World-System Steady State Or Collapse

  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...

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 ...