[FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Jochen Fromm]

The economy is collapsing right now. It has positive side effects like clean air in L.A. and Beijing, but right now it is collapsing.-J.
-------- Original message --------From: Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> Date: 5/2/20  18:47  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question Nick,I suspect that if people only did what they 'need to do' the economy would collapse.On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:Colleagues,  I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?   You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.   Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?  Nick  Nicholas ThompsonEmeritus Professor of Ethology and PsychologyClark UniversityThompNickSon2 at gmail.comhttps://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/   .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ...
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