World System Growth and Collapse or Steady State?










 

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UKL20: Can Policy Actions Destabilize the SocioEconomic System?

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  Typically, when commentators talk about Policy Actions such as the UK Climate Change Act of 2008 , the assumption seems to be that governments will never do enough and that the more aggressive the policy targets the better . Seldom are the effects on the political-economic system taken into consideration and seldom is consideration given to stabilizing the political-economic system before policy measures are enacted. In the graphic above, I have plotted two forecasts for UK1  (the dominant state variable in the UKL20 BAU Model ). The top graphic shows system collapse in the Business-As-Usual ( BAU )  model  which, as estimated from the World Development Indicators , is unstable. The lower graphic shows the stabilized version of the BAU model reaching a steady-state after 2046 (the model is stabilized by reducing growth rates). My next question is whether the  Climate Change Act of 2008  destabilized the system. In the Notes below, I present the U...
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Steady State Economy for Germany?

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  Jun 1, 2026  Germany Has Lost What It Did Best  Pro-growth handwringing. The IMF ( here ) among other commentators ( here ) think that the German economy is in trouble. The conclusions are based on the assumption of  Unlimited Economic Growth . What if the techno-optimist assumption is wrong? What if growth cannot continue forever and our macro-TechnoSocial systems must become  Steady State Economies ? Is there any evidence that any economies are already reaching Steady State and what are the implications, good or bad, if they are? HINT: from the graph above, the Deutsch Empire ( DE ) has been in a steady state since 2010. I'll explain all this in a future post. If you want to experiment yourself with the DEL20 systems model, you run it on line and experiment with coefficients  here . Notice that the two  error correcting controllers  in the Measurement Matrix are ( EF-GDP ), the  Ecological Footprint  compared to aggregate production ...
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Steady-State Economy: Political Philosophy

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In a prior post ( here ), I commented that the Political Philosophy of a Steady-State Economy  "remained to be worked out". What I mean by the comment is that when we work through all the popular political philosophies (see table in the Notes below) and end up at  Steady-State Economy  and General Systems Philosophy , we start to run into some contradictions. The graphic above summarizes the problem (there are actually six growth modes that contain the three above--see below). We know the history of Societal Collapse , it has happened before and is obviously not sustainable. We also hypothesize that unstable exponential growth will eventually reach limits on a Finite Planet (the Limits to Growth ) and create living conditions that are not sustainable. Growth Limits, however, are a hypothesis that can't be proven until it is too late. From General Systems Theory  we know that the only way to create a  Steady-State Economy  is by reducing growth rates and ...
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