eco short essay questions

4. Differentiate between positive and negative feedback loops. Give examples of each with regard to natural resource utilization. What is the importance of data collection and evaluation in understanding feedback loops?

5. Imagine you are making a presentation to a group of high school students. How would you explain the importance of a regulated market economy? (Three words) Select an example and describe how the system works. Keep in mind the goal of the system.

6. Imagine you are talking to a class of university freshman. They are concerned about what they should study. What challenges do you see in the future and how can those challenges be addressed by studying markets? Pick an example and explain how economics allows us to not only discover the challenge but also to find solutions

Here’s information that I got so far… but you should do research this is not enough

then checked himself. “Nature is prodigal with details but parsimonious with principles. I’ll sketch out the categories in this order: bifurcations; positive-feedback loops; negative-feedback controls; and emergency adaptations. “To anticipate myself, let me warn you that seldom does each individual mode of correction stand alone. Weblike, each affects the other modes. Dynamic systems can and do use all four modes simultaneously. Let me also forewarn you that none of the methods of correction is perfect. Each conceals traps and can have treacherous side effects, which may be why dynamic systems don’t last forever. But in spite of shortcomings, the modes of correction serve incomparably better than lack of corrections. In any case, they’re what we have to work with and depend on, gratefully and warily.” “How do you know these four are the only means that dynamic systems have of correcting themselves?” asked Kate. “I don’t know that they are. They’re the only ones I know of, either in economies or the rest of nature. It’s possible, of course, that my interest in economies has influenced what I see in the rest of nature. All I can tell you is that these four are my best shot, and if you dig up others, more power to you. “We’re already familiar with the fact of bifurcations, because bifurcations are developments. But not all developments are bifurcations.” “Would you define bifurcations , then?” asked Hortense, who had begun to perk up. “The word means ‘fork,’ like a fork in the road. It’s a term chaos theorists use. Mathematicians call the same kinds of events discontinuities. Here’s the correction principle: A system’s instabilities of some sort can have become so serious that for it to continue operating as it has been is not a practical option. It must make a radical change—take a fork in the road, travel into new territory. “Evolutionary history is stuffed with bifurcations. A momentous example from our own point of view was the emergence of air-breathing vertebrates from an ancestry of marine vertebrates.” “What instability did that overcome?” asked Hortense. “Not known for sure. Lungfish had both gills and a primitive lung, suggesting that their habitat was swampland. The earliest to take to dry land may have inhabited swamps subject to severe droughts, or perhaps they were escaping fearsomely jawed predators who couldn’t follow them onto~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Hiram, nodding, reluctantly set down a forkful of potato salad. “Adam Smith, back in 1775, identified prices of goods and rates of wages as feedback information, although of course he didn’t call it that because the word feedback was not in the vocabulary at the time. But he understood the idea. He analyzed how prices automatically corrected maladjustments between supply and demand. It was not, he found, by merely influencing distribution of supplies—that was an old piece of knowledge—but by actually bringing imbalances into better balance by triggering changes in production. In his sober way, Smith was clearly excited about the marvelous form of order he’d discovered, as well he should have been. He was far ahead of naturalists in grasping the principle of negative-feedback controls. Even machine designers didn’t recognize that they were dealing with—” “Please stay on the subject of money,” said Armbruster. “What does machine design have to do with this?” “Oh, lots of machines incorporate negative-feedback controls. Thermostats register temperature feedback and trigger corrective responses by heat sources. Or take the flywheel, an early mechanical example—” Registering Armbruster’s frown as feedback information, Hiram quickly got back on course. “It’s interesting, I think, that Smith visualized negative economic feedback control as a hidden hand ordering the market, and some two centuries later Wiener visualized feedback as a hand on a rudder.” Hiram reached for his fork again, thought better of it, and pushed away his plate. “Hiram, you go ahead and eat,” said Murray. “I can talk on this subject. Adam Smith observed that prices rise for goods in short supply and fall for goods in low demand.” “Like outlet stores advertising sale prices on manufacturers’ overstocks, I suppose,” said Hortense. “That kind of thing is feedback. Now, for corrections it triggers,” Murray went on. “Smith also observed that high prices for goods stimulated increased production of those goods and that low prices depressed production, automatically bringing supplies into closer correspondence with demand. He also applied this insight to facets of economic life other than production of goods. For instance, he noticed that wages rise when and where the demand for labor is high and fall when and where it’s in low demand. This influences migrations of workers when such movements are possible, and also workers’ choices of occupations when that’s feasible. When and where capital is in high demand, interest rates rise and attract capital. “Such continual adjustments—by industry, labor, customers, landowners, and capital—create self-organized order out of volatile, uncoordinated, confusing conglomerations of countless different enterprises and individuals, narrowly pursuing countless picayune opportunities and their own interests. So Smith was also far ahead of his time in identifying the phenomenon we now call self-organization and illustrating its behavior in a nonhierarchically organized, dynamic system. “Smith shared with his contemporaries many naive and obfuscating misconceptions about the world and the way it works. Nevertheless, these insights of his placed economics, in 1775, at a forefront of scientific inquiry. No wonder early ecologists drew on economics to explain their own discoveries. “Unfortunately, economics failed to progress much further as a science. It had this one solid concept in its grasp, and economists and economic philosophers tried to make it explain too much. They dwelled on arid arguments about whether supply generates demand or demand generates supply—arguments that continue to this day. “As we’ve seen, diversity generates economic expansion, owing to multiple reuses of settlements’ imports, in principle just as diversity of organisms generates biomass expansion owing to multiple reuses of received energy before it leaves the conduit. But although the close empiric connection between economic diversity and expansion was observable in Smith’s time and has been observable ever since, the connection slid unnoticed past economic theorists arrested in their obsession with whether demand leads supply or vice versa. Smith himself was partly responsible for that blind spot. He led himself and others astray by declaring that economic specialization of regions and nations was more efficient than economic diversification; his mistake came of flawed assumptions and extrapolations concerning division of labor. “To this day, no attention is paid to self-refueling as a complex but orderly process. And only in the mid-twentieth century did schools of economics so much as acknowledge that innovation—development—was worth exploring, and even then only as an eccentric and marginal side issue. And even today there is no useful attention paid to the systematic workings of development and co-development. The pity is that this intellectual stultification was so unnecessary …” Murray’s voice trailed off. “Why unnecessary?” asked Armbruster. “Keep explaining.” “The theorists after Smith retreated into their own heads instead of engaging ever more deeply with the real world. Plenty of observable, germane facts were lying around in plain sight, ready and waiting to lead Smith’s insights, straight as directional arrows, into the subjects of development and bifurcations. It could easily have been seen by anyone, for instance, that high prices stimulate substitutes for goods in short supply—that is, stimulate production of goods not previously in existence. In fifteenth-century Europe, the demand for books exceeded the supply of individually hand-copied books. That particular imbalance made printing with movable type economically feasible. Printed books were not only more plentiful than hand copies but cheaper than even those produced by poor, half-starved student drudges in cold, ill-lit garrets. “Or take metal plating, an important industrial advance even before Smith’s time and observable in many permutations ever since. The innovation that launched it in London was a lower-priced substitute for sterling-silver handles for table knives. In both printing and plating—and many other instances—disparate supplies and demands were brought into better balance only by developments.” “But don’t forget, those developments couldn’t have been undertaken without co-developments,” said Kate. “Yes, thank you, Kate. Pursuing Smith’s insights could have led straight into appreciation of co-development webs and would have thrown deep suspicion on economic specialization—and also on the supposed efficiency of monopolies, and on the deliberately specialized economic arrangements of imperial powers, which have worked so much harm on the world’s economies and the people who depend on them. “As for refueling, London, for one, was subject to enormous bursts of replacements of former imports; so were other European cities. Since these replacements were largely—not entirely, but largely—driven by the lower costs of locating close to markets instead of at a distance, Smith’s insights might have led to understanding why some economies, by diversifying, also become self-generating while others are dependent and inert. “All these investigations would have been more fruitful than theories about how economies should work or might work or could be manipulated into how they should or might work—instead of learning how they do work. What a waste. “But as far as negative-feedback control is concerned, Smith was brilliant. He realized that feedback is only as good as the accuracy of its reporting. He identified combines to rig prices as falsifications of realities about supply and demand. He saw that false information injected disorder into the system he was observing and describing.” Hiram, who had finished eating, said, “Your turn to have lunch, Pop. Let me pick up on how feedback can be true, false, or ambiguous. Negative-feedback controls are most reliable when the data reported, the purport of the data, and the corrective response are functionally integrated so there is no possibility of misunderstanding the information or triggering a mistaken response. “For programmed feedback-control perfection, there are few better places to look than colonies of social insects. For example, a termite colony maintains balanced proportions among its different castes. They’re all born of identical eggs with exactly the same genetic heredity, yet the adults greatly differ physically, depending on the functions they perform. The nursery of the larvae is where such differences are determined, by cascades of chemicals activated in the larvae by feedback reported as information on current populations of the various castes in the colony. For instance, a colony’s soldiers give off an odor, a pheromone distinctive to the soldiers. If the odor falls below a certain level in the colony, it means that the proportion of soldiers is less thannormal; there’s no mistaking the purport of the feedback. Since the drop automatically causes the nursery to supply more soldiers, there’s no room for mistake in the response—or in cessation of the response, either. Pheromone feedback from newly produced soldiers reports, ‘That’s enough soldiers.’ In short, data, the meaning of the data, and appropriate responses to the data are all perfectly integrated. Most negative-feedback controls, including most of those that operate within our own bodies, have comparable integral perfection.” “I don’t want to prolong your detour into natural history,” said Armbruster, “but I feel bound to point out, Hiram, that nature’s feedback reports can be false and the lies can be damaging. Spells of warm weather in midwinter aren’t unknown. But if plants take that data on temperature to mean that spring has come, they’re nipped in the bud.” “A good illustration of data and its purport not being integrated,” said Hiram. “But it’s surprising and gratifying to see how seldom native plants are fatally fooled. Their protection is their sensitivity to multiple reports. If data on temperature contradict data on length of the day, the temperature data are apparently suspect.” “If plants are smart enough to take