Evolution and Economic Change in the Current Recession

Millions of years of what? Money is a form in evolving process.

Evolution is the dynamic pattern and habit of change. The emergence of powerful evolving systems like constructions, money, technology and manufacturing have brought the human species into a new relationship with the rotation of the Milky Way Galaxy. In ancient times that rotation was not distinguished from the influence of seasons and the Sun and Moon. Now, galactic rotation exists at a measured rate, and woe betide the person or organization that forgets it never goes backward, never stops, and influences everything on earth in molecular, atomic and subatomic ways.

On the scale of evolutionary time - that is, the time comprehended by diversification in species - the human species is, at the outset, an changing, relatively young species. It became radically distinct from other animals only around 12 million years ago, changed a good deal since then, and only with the last few ten thousand years began a determined course toward constructionist and technological society. Since the profound successes five or six thousand years ago of the earth pyramid builders in the Middle East and the development of Taoist concepts of order in Asian, progress has been swift.

The difference at first between the two was that the pyramid builders began to use the execution of human beings as a preliminary to further action such as construction and war. This was only rendered into more modern, civil forms after thousands of years of struggle in which theology and law were not distinct much of the time. Taoism, on the other hand, attempted to derive little or no significant advantage in its comprehension of the natural world from the killing of human beings. That abhorrent practice was not used to advantage in the field of war except to eliminate enemies, and in political society, the light shed by executions was almost entirely dominated by the continuing realm and otherwise was used to terrify subject populations.

Modern concepts of evolution are sophisticated and describe well, according to various statistical tests, even the evolution discovered in the fossil record, of plants and animals that disappeared millions of years before human beings existed. By now, human evolution primarily consists of constructions, technologies and organization and not changes in human form. Houses, roads, buildings, bridges and other forms in architecture are strikingly similar in appearance throughout the world, and their design is a matter of constant scrutiny, reconsideration and improvement. Most of the energy invested by plants and animals into struggling with their world and the uncomprehending assimilation of order from that struggle into their own forms and behaviors, was inefficient. Human beings, however, have carefully distinguished and resolved their actions and expenditures of energy into different techniques and practices.

The result is that human beings have shifted evolution away from themselves into their works. The construction of shelters has led to modern housing design and the works of architects, planners and builders. Small hand-worked farms have emerged into modern business scale agricultural land development complete with infrastructures of transportation, storage, food processing, redistribution and retail of refined foods and prepackaged meals like noodle soup. The working of hides and hand woven fabrics has become industrial production of textiles and large scale largely automatic manufacture of clothing carefully designed to fit the human form. Transportation has changed from walking and riding on animals or boating on waters, to immense road and highway systems, vast numbers of motor vehicles along with airplanes and ships. Communication has changed from talking and shouting, to telegraph, telephone, motion picture, television, radio, and internet systems that link the whole world with instantaneous distribution of information, some of it translated by machines into every language on the planet. Money is an evolving system itself. The evolution of money went by fits and starts, devaluation and the complete disappearance of some moneys with replacement by new, then the appearance of checking and banking, credit and debit cards being an interesting case, and eventually into the virtual disappearance of the cash economy and utter dominance by credit economy.

Debit and credit cards are interesting because at first they were thought to be necessarily distinct because the were believed to emerge from two different classes of human beings. This was abandoned when classless society, undifferentiated into small exclusive privileged classes such as royalty and classes of the most numerous population usually called commoners. Debit and credit cards quickly became rather obviously indistinct, when debit cards evolved overdraft protection, and certain penalties such as interest rate increases continued to exist in credit card systems.

Unless it is recognized how deeply money systems are embedded in the evolutionary process, it will be difficult to predict its vagaries of inflation and paroxysms of recessions and depressions. One important point is that as with natural evolution, galactic rotation is significant. It is the very context of evolution. A specific time rate and direction is associated even with extremely long periods of time such as millions of years. To refer to millions of years as if it is a transcendent concept is no longer meaningful where it must be understood correctly; millions of years in the past? Millions of years in the future? Millions of years centered around the present year?