This is a rather ironic interpretation of Katrina,You've given a nice assessment of the causes of the Katrina mess, but my point was not that FEMA was the cause; it was that it was useless. You've said "a lack of coordinated centralized planning" prevented a decent response. Precisely. Centralized systems at that scale are too hierarchically complex and rigid to respond intelligently. But I don't want to get stuck on FEMA; there are thousands more examples of large-system failure and distributed system agility.
"our economy" has virtually destroyed our planet, has exterminated and
enslaved entire cultures, and has managed to become one of the most inefficient,
self-destructive, and inhumane resource allocation and management systems ever devised
I would be genuinely interested to hear why anyone would consider it to be aHow could you argue otherwise? Our culture's rate of change has been astronomical, and our economic system has managed to deal with it for centuries (the USSR collapse comes to mind, again). Again, compared to what? There are hundreds of dead cultures that failed to adapt to a fraction of the change this one's dealt with. Often simple immigration has killed a culture. Ours thrives on it. Distributed systems can learn. Centralized ones can only react and plan.
good candidate for dealing with rapid change.
An ecosystem might "adapt" to stress with "positive" things, such asI don't like the conclusion, either. But just 'cuz it's ugly doesn't make it untrue. Species loss in an economic ecosystem is analogous to businesses disappearing (or in a cultural system, ideas dying out). Population decline? I hope so--we need the whole planet to develop the birthrate of Europe, or slower, and feedback from expensive resources (as in Europe) works better than government condom programs. Uh-oh, I'm a neo-con!
symbiosis, but it may also respond with increased incidents of epidemic disease, population
decline, and even species loss.
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