— Analysis of economic systems from a biophysical perspective, considering energy, resources, and ecological limits. —
The creature comforts of modern industrial life — hot water, refrigeration, safe shelter, accessible food — represent a form of real capital so stable for most people in wealthy societies that they register not as gifts but as baseline reality. That psychological invisibility is itself a significant
Systems ecologist Howard Odum's maximum power principle — sometimes called the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics — holds that living systems self-organise not merely to survive but to capture and use energy as rapidly as available gradients allow. Trees, rivers, cities, and server farms all obey the same
After years of assuming that voting, technology deployment, and governance reform could redirect industrial civilisation's trajectory, Hagens now regards the system as too structurally committed to its current path for top-down intervention to matter much. His revised theory of change focuses instea
The same cognitive trap that keeps someone sitting through a bad film or wearing an ill-fitting jacket operates at civilisational scale, locking societies into roads, grids, suburbs, and global supply chains long after the underlying conditions have changed. The argument is not merely behavioural bu
Price signals encode far more than monetary policy, according to a framework that maps seven distinct drivers of inflation and deflation: energy throughput, raw materials, technology, financial leverage, ecological stability, currency architecture, and social contracts. Milton Friedman's dictum that