THE CHIANG MAI PAPERS

DEREK DILLON'S UNPUBLISHED ARTICLES



Constructing a Chaotic Marketplace©
Can Global Integration, Driven by Quantum-based Technologies,
Sustain Itself in a Newtonian Macroeconomy?

equity-and/or debt-based control
After the world economy collapsed following the 1929 New York stock market crash, there was, understandably, a compulsive search for mechanisms of security and stability. Keynesian principles of monetary and fiscal management policies were thrust upon the scene and the mixed economy legitimated. But security was sought not only through changes in public sector regulatory policy, it was also cultivated via new laws affecting corporate structure. The securities acts of the early 30s, the revisions of bankruptcy law in the late 30s, and the acts regulating bank holding companies of the early 40s, all these were motivated by demands for stability. As a whole, the effect of this lawmaking activity was to take management out of the hands of ownership. In a real, non-metaphorical sense, this was a continuation of the well-established tradition of modeling hierarchically-based methods of corporate management on the conventions of military staffing: whenever there is a managerial conflict in the military, the first inclination is to distinguish command from operational control. Separating corporate management from corporate ownership was the civilian equivalent. This separation was designed to make the whole economy more secure from wild fluctuations, but was bought at a cost to efficiency: management could relax on a cushion of equity dispersed amongst many manipulable shareholders. Thus was the contemporary supra-corporation born in a search for systemic stability. A crisis, of course, can wake management up, a debt crisis. If management bears the risk of debt, its efficiency will improve. But the whole economy will be less secure. Equity- or debt-based control, no matter; still, there are hierarchical structures managed by managers.

Information in the computer age, however, did not remain monopolizable. And since hierarchically-based management methodologies require information access to be concentrated on the upper tiers, when this information localization began to evaporate, flat management schemes emerged. This was a quantum-based-technology-driven economic effect, as information nonlocality is a characteristic property of quantum systems. One could validly say, in fact, that the evolving data processing and communications technologies have themselves become subversives, veritable agents attacking traditional business and government hierarchies, control networks, regulatory strategies, security management systems. And the intensity of this attack appears as if it could grow exponentially. Why? Because there is a basic incompatibility between certain quantum principles and the root assumptions informing Newtonian economic fundamentals; so long as this remains the case, the quantum-based technologies will continue to act in a manner that undermines prior economic convention.

commodities with simple-identity
Capitalism requires commodities which have simple-identity, so they can be classified as ownable private properties of wholly distinct economic actors. Software, however, as it already exists, has begun to lack simple-identity and simple-possession-ability (because of the ease of replication and virally-mediated mutation it is subject to); and when multi-application software modules become widely disseminated, simple-identity will have evaporated. Non-simple-identity is a quantum property. Traditional notions of intellectual property, embodied in new laws, have tried to dress the quantum identity of software in traditional atomistic Newtonian clothes. That has worked pretty well with current generations, but such laws, in attempting to deal with future generations of multi-application software modules, will of necessity become so complex as to be virtually unenforceable. Not to mention modules written to themselves write, in real-time, other more-dedicated modules! And future generations of networking will similarly alter the identity of computer hardware: it will become smeared out, nonlocal in the quantum sense, because its physical location will be largely irrelevant. It will have only a virtual existence for the non-place community of users. Time-sharing schemes are but rudimentary, stopgap Newtonian measures, the likes of which cannot possibly deal adequately with the coming challenge. The hyper-networked computer is not a mere commodity, not property that is simply-ownable. Similar incompatibilities will emerge in economic sectors other than the information industry; they have already, in fact: the developing problematics of patent law in the field of biotechnology, for example. The modularity and nesting properties of DNA codons -- being characteristics of genetic software -- create classes of non-specificity that are extremely difficult to regard as in any way wholly-ownable. Indeed, the desire for ownability may have prejudicially influenced the direction of experimental research, and hence discovery, in genetic science, thus suppressing insight into the quantum chemistry of DNA because of its threat to validation of commercially determined recombinant strategies. And the conundrum in art law is another case, a case that promises to become very convoluted as the new imaging, CD-ROM, laser, virtual reality, and communications technologies increasingly are used to create art, and even art/science (Kandinsky’s dreamed-of Kunstwissenschaft). The cusp point will be reached as art/science artifacts become on-line “network happenings”, replacing traditional means of communication about science.

behavior equations in a world of their own
But quantum physics is not the only hundred-year-old “new physics” that has by now become economically engaged; so has Einstein’s relativity theory of gravitation. Some time ago, transaction speed stopped being determined primarily by manual dexterity skill levels. The abacus, the adding machine, the cash register, the telegraph key, the telephoned-in buy/sell order have largely been replaced by the computer, the fax-modem, the microwave transmitter, the satellite communications relay, real-time global TV news, Internet, world phones, programmed trading. Transaction speed is near to becoming electron speed, a speed that has relativistic properties. Warp speed. The global economy’s space-time has become so curved it is now multiply-connected; Newtonian absolute space and time is no longer a reliable context within which to reference economic expectations. Bubbles form and break as a result on nonlocal exchange-forces carried by the inhomogeneities and complex connectivities which have become emergent properties of a veritable economic moonscape. Increasingly, local action is global -- which is what relativity physics has always maintained. Hysteresis effects are now prevalent; economic cause and effect are no longer coupled in the way they once were. Our Newtonian econometric behavior equations live in a world more and more only their own. “Elastic hysteresis” has, to all real intents and most imagined purposes, slain Keynesian monetary and fiscal policies as effective means of public management in any given national economy: there is a lagging behind in cause-effect relations because, with warp-speed-created topologies, any national policy initiative must now pull against the “weight” (a gravitational effect) of the whole global economy. And as a given bubble bursts, there is inevitably a “hysteresis loss”: the energy level dips due to the cause-effect uncoupling caused by hysteresis (economic energy being visible in the vigor and efficiency with which resource allocation and utilization are accomplished). Such processes are scale-dependent, focusing the involved problematics away from the dominant economy.

systemic adaptation not a decision science
These quantum-relativistic properties and effects are inseparable from global integration, and will only increase as that integration proceeds. The Tofflers, in offering their Third Wave thesis, understand that a new technological base is in process of forcing new principles of organization upon the global economy, and that this is in large measure an autonomous process. What the Tofflers have not clearly articulated is that local, national, and multilateral policies are action orientations within a given organizational framework; they are not adaptation mechanisms of the system itself, not means of creating new organizational principles appropriate to the new techno-base. When the technology base governing principles of organization permitted by the system undergoes a phase shift, the transformational dynamic is out of the hands of politics as a decision science. What people want and what they decide will have little effect on systemic adaptation. Policy as an activity category is incapable of significantly affecting the largely self-determined process of technology-driven systemic transformation. The underlying quantum-relativistic principles that gave birth to the new technologies will determine most everything about the new organizational regime that emerges. The global economy is a complex organism attempting to adapt to a new technology base; we would be wise to help this adaptation, not hinder it. New organizational forms expressing the principles governing the new techno-base can be created, but that kind of creativity has never been a matter of policy.

Are, for instance, alternative economic indicators, like those which have been proposed to replace GDP, such new organizational forms? No. They are policy aids, not mechanisms of systemic adaptation. And these indicators cannot goad the system into achieving what their creators want. A reworking of tax structures and new regulatory initiatives based upon information provided by alternative economic indicators will not solve the problem of externalities because these taxes and regulations are national policies in a global economy forced into integration by a new technological base. Businesses can easily go off shore to flee the nation-state implementing the new taxes and regulations. Thus, the impetus to a top-down-managed supra-national world order comes from: (1) knowledge of this fact; and (2) the desire to maintain principles of organization unrelated to those of the new techno-base. There would be no getting away from the regulatory control of a global supra-national state. But such a top-down managed Newtonian global system would not function well in presence of the new techno-base. Today, primary forms of escape involve going outside the given national economy. In future, the new technologies will increasingly make available an enormous range of “internal escapes” which will undermine the ability to globally impose top-down control.

A few commentators are beginning to realize, with something verging on horror, the full dimensions of what has happened. America has made a major contribution to creating a new techno-base -- in large part spin-offs derived from devices initially pioneered for warfare -- whose fundamental principles contradict deep-rooted beliefs of many, if not most, Americans. When the physics of it all came on the scene early in the century following from mathematics created during the previous hundred years, that was bad enough, and probably helped cause a world war. But now that same physics is embodied in powerful new technologies which will inexorably force changes in the very principles embodied in traditional notions of economy, governance, and society. What the Tofflers don’t understand in giving us a simple linear account of history -- from First to Second to Third Wave -- is that animistic, tribal forms of spontaneous order directly express psychologically, socially, politically, and economically the basic principles of collective and cooperative behavior which the new physics is most specifically concerned with. And that this fact is what World War Two was fought over! Moreover, horror of horrors, now we are faced with the same thing all over again, only, because it’s into the technology base, the situation is far worse now than it was then.

risk seen to climb a devil's staircase
How has this highly complex circumstance affected the security-risk/stability-uncertainty equation which lawmakers of an earlier era addressed through manipulation of equity/debt-based structural variables? One place to look for answers to this question is the derivatives market. Derivatives were created to reduce risk for marketplace actors in an integrating global economic environment which has become evermore uncertain. Actors can hedge their risks by taking futures options on an increasing number of variables globally affecting the environments of their business transactions. Currency exchange rates, for instance. One of the early sacrifices to global integration was the gold exchange mechanism of the Bretton Woods system. The Vietnam war was financed by borrowing on the world market (primarily Eurodollars, later debt-serviced by petrodollars) at overmarket interest rates, rather than by taxation. The resulting inflation drew increasing demands for gold in exchange for dollars, which led to crisis during the Nixon administration -- so the President separated the dollar from gold, thereby ending the gold exchange mechanism and allowing currency values to float freely against one another. This, of course, added greatly to the uncertainties in the integrating global economy, uncertainties giving rise to levels of risk that derivatives were designed to help reduce. Current trends, in Asia for instance, to increasingly finance infrastructure development -- once considered public sector production -- privately, by borrowing on the world market at overmarket interest rates (necessary to draw funds into the domestic economy) can be considered similar to the way the Vietnam war was financed, and is likely eventually to have equally unpleasant consequences. Interest-rate derivatives, of course, can help hedge risks arising from the multiply-connected financial hyperspaces created by warp-speed movement of the megamoney involved. Occasionally, there’s a real-world earthquake and a bank falls to the inordinate risks it has, for whatever reason, taken.

Where does the risk go that the derivatives siphon out of the world economy? Does it just evaporate into thin, polluted air? No, not likely. In all probability, it’s transferred from the market microenvironment to the global macroeconomy. The marketplace actor becomes more secure, but at the cost of increased systemic levels of uncertainty. The exact opposite effect of that achieved by the equity/debt-based structural manipulations of the 30s and 40s! Does the transferred risk at the microlevel leap, in one large bound, via mediation of the derivatives, to the macroeconomy as increased uncertainty? Again, not likely. Surely, it’s a reverse-cascade effect, a climb up a devil’s staircase. Global integration means that economic partitions, sectors, systemic nestings, connectivities, intersystemic flows are changing, becoming more tightly stacked, more correlated, more similar, even somewhat self-similar. Most visible are patterns of free-trade bloc formation; much less visible are transnational coalitions between specific multinational corporations and a given mega-urban-region governmental entity, for instance. And the binary succession of iterates which records the warp-speed megamoney flows associated with these accelerating economic processes forms a hyperspace of symbolic dynamics within which uncertainties climb, plateau, cascade, propagate in waves that drive the business cycle. Hidden intersystemic connections and extrasystemic factors (externalities) have long been thought major contributors to causing the business cycle; integration magnifies the effects of these influences. Does the microlevel risk, transferred by derivatives as increased macroscale uncertainty, ride on the back of these symbolic dynamics up a devil’s staircase which grows steeper and steeper as quantum-based technologies make over the world economy in their own images?

A specific risk is like a discrete packet of potential instability. In the Earth’s atmosphere, instabilities (as packets of potential vorticity) can cascade from the macroscale to the microscale or, by reverse-cascade, can move from the microscale to the macroscale. A microscale severe storm environment -- containing thunderstorm cells or a tornado -- sends forth vertically-propagating infrasound bursts which penetrate the tropopause boundary and deposit discrete packets of cyclonic angular momentum in the macroscale motion field, thus disturbing the mass-momentum balance of the global atmosphere. Mapped by calculus derivatives and difference equations, meteorological instabilities, uncertainties, risks, errors, negatively-viscous buoyant plumes -- whatever name one wishes to put on them -- engage in diffusion limited aggregation, doubling, bifurcation, reverse-bifurcation, and ascend a devilish, but symbolically dynamic, staircase (Newton’s billiard table wildly tilted into a skew-parallel), one locked-in scale-level plateau-interval after the next, in search of an attractor infinitely strange. So, likely, do the economic risks transferred as uncertainties by financial derivatives (and iterated in warp-time as binary numbers microwave-pulse-code burst through vertical levels of the Earth’s atmosphere on their virtually uncountable curved and multiply-connected world-lines of megamoney deposition in the macroeconomic flow field -- most certainly disturbing the equity-debt balance of the global economy).

market vectoring on self-organized criticality
So, it appears that each unit of risk diverted in the marketplace is summed as systemic uncertainty at the macrolevel. The more global integration proceeds, and the longer the derivatives market transfers risk as uncertainty, the more certain does it become that chaotic forms of behavior will come to dominate the global economy: iterative decompositions, transparent mappings, forward iterative pre-images, multivalued non-uniformities, and so on. How could it be otherwise, when monetary transfers are encoded in binary numbers, iterated interminably, and projected as holomovement via satellite relay into cluster agglomerations revered as tantamount to transcendental number spaces? Is this necessarily a recipe for disaster? No! It could be a route to a very positive future. A mechanism must be found to metabolize the macrosystem state on the microscale. That which has climbed the devil’s staircase must descend, must in its turn be processed within the heart of market microenvironmental mechanisms. This micro-macro/macro-micro metabolizing must imitate a system far from equilibrium vectoring toward self-organized criticality. Why? Because a global integration, driven by quantum-based technologies, cannot sustain itself in a Newtonian macroeconomy; the divergence of the tacit presuppositions is simply too great. The popular sense of foreboding is well founded. Individual financial security cannot be achieved without success at systemic transformation.

The real present task, therefore, is not to seek quantum-relativistic or chaotic properties in the existing capitalist market economy (which was constructed according to analogical generalizations of Cartesian-Newtonian notions), but to reconstruct the foundations of market systematics according to contemporary quantum-relativistic and chaos-theory understanding of self-organization in natural systems. What Adam Smith, John Law, and the others did from the Newtonian paradigm, we must now do from the quantum-relativity paradigm. The place to start is with the currency exchange-rate conundrum. Why start here? Because the reconstruction, in order to be effective, must begin with the economic correlate of that factor which most fundamentally distinguishes between “old” and “new” physics: the differing notions of identity involved. In Newton’s laws of motion (which were the analogical model used by Smith to codify understanding of the market supply-demand dynamic), all the variables in the equations are single-valued: for every value of x there is a single unique corresponding value for y. In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger’s wave equation replaced Newton’s laws of motion. The variables in the quantum wave equation are multivalued: for every value of x there are a multiplicity of corresponding values for y. Two different notions of identity are involved here, one simple and one complex. An entity with simple-identity, when in motion, carries very little holistic information about the system of which it is a part. An entity with complex-identity, when in motion, carries a large component of holistic information about the system to which it belongs. An electron in movement creates about itself a field of magnetic flux; money in movement creates about itself a field of economic event gradients: basins of attraction orchestrating resource allocation. But Adam Smith, in elaborating the notion of a supply-demand dynamic as the self-organizing market mechanism, relied directly upon analogy with the summation of forces (vector sums) in Newton’s laws of motion, laws possessing single-valued variables. So, John Law and others, in elaborating upon monetary and credit principles, did not feel called upon to imagine an exchange unit possessing complex-identity. In contrast to the electron, therefore, our moving monetary units, when inducing fluctuations in economic event gradients, do not carry in their wake much information about the total state of the economy. Stock traders, inventory purchasers, interest rate setters, and many other categories of economic actors crave adequate real-time information about the instantaneous total state of the economy -- and they have no way of getting it. This is not a property of a quantum-relativistic system. Adequate risk reduction depends upon making available to the market mechanisms themselves categories of macroeconomic information which present market systematics do not even allow into existence. As the global economy integrates more and more, it requires autopoietic operators of greater and greater self-organizational competency. The exchange unit must become such an operator by carrying a much heavier load of systemic, synoptic, holistic information. Alternative economic indicators would be very helpful here, but not merely as goads to better policies. Any new indicators must be part of a process of re-creating market fundamentals, such as the very notion of what an exchange unit can be. In seeking a replacement for the gold-exchange mechanism, it is necessary to recognize that the exchange unit must undergo a change in the fundamental character of its identity. The increased utilization of electronic exchange makes this possible.

time-shape and supply of capital
Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek has stated that “…the only adequate description of th(e) ‘supply of capital’ is a complete enumeration of the range of output streams of different time shapes that can be produced from the existing resources”. Physicist Frank Tipler recognized this notion as being fundamentally quantum mechanical in nature. In his book THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY (Doubleday, 1994) Tipler quotes Hayek on two occasions in observing that Hayek’s notion of total “capital stock” is equivalent to the many-worlds (or relative-state) interpretation of quantum mechanics offered in the late 50s by physicist Hugh Everett, III. This interpretation does not view the wave function as a probability amplitude; it regards the multiple-values of the function as representing real states. With an economic universal wave function, the many “worlds” would be the multiple time shapes of flux-partitioning which the global economy assumes under continuous chaotic self-organized far-from-equilibrium phase transition. The “supply of capital” is viewed as a multivalued function, as possessing complex-identity by virtue of being composed of a superposition of differing time shapes. Can this idea be the basis for an electronic exchange unit that carries multivalued, holistic information?

Think of parity relations between currencies in terms of renormalization schemata. Renormalization is a “block renaming” or scaling technique used -- on a model of a chaotic system with many scale-levels -- to determine parameters characteristic of the system’s movement to a state of self-organized criticality: a very high state of global (i.e., systemic) integration. Fluctuation of relative currency values is a kind of “block renaming”, absent the scaling technique which would reveal, in the market microdynamics, the desired holistic information about the instantaneous total state of the macroeconomy. Gold once was the exchange standard, that is, the universal exchange unit to which the various national monetary units were referenced. Though the value of gold under different systems historically varied, for each x currency, there was, at any given time, only a single corresponding y value in gold. Gold was a single-valued universal referencing exchange unit and, therefore, did not carry much information about systemic integration. The value of gold was not determined by the relative-state of the various national currencies. Had it not been set by regulatory decision, and had it been so determined by relative-state, it would have carried major components of information about the total state of the macroeconomy. Such a global process needs to emerge from self-similar processes within its nested scale-levels. What needs to replace gold is a multivalued universal referencing exchange unit, a unit whose values automatically fluctuate according to a global wave function representing the relative-state of the various national currencies. How can this wave function be constituted?

Consider the “weight” of a given currency as varying according to the “capital stock” of the given national economy (or other chosen scale-level partition), which is itself, according to Hayek, a superposition of the time shapes of the alternative income streams its resources can generate. Getting such a universal referencing exchange unit up and running, then, would involve overcoming a “measurement problem”(just like in quantum mechanics), and ascertaining the proper sorts of data gathering. How are “capital stocks” to be assessed? Once this question is asked in practical terms, the whole edifice of chaos theory comes crashing in upon economics.

trade blocs and multivalued exchange units
The derivatives market is concerned to mode-lock the time shape of value fluctuations of monetary instruments and commodities on a given scale by transferring as much microscale risk as possible to uncertainty at the macroscale. The creation of free-trade blocs is also an attempt to remove relatively-local (intermediate scale) risk and transfer it as uncertainty to the global scales of capital formation and motion. The quantum-technology-driven integrating global economy already is trying to scale itself, trying to engage in “block renaming”! Helping it along means arriving at some optimizing notion of economic partitioning: the nest of scales chosen. This “choosing” is the economic equivalent of the act of “observation” in the participatory world of the quantum “measurement problem”. An optimizing notion of economic partitioning is not one of economic aggregates arrived at primarily on the basis of ideological vectors, geopolitical out-flanking, and the notion of nation-statehood; these Newtonian precepts clearly have become economically outmoded. The chosen economic partitioning, the parametric properties of the scale-level nest, that is, optimally should not be fixed, but should alter as dictated by the universal wave function for the global economy which represents the changing relative-state of the nested system. With electronic monetary processing and transfer, this becomes possible; hard currencies and physical nation-state boundaries are, over the long haul, incompatible with quantum-relativistic technology-driven global integration. A rationalization of the phase-over period, wherein the hard-currency value is only one weight on the given partition’s exchange unit, will certainly be part of the optimizing integrative process -- and any implementors of a pan-EU monetary unit should strive to attain this multivalued characteristic. Political constraints on implementation of such quantum economies are another matter. However, the more clearly we prefiguratively view the systematics that the inherent properties of the evolving technologies are inevitably thrusting upon us, the less upheaval is likely to be involved in the zig-zag implementation path most likely to be followed.

In the ideal case, one would hope -- indeed, could one even expect?-- that, if the parameters governing the econometric scale-level nest were allowed to modify as determined by a universal wave function, the attractors for the resulting orbits of the critical variables would be directly related to two factors: the global array of natural bio-regions and the intersecting web of culture circles. The negentropy-extracting, far-from-equilibrium state of a system is maintained by a self-referential cycle: the non-equilibrium state is sustained by a continuous influx of free energy from the environment and a reciprocal outflow of entropy, and this exchange, itself, is maintained by the non-equilibrium state. If, therefore, the universal wave function is composed on the basis of a superposition of the time shapes of “capital stocks”, one would expect the attractors to relate to the source-patterning of those stocks and the evolved characteristic means (enculturated learned behaviors) of processing them. But there currently are political constraints on the evolution of the scale-level nest partitioning, and hence on the elements of superposition that any near-term implementable universal wave function could assume. This means that the immediate possibilities for microscale processing of the macrosystem state (as a reciprocation of the inverse processing which financial derivatives and the like accomplish) are limited. Therefore, the increasingly necessary self-referential hypercycle is not yet fully constructible.

Waiting around for the optimum case to present itself, however, is to insure that it will never materialize. What we want is a global economy flux-partitioning such that it is continually mapping on a multifractal base in a state as close to self-organized criticality as is practically achievable given varying conditions of total “capital stocks”. And we want the parity relations of the various currencies to be superposed, according to their relative-state, as a composite constituting the multivalued, universal, referencing global exchange unit -- the value fluctuations of which are governed by a wave function. Micro-macro/macro-micro self-referential reciprocal maintenance. Increased risk increasingly impinges upon the microscale actor as global integration proceeds, because insufficient information is available at the microscale concerning the rapidly changing macrostate of the system. Financial derivatives respond to this evolving circumstance by shifting the increased risk away from the actor. What is also required is to bring adequate information about the changing macroscale state into the market microenvironment and to couple that information to incentives and sanctions linked to market action-directives. Inducements to action would then become more subtly cued. A multi-valued exchange unit is a much more direct and self-organization-promoting feedback mechanism than regulatory activity or manipulation of the tax system. This is the function of a multi-valued exchange unit: to make the market microenvironment a more effective processor of the macrosystem state. It is this sort of feedback loop that takes a non-equilibrium system to a state of self-organized criticality. The more the varying multiple-values of the nested exchange units are weighted in relation to externalities impinging on the system, the closer that system will hover to self-organized criticality. The ability to accomplish this, of course, is a function of how well the “measurement problem” is solved.

local exchange units, bio-regional niches, and amenity migration sites
But we cannot, yet, have what we want. And not only because of politics and the physical boundedness of nation-states. The measurement problem, clearly, prevents immediate global implementation of a multivalued exchange unit. And so does insufficient dissemination of the requisite technology, and so on. So, we have to start at the lower end of the scale-level nest and work upwards, hoping that technology-forced global integration proceeds at a pace slow enough to meet halfway our efforts to construct a compatible system from the bottom up. By starting at, say, the town-planning level, we can, on the one hand, begin with a simplified version of the larger problem, and on the other, begin constructing the scale-level nest and the exchange-unit value-array in terms exemplary of the principles identified by chaos theory and the science of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. A lot of practice is required, and trial and error learning. Shifting from single-valued to multivalued is a MAJOR phase transition involving cognitive (and even emotional) adaptation by the users -- given that two very different notions of identity are involved. So, the starting points are very important. The parametric properties of physical systems undergoing far-from-equilibrium transitions are likely to be instructive: their dynamics, for instance, are often spatially organized about singular points in significant array. What towns correspond to such singular points? The optimum case, given our hypothesis about the governing attractors, would be towns extremely rich in cultural resources and, at the same time, located in identifiable bio-regional niches. We should look at world heritage sites and see if we can identify towns fulfilling these requirements. We should look at patterns of amenity migration to see if we can find sites with similar properties. Amenity migrants move to a given location because of the amenities it offers (cultural richness, natural beauty, and so on), not because of economic incentives. Bioregional and cultural basins of attraction likely are involved. The amenity migrant may unconsciously be identifying sites in the critical array of singular points that necessarily must be “activated” (as in the self-similar and conformal mappings of chaos renormalization) in order for the global economy to scale itself for integrative phase transition. Can we doubt that the human intuition has already got a read on the collective need?


Return to:
•Top
•The Chiang Mai Papers -- Abstracts
•Home page