Social systems and economic implications

The concept of goods in an economic sense is something that is intended to satisfy the wants or needs of a consumer, and the effectiveness at doing this is considered to be their utility value. Economic theory concerns itself with the social self-other relationship but more so in a self-self, mechanistic relationship through an economic obsession ‘with dressing up in the methodological clothes of physics’ (Fulbrook, 2009, p. 76). In this type of economic system an individual is expected to transact with another individual in the interests of self. The narrowing of the role of transport in a context like this to that of being a derived demand to satisfy the distribution of goods is a direct outcome of the influence of neo classical economics, where the focus is on individualisation of wants and needs and the sovereignty of the consumer is all important. This focus resulted in a lessening of the importance of the process of shifting something of tangible value (such as potatoes) to an actual market place. Classical economic models still tacitly acknowledged the work required to make the physical connection between land and transport as a source of wealth, and the social structure it supported. During the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, the definition of transport within economic orthodox theories became progressively reduced to the study of a

mechanistic and isolated function serving markets that lacked the definition of Smith’s original local village trading marketplace. Transport portrayed in this way is reduced to distance, tonnage, and by the 1980’s explanations such as Christallers Central Place Theory created a platform for economic based mathematical modelling of transport geography constructed on neoclassical axioms to dominate thinking. For the last thirty years, the transport function has been cast almost exclusively in economic terms as a derived demand and if there is criticism and opposition to this, it is muted and ineffective. This included a lack of need or development of a more general goods transport theory.

Rittel, a professor of the science of design, and Webber, a professor of city planning, are not optimistic that a scientific base can be used when confronting social policy problems. In fact, they say they are bound to fail as problems of social policy are in essence non-linear and non-scientific with no definitive solutions (Rittel & Webber, 1973). It is interesting to contrast this situation with the description of cellular information systems, and what is known through the mapping of the complex relationships within and between cells and their environment. In that environment it appears that the social policy problems have been solved, and the collective good of all within the boundaries are constantly monitored and the system modified accordingly. This approach to ‘problem’ resonates with the communication networking of Checkland’s (1981) Soft Systems

Methodology that recognises that the problem solving process becomes part of the learning process and is self-modifying where the solution of one problem influences the solutions of other parts of the problem. It is discursive in the positive sense that while reaching consensus may be a lengthy process and expand in its scope to include extra material apparently not essential to the topic as firstly understood, it has the potential to enable a pathway towards problem definition.

At the heart of policy management there are always new forces requiring policies to address new circumstances. Easton calls this ‘ongoing modernisation’ (Easton, 2008), and with the sources being technically complex, globalised and with social change and aspiration; lead to forces resembling Geel’s ‘dynamically stable’ socio-technical regimes that undergo transitions.(Geels & Schot, 2007). However, what follows from transport ontology as developed for this thesis is the requirement for hierarchical governance of some function as well as network exchanges to be monitored as they adapt, adopt, and self-modify using self-feedback mechanisms. What we learn from the stability of cell design is that energy flow is what ultimately governs the health of the organism and so its evolutionary trajectory depends on access to energy.

This suggests that the rudder guiding the ship of policy needs to consider the stocks and flows of energy through the organism or organisation, and specifically address the implications of finite

stocks of low entropy energy, and how these fit with policies supporting short term decisions on energy use that can be summarised as ‘burn it all now’.

The work of HT Odum and Swenson supports a view held within ecological studies that all systems share a common framework of some sort or other. Students of H.T Odum found that “What was astonishing for us was the realisation that the systems and energetic principles that we were learning and applying to rivers and estuaries in North Carolina could be equally applied to human- dominated systems” (Hall, 2005, p. 13). The possible similitude between human systems and natural systems was an interesting notion that led me to focus on the nature and importance of energy flow for all human endeavours – with freight transport systems being one specialised application. The practical question of what sort of link there is between transport growth and GDP growth does not seem to me to be answerable in the absence of a full consideration of transport as part of a living system, and where energy flows are left out of the equation. Conversely, fossil fuel is a factor in the correlation of economic growth and energy use (Ayres & Warr, 2004; Warr, Schandl, & Ayres, 2008) with a close analysis of fossil fuel availability (Robelius, 2007) showing this to be a vulnerable point in looking at future development.

Rodrigue views transport not as science or an industry like cotton weaving, car making or dairy production. He focuses instead on how it functions within the current economic framework (Rodrigue, 2013) where the development of transport systems remains a distinct social function responsible for creating complexity and relationships that in turn required a governance

mechanism. In support of this Lawson argues that the level of control and complexity in society is controlled by social rules that can be studied and are as real as those found in any physical system. The possibility of transport being used as a controller of the health of social systems emerges from identifying transport functions in thermodynamic and evolutionary systems, and how this affects cellular and ecological systems development. An acceptance that processes seen in nature are reflected in social systems is consistent within an ontology where transport is a consistent connection between material flows and energy flows that result in living systems. Accepting that social systems are in the same evolutionary and thermodynamic world as cellular and ecological systems allows for a translation of and unification of transport functions and a comparison of features.

The volumes of material and distances that goods are transported continues to grow and support a political-economic and financialised global economy. When framed within this Neo-Liberal

money flows become opaque. The neoliberal view held since the 1970’s is the dichotomy of the intent of Classical economics, practiced by the likes of Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Keynes, Schumpeter, Fisher, and Minsky, with its understanding of dynamics, impacts on social classes, emergent

phenomena, complexity and evolution. The liberalisation of markets increases competition between geographically separate markets through the removal of barriers to entry, price control and

licensing, and changes to taxes and subsidies that may discriminate between businesses and different related markets (Easton, 1997). For New Zealand the implementation of this ideology included a reluctant restructuring to address a range of problems (Easton, 1997). Three of them directly affected transport, being, transport deregulation, the energy problem, and an insulated economy. All three are factors of cellular and ecosystem health and require complex interactional communication to ensure the health of the organism. The ontology allows that complex systems at any household scale monitor the management of all activities’ throughputs. From this study it is questionable whether market activity, as envisaged by Smith (who was writing in a pre-industrial time) is the same type of ‘market’ activity that moves commodities between distant communities without any social attachment to those with whom the goods are exchanged.

One thing not to have changed during the rapid complexification of the world and related expansion of cities, enabled through cheap oil, is the definition of transport. Is modern transport still

performing the role that Cooley described, or has it changed? There is a large question about what the finite stock of petroleum plays in the evolution of the world this century. Transport has played a central role in building an oil fed economy, but is our understanding of the role of transport in the world writ large – to the evolution of the world - sufficient to keep civilisation on the rails? The only absolute scarcity in the universe is low entropy (Dryzek, 1987), for which there is no substitute. As Dryzek put it:

How do you recognise an ecologically rational structure? They are highly ordered and have low entropy so can cope with stress and perturbation (disturbances caused by secondary influences), so that the structure can consistently and effectively provide itself with the good of life support. Rationality is closely associated with self- regulation as the wellbeing applies to the system as a whole.

(Dryzek, 1987) I have traced transport processes back to the development of the first cells 4.5 billion years ago and shown how transport actions brought together energy and matter, or where part of the physical junction of the thermodynamic movement of heat from within the earth and atoms from the sea.

The combination of environment heat and chemiosmotic activity in a physically discrete space enabled a concentration of atoms to create potential across the border of that physical space. The combining of transportation and potential energy is then followed through to the formation of prokaryotic cells as part of the identity of a persistent self of the cell. Transport systems facilitated the internal mechanisms of the cell, and the movement of food and waste between the confines of the cell and its environment through formalised transport mechanisms such as cilia and passive and active transporters.

Transport is an intrinsic part of the co organisation of the self and other dynamic relationship of the living cell in its epistemic and interacting environment. Calling the environment ‘interacting’ invites transport and thermodynamic activity in the world to be considered as equally important to those processes within living cells, organism, or macro organism at every scale through to the level of invertebrates. My transport ontology recognises that this is critical to a unified view of how transport interacts with all the formation and maintenances of all living processes.

The ontology also allows for a concept of informational intelligence, or that described as physical, or natural intelligence. The importance of border control at any scale can be expected to be of similar importance. Cells are being described as highly cooperative and exercising extensive transport signalling as part of the active governance that is characteristic of its historical evolutionary and thermodynamic base. The work of Odum and Swenson flag the likelihood that there is natural intelligence by the inclusion in their models and theorising of energy flow as providing an epistemic aspect of evolutionary development through self-feedback catalytic mechanisms. It seems that autocatakinetic processes do underpin the self-other concept ensuing the persistence of low entropy beings within flows of potential energy within a background environment that provides a high entropy heat sink.