Sublime

Energy Trap. This, according to physicist Tom Murphy, comes about because the energy it takes to build the

This will change when people start selling not just their fiat, and not just their time, but when they start liquidating real assets.

as cities grow and their networks evolve, the area or volume of the networks needed to keep them functionally connected tends to become smaller on a per capita basis. For example, in larger cities more people can share the same bus or segment of road or sewer pipe.

In the 1930s, Max Kleiber, a Swiss agricultural biologist, observed that, across mammal species, from shrews to elephants, the energy required to maintain basic metabolic function is closely correlated with an organism’s body size.

Instead of assuming agents were perfectly rational, we allowed there were limits to how smart they were. Instead of assuming the economy displayed diminishing returns (negative feedbacks), we allowed that it might also contain increasing returns (positive feedbacks). Instead of assuming the economy was a mechanistic system operating at equilibrium,