Yeah, exactly... Can I buy those somewhere?
In some department store somewhere between the actual and the potential, yeah!
I think I caught the jist of it, sortof... humans in space stations can't walk when they get home, so... societies in perfect tranquility will fall apart when they're invaded by a few petty knife-gangs, so his point is to 'exercize' even when you don't need to, I suppose, and then extrapolated a whole lot on that, or smt?
Somewhat. He seems to be overusing the human body as a working metaphor for the body of humanity, too. There's just something about it all that fails to fully hang together, even if I can't readily articulate why.
I think it's more likely he extrapolated from a long time doing mathematical risk analysis and his dissatisfaction with people trying to predict sudden catastrophes. So instead of trying to predict and prevent these calamities (which is what everyone generally tries to do) he's looking for ways of thinking that would enable us to be more resilient to these setbacks when they inevitably occur. The model he thinks makes sense is the organic model which we see in both individual organisms and across evolutionary biology: constrainted resources, stressors and other volatility increase fitness of the organism or of the species as a whole.
Now the real question is, does an organic model apply to economies, which seem to behave like organic systems with complex interdependencies?
He also applies it to other social phenomenon, like a dictatorship's attempts to crush an uprising tending to radicalise and strengthen the very thing it tries to oppress, or criticism of an author tending to spread the author's ideas. (If memetics implies that information behaves organically, then it should be subject to similar organic behaviour under stress).
He also suggests, interestingly, that taxi drivers are more resilient than office workers because an office worker can suddenly lose their job and be reduced to financial ruin (large unforseen shock); a taxi driver can have no fares for a night but recover the next day (constant small shocks). The office worker might accumulate large debts because of some illusion of security, the taxi driver is exposed and is constantly made aware of the insecurity of his income and thus makes compensations for it.
If that sounds like he's advocating some kind of insane survival of the fittest kind of ideology, he's not, because he points out that periods of recovery are as important as acute stress to these organic systems. Acute stress is good for people, chronic stress is not. So he advocates protecting the very poor so that there can be recovery, but giving no particular benefits to the middle or very high income earners.
It does relate to recent research that indicates that human thinking does not work on a 9-5 schedule, but that people tend to come up with solutions to problems when they aren't actively thinking about them. ie: periods of rest and apparently doing nothing, coupled with short periods of intense activity, tend to make people more productive and happy in fields which require creativity. (And almost all jobs require some degree of creativity).
He also claims that (
and I would love it if Coq de Combat could give me some insight into this) that the Northern European countries have such high standards of living despite appearing to be what we call 'socialist', because they actually have very small and limited central governments; the money is distributed to very small and quite autonomous individual districts who tend to allocate resources in a gloriously chaotic and messy process where local people wrangle over issues like where to put a water fountain etc.
I'm always interested in these kinds of ideas because whenever I hear opinions from both ends of an issue, I tend to see the sense and value in both sides of the argument. Maybe it's the mediator in me but the theory that weds the two extremes but isn't unpalatable compromise is appealing to me.
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