. We are privileged to discover those rules slowly and to use them consciously. We can look beyond the apparent scarcity of the moment to the ubiquitous abundance that has nurtured evolution of our biosphere. Until the next cosmic disaster sets life back or extinguishes it, evolution builds ever more plentiful life from a once inanimate universe. Economics must open more to life science to understand abundance. Modern Monetary Theory has pushed the door ajar. Bob Komives' conjectures push it open.Our wealth is complex. It includes art, safety and clean air, as well as more tangible goods and services. A resource is a resource because life has knowledge to leverage it. Knowledge is wealth and has no inherent limitations except the limits of the universe. We must measure knowledge, track it, and understand how life organizes it if we are to understand abundance. The biosphere is rich in knowledge bound into energy forms that know how to organize themselves to convert more and more of the inanimate universe into life. Humankind's wealth is its share of that knowledge. Today, other life sciences know more about this wealth than does economics.Economics usually deals only with humankind-as do some other sciences such as sociology. That limitation is legitimate since all sciences are really arbitrary sub-sciences of one whole, science. If intellectual boundaries are understood to be convenient rather than absolute, we let one science flow naturally into another. Economic analysis should work at species level, national level, regional level, group or family level, or at the level of any life system we choose. Why? Because wealth develops at all levels. Choosing any one level for analysis, we must look inward to sub-systems, but also outward to the systems of which the chosen level is a working part.A community fosters its economic development when it captures wealth, distributes it, and recirculates it through community organs-neighborhoods, schools, families, businesses, associations. In the process of economic development new subgroups may form, and old ones may reorganize. As in nature, the successful process is at once complex and elegant.This same community should look outward to try to understand the larger governments, cultures, ecosystems, and ultimately the biosphere and universe of which it is an organ. Economics, the life science, will tell us how, while capturing wealth from these higher-level organisms, we should foster their wealth-recognizing that they too develop and change. Economics, the life science, will explain to us why, if we organize ourselves to foul or stagnate our planet, we organize for failure.