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silverj6@mchsi.com
Silver J. H. Jones
Silver J. H. Jones
2008
Copyright © 2002 by Silver (J. H.) Jones. All rights, electronic, multimedia, and print, reserved. A publi-
cation of SSPEN - Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovillage Network.
What is a synergistic economy, and how does it differ from a primarily competitive economy? We take on
this task from an inquisitive rather than an authoritative perspective. We do not believe that a truly syner-
gistic, systemic, and symbiotic economy has ever been attempted in the modern era. Would such an
economy diminish the core of power, which now exists in the hands of only a few, and distribute this
power to a much more highly distributed population? When and if such a transition occurs, what will it
look like, and how will it differ from our current competitive, for profit, and mercenary economy?
We would undoubtedly recognize such an economy if we had a chance to see it, but unfortunately we
have no examples. This means we have no alternative except to try to envision, design, simulate, and
eventually develop such an economy. This type of economy may be so new and innovative that the words
‘design’ and ‘develop’ may not be appropriate. Certainly some degree of design must be involved, but
perhaps what we really need to do is - to set up the proper circumstances to allow such an economy to
self-organize, and emerge into being in a bottom-up fashion. What would a dynamic self-organizing
economy be like? We must be prepared to learn and morph our conceptualization as the simulation takes
on its own reality. We should not totally assume at the outset, that we know what such an economic sys-
tem looks like, and exactly how it will behave.
After attempting to define a synergistic economy, we shall then turn our attention to our proposal that
‘microsocieties,’ in the form of ecovillages, can serve as ideal testing grounds for exploring synergistic
economies. The chance to explore alternative economies in smaller microsocieties and their networks, is
an extremely useful and prudent methodology. Economic models which have evolved, scaled, and sur-
vived the rugged hill climbing in the fitness landscape of the ecovillage network, will have proven their
usefulness. Having proven their adaptability in diverse circumstances, and established their robustness,
they will become viable candidates for introduction into the larger economic global network. Before any
economic system can be adopted at the global level, it must involve more than ideology, it must have been
submitted to exhaustive testing, and retesting. In the age of complexity, we can no longer afford to base
our systems on ideology alone. A cascading scale of ever more exhaustive and broader simulation and
testing, must be a core ingredient in our evaluation of alternative models for a truly synergistic econ-
omy. The current wild swings of economic and capital market cycles provide sufficient evidence that we
have not yet mastered this science and art of economy, and that we are amateurs at complexity control.
• Neither the self focused interests of ‘for profit only’ capitalists, nor the unconditional altruism of social
economic liberals - properly captures the complex mix of approaches that community governance is
capable of.
• Large city, state, and national institutions should be focused in such a manner that they allow communi-
ties, markets, and states to work in a complementary and systemic fashion.
• Poorly structured and administered institutions, markets, and states can crowd out otherwise healthy
community governance. (This is why we recommend integrating local communities into highly net-
worked communities.)
• Not all forms of property rights are equal when it comes to fostering community governance, and al-
lowing these communities to function in a complementary fashion with other communities, markets,
and states is desirable.
• In contrast to the position that small scale local efforts are regressive examples of the pre-modern era,
microsocieties (small worlds) are much more likely to increase in importance - in the new rapidly
changing high technology/information age era we are now entering.
For a number of examples which demonstrate how community governance and economics were able to
solve problems which could not be solved by either individuals acting alone, markets, or governments see
Bowles and Gintis [3].
The cutting edge of economic research today incorporates a much more vast field of disciplines than eco-
nomics did throughout most of the last century. Changing perspectives on economy are coming from
fields like alife, emergence, self-organization, complex adaptive systems, evolutionary computational
simulation, nonlinear dynamical systems, cybernetics, complexity, and chaos theory. General system the-
ory is an attempt to pull all of these disciplines together under one umbrella, in an effort to establish their
systemic relationships. Unfortunately, to even begin to explore the implications of this fascinating new
research, would require a book length discussion. We will limit ourselves here, to pointing out the most
basic differences in the functional advantages and disadvantages of markets, the state, and microsocieties.
Markets have certain advantages over governments, because of their ability to more easily utilize private
information, and to establish, administer, and enforce contracts at a relatively low cost. Markets, when
functioning properly, in a broadly distributed economy, are more efficient at rewarding good performance
and disciplining poor performance. State and federal governments have established their ability to deal
with a different category of problems. The greatest advantage government has, is its ability to legislate
and enforce rules of conduct in cases where behavior, in order to be effective, must be mandatory (exam-
ples - paying for community infrastructure, providing national defense, insurance programs such as social
security). Communities display their particular strengths in areas where the state and the markets prove
inadequate. Community governance displays its strongest attributes - in instances where highly local, ir-
regular, and dispersed private information, often hard to capture in statistics - is important in the function-
ing of the community. No one is closer to the community than the people who live in it, and this informa-
tion is often unavailable to more distant organizations. Local community can be extremely effective at
monitoring and enforcing the local behavior of its members. Communities have numerous types of infor-
mal controls that are not practically reachable by formal governance, contractual, or market forces. Trust,
reciprocity, reputation, popularity, and self-esteem are just some of the means by which community func-
tions without formal contracts. Community has a vast selection of informal psychological, sociological,
Why are we asked to just ‘accept’ this as inevitable in an economic system, when we refuse to accept it
in so many other types of systems we live with everyday in our lives?
We are told by these very same people that make these markets, that markets are efficient and rational
mechanisms. Yet we would never accept this ‘boom and bust,’ unstable and unpredictable behavior from
any of the other systems we have in our lives - like our electrical grid, our television networks, our radio
networks, our refrigerators, televisions, radios, stoves, etc. In almost any other type of system, we would
define the same kind of behavior that we witness in the markets and the economy as ‘defective.’
Class I (control class) - involved no genetic algorithm evolution and no rule switching.
Since the genetic algorithm changing is never invoked, the traders must rely only upon the initial pool of
trading strategies.
Class III - involved slow genetic algorithm evolution and slow strategy switching.
In these simulations the time period of genetic algorithm turnover is moderate (once every 1000 - 10,000
turnovers in 300,000 cycles).
Class IV - involved fast genetic algorithm evolution and frequent strategy switching.
In these simulations the genetic algorithm turnover rate is high (once every 100 - 1,000 turnovers in
300,000 cycles).
• volatile prices
• highly complex trading strategies
• a market where technical trading strategies dominated fundamental
strategies
• a market which could be described as deviating significantly from rational and efficient market theory,
and which produced significant bubbles and crashes
In attempting to understand the results of these simulations we should consider Class I and Class II as
controls, because they represent the extremes where no evolution, and an extremely rapid evolution took
place. Neither of these scenarios fits the type of circumstances we encounter in real trading markets. Class
I is unlike the real trading markets because the trading agents never change their strategies from their ini-
tial one, even over long time periods. Class II exhibited surprising behavior where the very rapid genetic
algorithm turnover resulted in agents choosing not to change their strategies because they simply could
not keep up with the rate at which the information changed, on an ongoing basis. Class III and Class IV
represent the closest to real world examples, and this is where we need to focus our attention. Class IV is
a moderated version of Class III, where there is rapid turnover, but the trading agents feel they have suffi-
cient time to attempt to take advantage of the changing information so as to update their trading strategies.
The authors of this study comment on the fact that the increased emphasis on technical strategies, if
enough of the agents were to adopt them, could lead to a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, resulting in the
markets exhibiting more drastic swings (bubbles and crashes). In these simulations the trading agents do
change their strategies often, and they rely predominantly on technical trading techniques as opposed to
fundamental strategies. It is very significant that this approach produced lower overall wealth accumu-
lation, even though the agents felt that they could benefit from the information available. However, the
results, showed that their perception was incorrect. Their actual earnings, as opposed to their percep-
tions, were considerably lower than in the Class III simulations. The Class III simulations which had
only moderate genetic algorithm turnover rates produced the most rational and efficient market, and
resulted in the highest accumulated wealth for the majority of trading agents.
The above conclusions are, for the most part, are those of Josi and Bedua, and are limited to these specific
simulations. We believe, to a large extent, these results support the conceptual analysis that we have pro-
vided in our discussion of markets.
This type of computer simulation is very valuable, and it is unfortunate that our largest supercomputer
facilities are not actively improving, expanding, and extending these studies. We very much need to con-
tinue learning from these simulations, broadening and deepening both the quantitative and qualitative
samples in our database, and expanding the number of trading agents in the simulations to better ap-
proximate real world markets. Until a much larger database is available, we are limited to conceptual con-
jectures in an attempt to extend our understanding of these results. We cannot help but wonder if part of
the reason that Class III simulations produce superior wealth accumulation, in comparison to Class IV
simulations, is because less shorting, day trading, and swing trading occurs in Class III simulations. In
Class IV simulations we would expect to see a much larger participation of opportunistic hedge fund trad-
ing (naked shorting), in addition to much more active trading on the part of professional traders. The
combination of both private and investment firm short trading, in volatile markets, with thin volumes, can
also initiate an additional side effect of triggering computerized institutional and mutual fund block trad-
ing, resulting in greater volume and price fluctuations. Institutions and mutual funds generally prefer to
take a more long term investment approach, but because of the enormous sums of money involved in
these funds wild market swings can cause the managers of these funds to move to shorter term trading
strategies, and forced selling to meet redemption demands. The results of these simulations would seem to
indicate that this trend (a transition from Class III to Class IV behavior) is a lose/lose strategy for all the
parties involved. We already know from the simulations that the wealth accumulation of the individual
trading agents is reduced by this transition. Since these simulation were too simplistic to include hedge
funds and institutional trading, we are forced to extrapolate what the effects of this transition might be.
Since hedge funds are privately held, they are not required to provide statistics on their performance. If
we can believe their own voluntary reporting, they certainly did better than individuals, institutions, and
mutual funds (tech bubble era) in our recent Class IV real world market. Mutual funds and institutional
investors probably incur less wealth accumulation during these transitions, similar to the fate of individual
long-term investors. Since hedge funds are optimized for highly technical short-term trading, they can
probably afford the most expensive technical software and the high speed supercomputers necessary to
utilize large volumes of rapidly changing data. In Class IV markets they are probably at a distinct advan-
We prefer a more future oriented approach, taking advantage of all the good aspects of modern society
and replacing the bad aspects with new innovative solutions.
We already know about the three basic economic models that have been tested in the Twentieth Century -
capitalism, socialism, and communism. A capitalist economic system attempts to place economic control
in the hands of the individual citizens, and it believes that individuals must be rewarded in the economy in
proportion to their own incentive and effort. Ownership is placed in the hands of individuals. Competition
is believed to be the pathway to the best economy. Communism (as it has been implemented as opposed
to its pure form) on the other hand, relies on collective incentive, and rewards all individuals on an ap-
proximately equal basis, and ownership is supposed to be collective rather than individual. Cooperation
and collective effort is believed to be the pathway to the best economy. Socialism, in general, is some
where in between these two opposites. Ownership is shared between the state and individuals, govern-
ment, rather than the private sector plays a larger role in both society and the economy than is the case in
capitalism, and a smaller role than is the case in communism. A combined effort, and shared responsibil-
ity between the individual and the state, is thought to be the best pathway to a good economy. This is of
course an oversimplified summary, but it should suffice for our purposes here.
As the world approached the end of the Twentieth Century capitalism seems to have been the favored sys-
tem of the big three. All three systems have their advantages and weaknesses on a theoretical level,
whether all of these approaches will ever be tested in their uncorrupt pure form remains an open question.
What is not an open question, is how the world has chosen from the only examples of these implementa-
tions available. Capitalism, as it has been implemented in the European and American systems, is the un-
disputed winner. Most of the industrialized nations have adopted this approach.
Microeconomies can afford to be more experimental than the larger more inertial structures of markets,
states, and nations. They can afford to experiment with models that do not fall into any one of the big
three categories. Depending upon their inclinations and objectives, microeconomies can either adopt cer-
tain aspects from one, two, or all three of the big three, and just as easily they can reject the aspects that
do not seem to work in their particular situations. They can afford to tailor their economies to their needs
in a effort to freely improve on the existing models, or they can attempt to invent new models from
scratch. Centuries from now, one of these new models may be the predominate model, having proven it-
The problem of competing standards is an ongoing problem in the technological ear. Witness the evolu-
tion of the, now almost extinct, modems in the 28k, 33k, and 56k transition era (2002 era). There were
two competing standards used by alternative manufacturers with each new release of a new modems, pro-
ducing addition complexity for internet providers and end users. If you bought a modem early on, before
it had been standardized, when it finally became standardized you had to purchase the same modem again
with the new standard to ensure a stable connection. A great deal of unnecessary cost and waste of raw
materials was the end result. Why did this happen? Each company held a patent and wanted to control
market share, even though there was very little difference in the performance of the two alternative de-
signs. If the two modem standards ended up performing in an equivalent manner, the two companies
should have agreed to split the research and development costs. The standard would have been decided
Let us briefly turn our attention to the financial markets. Even with all the different stock exchanges,
NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX, and the more recent proliferation of the newer clone ECNS, why do we see no
fundamental differences in what they are offering the investor. They are all competing for spreads and
execution speeds, and offering very little in the way of qualitatively diverse alternatives for investing
(2003 era - somewhat improved). The over 10,000 mutual fund companies are also essentially clones of
each other, with only a few exceptions. Not a single exchange specialize in socially responsible investing.
• A balanced approach between valuable competition, needless duplication, shared and distributed inno-
vation, with an emphasis on synergistic amplification rather than duplication of valuable capital, raw
materials, labor, engineering, and research resources. Amplification refers to learning to use a basic
technology or technological components in as many ways as possible, through innovation, flexible de-
sign, adaptive engineering, and marketing.
• Inventive and innovative capital markets, as opposed to the cloned and redundant current market offer-
ings.
• A balanced optimization between hierarchical and heterarchical organization of the worlds economy.
• A primary focus on the teleological goals while allowing for profits, as opposed to the current short
sighted ‘for profit only’ mercenary approach, so devastating to our planets ecology, and our civilizations
efforts toward biorapture and universe ascension.
• A dedication to endurable round trip products that can be easily serviced, easily maintained, and easily
recycled at the end of their life expectancy. Nanotechnology will be our first opportunity at 100% recy-
cling. Until then we will have to commit to our best effort with known and new innovative pre-
nanotechnology procedures. Compare this to the current ‘disposable’ (disposable where?) and ‘throw
away’ (it costs more to fix it than to discard it) mentality.
• A primary focus on research that preserves what is left of our nonrenewable resources, and efficiently
utilizes our renewable resources.
• A continual dedication to complexity and chaos control in all aspects of research, design, engineering,
production, distribution, and marketing.
• A continual dedication to a high quality of life by preserving and renewing the health and well being of
our planetary and social ecosystems.
The Ten Commandments have already been spoken for, so we shall present only nine commandments for
synergistic economies, subject to revision when we are actually engaged in the process.
Ecovillages are microsocieties with microeconomies which are scaled down experimental versions of the
larger society. They therefore present excellent opportunities to try out new and innovative approaches
without the full risk of implementing them in the society as a whole, before sufficient testing under di-
For some reason the tendency by the larger society has been to fear and shun such microsocieties, as if
they were some dangerous threat, when in fact, they can be very valuable testing grounds for new ideas.
The tendency of a few cults to form closed microcommunities, focused around single individuals, where
extensive mind control techniques are employed, has unfairly given microsocieties a bad reputation.
These examples seems to be the only examples that the media are interested in, because they never bother
to report on the exemplary microsocieties. Please forget the cults, because what we are suggesting is
very different. We are talking about democratic communities where individuals are allowed full free-
dom to come and go and participate in the larger society, and information of all types flows freely be-
tween the microcommunity and the larger society. The ecovillage network we speak of would consist of
hundreds, thousands, or millions of microsocieties - each consisting of a unique community and yet
united by a similar purpose. The obvious intent of the network is to link these, otherwise separate, com-
munities together all around the world. Both the physical and the cyber-networks would be sustained by
profuse communication with information, cultural, technological, educational, and economic exchanges.
Experimental microeconomies
A program of microeconomies in the form of ecovillages connected all over the world via a highly dis-
tributed network would seem to be just the type of testing system we will need to find out what kind of
economy works best as we proceed into the exponential complexity explosion and growth of a post-
industrial technological and information society. The degree of complexity and nonlinearity in such a so-
ciety, makes it impossible to test new systems adequately with theoretical or analytical methods alone. We
must perform many simulations, which test our models in the real world - full of nonlinear complexities.
Testing must include multiple levels of scaling, starting from local successful tests all the way up through
testing in the full ecovillage network, before these models are implemented in the full global environ-
ment.
Before we can begin testing microeconomies, we must have microsocieties. Before we can determine the
best experimental economic models for the future, we must determine how to get microsocieties funded.
Obviously there are many approaches that can be adopted, depending upon the particular circumstances
of each ecovillage development. Projected size, projected growth, available capital resources, the core
theme of the community, economic expertise, and many other factors will play a role in deciding upon the
proper method of funding for each unique experiment.
One could design a community so that it allowed for two types of citizens, those that choose to both live
and work in the community, and another group who only chose to live in the community an find employ-
ment in the external economy, outside the ecovillage. We will only discuss ecovillages where citizens
• A certain portion of the land could be set aside for businesses, and community members who wanted to
build businesses in the community could also opt to purchase, lease, or rent these business locations.
The profits from these businesses would belong to the individual, or group of individuals, who estab-
lished and ran these businesses.
• Some form of joint ownership between individuals and the collective association could also be another
approach, each sharing a portion of the research and development expenses, operating expenses, and
profits.
• Some communities might even want a more open economy that allowed people or groups from outside
the community to operate businesses within their communities. Contractual agreements between the
individual businesses and the home owners associations would be used to handle the legal terms of the
agreement between the two parties.
• Microcommunities could also choose a model where the internal community actually provided eco-
nomic products and services to the larger external community.
• For ecovillages that focused the largest portion of their economy around the internet, all of the new
forms of experimental virtual economies (yet to be determined, and to hard to classify at this juncture)
could also be considered.
• Natural trading partners for ecovillage community economies would be other ecovillage communities,
since they share a common philosophy.
Obviously determining which of these alternatives would work best for a given ecovillage, would depend
on:
It is also very likely that as the community grew, different models might be more appropriate at different
stages of growth. A number of circumstances could trigger such a change - a drastic change in the growth
rate of the community, changing economic circumstances, or a severe change in climate.