0:52
Carlo Ratti Reframes the Economic Crisis
Director, MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory
Carlo Ratti on the economic philosophy of Buckminster Fuller.
March 16, 2009 | In Business & Economics
0:52
Director, MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory
Carlo Ratti on the economic philosophy of Buckminster Fuller.
March 16, 2009 | In Business & Economics
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Discuss
Richard Oakes on March 17, 2009, 3:58 PM
This is very short, and he doesn’t get a chance to say very much….
In essence he is suggesting that the Global Financial Crisis can be viewed in evolutionary terms. The weak will be destroyed and the strong will survive making the financial system stronger in the long run.
I see some problems with this idea.
1. More often than not in financial markets, it is not the strong that survive, it is the lucky. Lucky people rarely learn anything from their experience, and they are just as likely to be unlucky next time.
2. As the late great Kenneth Gailbraith once said “The collective memory of the financial market is about ten years.” What he meant was that people forget! They tend to forget bad experiences with money faster than anything. Does anyone remember LTMC? Enought said!
joe stafura on April 7, 2009, 9:02 PM
What he was saying is that punctuated equilibrium is at work. The driver of these big changes is a larger than average change in the context that we are existing. This is evident in the global scale events such as the great extinctions, the most recent 65 million years ago caused by an astrological event.
Humans have been altering their context with technology and the results have been leaps of progress, some examples; 2000 years ago, 1215, 1439, the late 1700’s, and early 1900’s. We are more than likely going through a very large change driven fundamentally by mechanical-electronic-bionic technology and the expansion of the social order towards true globalization.
The march towards globalization is really a continuation of expanding social structures that began at the beginning of our days, before even achieving “humanness”.
I share Carlos’s optimism for the other side of this painful change, we have made tremendous progress since the 1500’s when we lived 30-40 years in a world where no one washed and most people were hungry and starving a good part of the time unless you were rich.
Onward to a world where hungry is as far in the past as outdoor bathrooms.
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