What do you think?
Rate this book
Anthill Economics: Animal Ecosystems and the Human Economy
Does modern economic theory violate the basic laws of nature and physics? That is the question that award-winning environmental and energy writer Nathanial Gronewold sets out to answer in Anthill Economics.
Drawing from the nascent field of biophysical economics, Anthill Economics puts forth a radical new way of as 21st-century citizens, the global economy truly is our human ecosystem. It is where raw materials are sourced, goods are supplied, energy is converted, and capital is exchanged. Shouldn't it stand to reason that the same principles that affect animal ecosystems (like population density, habitation patterns, and energy return on investment) similarly apply to our –albeit more complex –human ecosystem, too?
With an innovative and cross-disciplinary approach, Gronewold draws comparisons from both the animal kingdom and the atomic world. The rollercoaster-like rise and fall of the caribou population on a remote island can teach us about resource allocation. The behavior of squirrels gathering nuts is a lesson in energy return on investment. Could the high unemployment rates of anthill colonies shed light on problems with the human job market? And, will global warming change these patterns for humans and insects alike? Furthermore, if certain laws of physics can be used to explain the distribution of energy in a complex physical system, could these same laws also explain the distribution of money in a complex economic system as well?
This clearly written book full of illuminating ecological analogies provides a more complete understanding of human commerce shaped by the rules of nature and laws of physics.
Drawing from the nascent field of biophysical economics, Anthill Economics puts forth a radical new way of as 21st-century citizens, the global economy truly is our human ecosystem. It is where raw materials are sourced, goods are supplied, energy is converted, and capital is exchanged. Shouldn't it stand to reason that the same principles that affect animal ecosystems (like population density, habitation patterns, and energy return on investment) similarly apply to our –albeit more complex –human ecosystem, too?
With an innovative and cross-disciplinary approach, Gronewold draws comparisons from both the animal kingdom and the atomic world. The rollercoaster-like rise and fall of the caribou population on a remote island can teach us about resource allocation. The behavior of squirrels gathering nuts is a lesson in energy return on investment. Could the high unemployment rates of anthill colonies shed light on problems with the human job market? And, will global warming change these patterns for humans and insects alike? Furthermore, if certain laws of physics can be used to explain the distribution of energy in a complex physical system, could these same laws also explain the distribution of money in a complex economic system as well?
This clearly written book full of illuminating ecological analogies provides a more complete understanding of human commerce shaped by the rules of nature and laws of physics.
- GenresEconomics
208 pages, Hardcover
Published March 5, 2021
15 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 21, 2021
3 points in this book:
- Population density = less fertility
- We need energy sources with a high eROI
- Economics follow enthropy, with globalization leading to inequality
Vaguely anti-communist, no solutions brought forward, no position as to the relevance of those points. The ant colony analogy could have been summarized by "societal behaviors emerge by convergence", he vaguely underscored the need for a regenerative economy, recycling. I felt like he was simply pointing to some population curves found in "nAtUrR" to say that we are also part of NaTuRr and we follow those curves too.
... Ok, under what circumstances, under what kind of economic conditions, what tech, where, what climate, what ressources.... It's so vague, so meta-analyzed, that although the premice is true and interesting, it's useless in application.
For my Commie ass, my interest would have lied in having an analysis of the sort applied to more kinds of economies, with parameters such as eROI (which he loved to bring up a lot), population density and plot the economics with his enthropy curve to then make more predictions, based on different parameters. With that title, I also hoped for an exploration of decentralized decision-making, but this book has nothing to fo with that concept.
Anyway, I felt I lost my time at the end of the day. If we use natural sciences in our economic and political scenarios, let's make sure the parameters are the same and make sense.
- Population density = less fertility
- We need energy sources with a high eROI
- Economics follow enthropy, with globalization leading to inequality
Vaguely anti-communist, no solutions brought forward, no position as to the relevance of those points. The ant colony analogy could have been summarized by "societal behaviors emerge by convergence", he vaguely underscored the need for a regenerative economy, recycling. I felt like he was simply pointing to some population curves found in "nAtUrR" to say that we are also part of NaTuRr and we follow those curves too.
... Ok, under what circumstances, under what kind of economic conditions, what tech, where, what climate, what ressources.... It's so vague, so meta-analyzed, that although the premice is true and interesting, it's useless in application.
For my Commie ass, my interest would have lied in having an analysis of the sort applied to more kinds of economies, with parameters such as eROI (which he loved to bring up a lot), population density and plot the economics with his enthropy curve to then make more predictions, based on different parameters. With that title, I also hoped for an exploration of decentralized decision-making, but this book has nothing to fo with that concept.
Anyway, I felt I lost my time at the end of the day. If we use natural sciences in our economic and political scenarios, let's make sure the parameters are the same and make sense.
January 22, 2023
I am part of the way through (now finished) and I find myself disappointed, which I hope is not merely due to my disagreement with the author's stance. I find his key premise totally reasonable. Of course humans are constrained by nature. But in the chapter on secular stagnation, the author leans heavily on the common canard that technological progress is slowing.
It depends on what you look at. My grandmother lived through most of the 20th century and fits the author's example of an observer of technological progress. But what I have seen happen since my childhood in the 70s dwarfs the discovery of flight or the splitting of the atom, albeit on a less obvious level.
The author concedes that there has been great progress in computers, so let's put that aside. Even the ordinary products we use have changed. Cheap disposable products are manufactured at a high level of precision using materials that are themselves breakthroughs (even if you ignore the parts that just weren't possible, such as microelectronics). A car of today is not the same as a 70s car even if both perform the same function. It is far more complex. It has an airbag. It has electronic sensors. It was designed with CAD tools that did not exist at the time. The cost of producing a car of today in the 70s would have been prohibitive, even limiting it to parts that actually existed.
There are advances in medicine (incremental to be sure) that have steadily changed certain cancers from a death sentence to a treatable condition. This has not necessarily improved life expectancy, because of confounding problems such as poverty, but the understanding and capability of medical science has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few decades. When I was a child, the idea of sequencing the human genome was science fiction. Today, the complete sequencing of an individual human genome is a routine (if unusual) diagnostic.
The world of today may superficially resemble that of the 1970s, but viewed under a microscope, it becomes clear that the changes in consumer products are no less revolutionary than the ones that gave us radio or airplanes. I find it disturbing that someone who presumes to make a subtle point about economics and growth would begin with an evaluation of technology that fails close inspection.
Note: I do not contradict the claim that economic growth may look like it is stagnating. Productivity is simply not an easy thing to measure. "Cost to make a widget" presumes a fixed definition of a widget, but a close inspection of inexpensive consumer products will reveal a higher level of precision and complexity than was the case 40 years ago.
Added after finishing: I am almost tempted to drop my review to two stars. This book does have its moments, e.g. when discussing the behavior of ants such as leaf cutters and aphid ranchers, though I feel the analogy to humans is a bit strained.
The author concludes with a bizarre tirade against academic economists and even I (a non-economist) could spot some howlers. Whether economists are less likely than other academics to embrace interdisciplinary work is unclear to me. I'm a big fan of Paul Krugman, since before he had an NYT column and he has never struck me as having tunnel-vision. But let's get to specifics.
Gronewold criticizes economists for being fixated on equilibrium conditions. This is in literal contradiction of one of the most famous quips by an economist. When John Maynard Keynes said "In the long run, we are all dead." he was making the point that equilibrium conditions do not address the dynamics of real human experience. In fact, all of the models that economists apply to understand business cycles are an attempt (not always successful) to address non-linear dynamics rather than equilibrium.
He also makes a distinction between "equilibrium" and "entropy" that suggests a misunderstanding of what entropy entails. In fact, the definition of thermodynamic equilibrium is a state of maximum entropy. That is, when two objects reach the state at which they are the same temperature, that is because the order represented by a temperature differential is replaced by the disorder of equal temperature from which no energy can be extracted and put to use.
He also criticizes economists in believing in unlimited exponential growth, which is again nonsensical. Like "Moore's law", it is sometimes useful to model change as exponential within a limited range. Economists are well aware of projections by Malthus on population limits, and economist Brad DeLong has written a great deal on the surprising way we have escaped the "Malthusian nightmare" so far, but he acknowledges that this was due to unanticipated technological advances and no guarantee of escape indefinitely into the future.
Another famous quip by an economist is Herbert Stein's “The unsustainable will not be sustained.”, conceding that growth may not continue indefinitely (though failing to address differences in what happens when processes reach their limits).
The overall tone of the conclusion was also unusually adversarial towards the reader, who presumably liked it enough to read that far. It could have been greatly improved by dropping the sensationalist "You might not believe me." tone. Sure, I believe large parts. Population levels off after reaching a certain density. It is intuitive and observed not only in nature but in cities. Economists, like other academics, study idealized models. Gronewold takes some of these models literally and then gins up a non-existent controversy with imagined readers who, contrary to all common sense, believe these literal models to be true.
It depends on what you look at. My grandmother lived through most of the 20th century and fits the author's example of an observer of technological progress. But what I have seen happen since my childhood in the 70s dwarfs the discovery of flight or the splitting of the atom, albeit on a less obvious level.
The author concedes that there has been great progress in computers, so let's put that aside. Even the ordinary products we use have changed. Cheap disposable products are manufactured at a high level of precision using materials that are themselves breakthroughs (even if you ignore the parts that just weren't possible, such as microelectronics). A car of today is not the same as a 70s car even if both perform the same function. It is far more complex. It has an airbag. It has electronic sensors. It was designed with CAD tools that did not exist at the time. The cost of producing a car of today in the 70s would have been prohibitive, even limiting it to parts that actually existed.
There are advances in medicine (incremental to be sure) that have steadily changed certain cancers from a death sentence to a treatable condition. This has not necessarily improved life expectancy, because of confounding problems such as poverty, but the understanding and capability of medical science has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few decades. When I was a child, the idea of sequencing the human genome was science fiction. Today, the complete sequencing of an individual human genome is a routine (if unusual) diagnostic.
The world of today may superficially resemble that of the 1970s, but viewed under a microscope, it becomes clear that the changes in consumer products are no less revolutionary than the ones that gave us radio or airplanes. I find it disturbing that someone who presumes to make a subtle point about economics and growth would begin with an evaluation of technology that fails close inspection.
Note: I do not contradict the claim that economic growth may look like it is stagnating. Productivity is simply not an easy thing to measure. "Cost to make a widget" presumes a fixed definition of a widget, but a close inspection of inexpensive consumer products will reveal a higher level of precision and complexity than was the case 40 years ago.
Added after finishing: I am almost tempted to drop my review to two stars. This book does have its moments, e.g. when discussing the behavior of ants such as leaf cutters and aphid ranchers, though I feel the analogy to humans is a bit strained.
The author concludes with a bizarre tirade against academic economists and even I (a non-economist) could spot some howlers. Whether economists are less likely than other academics to embrace interdisciplinary work is unclear to me. I'm a big fan of Paul Krugman, since before he had an NYT column and he has never struck me as having tunnel-vision. But let's get to specifics.
Gronewold criticizes economists for being fixated on equilibrium conditions. This is in literal contradiction of one of the most famous quips by an economist. When John Maynard Keynes said "In the long run, we are all dead." he was making the point that equilibrium conditions do not address the dynamics of real human experience. In fact, all of the models that economists apply to understand business cycles are an attempt (not always successful) to address non-linear dynamics rather than equilibrium.
He also makes a distinction between "equilibrium" and "entropy" that suggests a misunderstanding of what entropy entails. In fact, the definition of thermodynamic equilibrium is a state of maximum entropy. That is, when two objects reach the state at which they are the same temperature, that is because the order represented by a temperature differential is replaced by the disorder of equal temperature from which no energy can be extracted and put to use.
He also criticizes economists in believing in unlimited exponential growth, which is again nonsensical. Like "Moore's law", it is sometimes useful to model change as exponential within a limited range. Economists are well aware of projections by Malthus on population limits, and economist Brad DeLong has written a great deal on the surprising way we have escaped the "Malthusian nightmare" so far, but he acknowledges that this was due to unanticipated technological advances and no guarantee of escape indefinitely into the future.
Another famous quip by an economist is Herbert Stein's “The unsustainable will not be sustained.”, conceding that growth may not continue indefinitely (though failing to address differences in what happens when processes reach their limits).
The overall tone of the conclusion was also unusually adversarial towards the reader, who presumably liked it enough to read that far. It could have been greatly improved by dropping the sensationalist "You might not believe me." tone. Sure, I believe large parts. Population levels off after reaching a certain density. It is intuitive and observed not only in nature but in cities. Economists, like other academics, study idealized models. Gronewold takes some of these models literally and then gins up a non-existent controversy with imagined readers who, contrary to all common sense, believe these literal models to be true.
May 11, 2022
Simple explanations are satisfying yet rarely useful. This does not present any science backed argument, just some analogies to ants and a lot of "I reckon" and "in my opinion".
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews