Why are we miserable?

Australia as one of the privileged societies with abundant energy resources and high use at low efficiency is at the forefront of this challenge to a deeply ingrained belief system. We are still in the stressful, non-decisive stage where the old beliefs are strong in some quarters, the new ideas still to be fully developed and digested and the required changes to lifestyle seen more for the disruption and inconvenience that will follow, rather than for the benefits that can accrue.

The angst arising thereof will not be dissipated and replaced with a positive, optimistic outlook until the new belief system can be soundly established and accepted as normal and natural.

It is no use replacing the old economic belief system and structures with another one that incorporates the same seeds of destruction. Religious arguments can persist for millennia as they are effectively circular, not amenable to empirical proof and have a rigidity that results from acquiring dogmatic knowledge at an early age. The world has seen that the best way out of the circularity of such arguments is to dispense with them altogether and to replace them with a system that is capable of flexibility and incremental steps towards matching belief with reality.

Economic beliefs have persisted in a similar ideological way, as there has been no way to evaluate economic ideas other than from within the system. So the old arguments that have been formalised since the 1800s are still argued today and when resonant and implemented too literally, generate immense harm and distress.

The main economic beliefs are ultimately based on simplified models of human behaviour and which particular set of emotions and type of rationality is considered to drive that behaviour. If the individual profit maximising emotion is selected we end up with cycles of bubbles and depressions. Alternatively, if the motive of the altruistic group benefit maximiser is accepted, then society heads towards stagnation and often xenophobia.

The way ahead is to move economics, in the macro sense, from this basis and put it on a physical one. The world is such a wonderful place because we have had over 3 billion years of the most primitive life forms taking energy from the sun and changing the atmosphere into a stable, oxygen rich one with very effective feedback mechanisms that keep the system stable.

Our economic system must do likewise, otherwise the so called most advanced life form on the planet will wreck, in a few hundred years, all the good work done by the least advanced over the last 3 billion years.

To do this, the economic system must be based on and measured by the use of energy and the production of entropy as an empirical quantification of which system should be adopted. This is the only way to move economic systems, and thus how humans live in and utilise the world's resources, out of archaic beliefs based on concepts and then onto a rational level.

This is well within existing capabilities although only dimly perceived at present and well outside the limits of this essay. But once this journey is started, the cloud of gloom will dissipate as the challenge becomes based on how best to realise the future. The depressive and divisive arguments over past beliefs and who was responsible will fade into irrelevance just like the few flat earth believers left and the noisy but ineffectual antievolution brigades.