An economy like an ecosystem is a dynamic environment. Like an ecosystem, an economy can exist anywhere on a spectrum between Highly managed or not managed at all. Both work in the sense that activity of some sort will occur. An economy that exists without intervention will be vibrant and self driving. It will be vital and aggressive. It will also be brutal and harsh – prone to booms busts and collapses until it finally settles into a surprising status quo. A managed economy is like a garden. It may be shaped and cultivated in any number of ways. However, the inputs required to maintain an artificial system are significant. In a manner, they require the addition of far more fertilizer or artificial light. They require specific nutrients be added at the proper times. And yet, they hold the potential to bloom in ways that nature does not. The creatures that inhabit them are gentler and often more fragile. Their softness makes them they are attractive to nature, which in its hardness sees opportunity. If untended, they always revert to a brutal state. In a garden, the gardener watches closely. The members are flora and fauna carefully monitored, pruned, and culled accordingly. Gardens are the result of a central power or powers exerting their desires on nature. This process can be harmonious or acrimonious, but it’s particular nature is driven by the preferences and diligence of it’s gardeners. In the absence of a gardener, nature will begin to encroach, and only the strongest cultivars will be able to remain, often with dramatic changes in their own internal natures. Extractive over cultivation may lay land barren for a time and may kill off micro organisms that the whole system relies on. At the same time, in a harsh environment, middle of the road plants and animals are at the mercy of both micro-organisms and larger predators.
The question of which type of economy will foster the greatest prosperity is a red herring. Both systems will support life. Life is the counterpoint to death. Both spring eternal. The question is ultimately one of individual and social values. Both will foster commerce. and some creatures will be better suited one or the other. Both feral economies and cultivated economies will continue according to the interactions of their inhabitants. Ultimately, in a stable environment, every inhabitant lives and dies to be consumed by its offspring, neighbors, or both.
If you are one of those who possess sufficient agency, ability, and motivation to consciously choose the manner in which you live and way in which you exert what impact you may on your environment, then you have choices to make based on your values:
For those who favor some management the questions I believe are worth asking are: What do we value?; Are we fully aware of all of our values and where they come into competition?; what sort of environment do we wish to inhabit?; And are we willing to share our garden or even tolerate the the agricultural practices of those farms, gardens, and ranches near us?
For those who favor a totally natural environment, the only question is, how do I survive and procreate.
For those who believe in managed compromises, or enforced standoffs. the question is how do I navigate to the environment for which I am best suited and do I have the will and ability to survive in that environment through compliance or my own natural abilities? Is my preferred role that of gardener, prey, predator, flora, fauna, micro, macro? We should remember that members of both systems may exist in either and that, in both systems, members act with varying levels of empowerment and agency at different times. Both systems run on tension between individuals and organizations scaled up and down from the base components of a bacteria to the complexities of organisms and organizations.
Ultimately, there will always be some flux between natural and managed. But all systems reach a point of general homeostasis or they collapse in on themselves with new activity springing from the leavings of the old system.