Power & Energy

There is an assumption made here that we have never fully defended, but simply taken for granted, and I have noted it n some of the criticism we’ve recently recieved, so it’s high time to address the topic in a straight-forward fashion. The assumption is: Political power is a type of complexity, and thus it is a function of energy.

Ran Prieur recently pointed to a graphic illustration of this, provided above:

Someone made a global map of GDP per square kilometer, and pointed out that it’s almost identical to that “Earth at night” satellite image! I’ve never seen such a good illustration of the connection between the modern economy and energy consumption. And I’m wondering what kinds of economic activity are happening in the “dark” areas and not being calculated into GDP, and what kind of economy we would have, or could have, without so much cheap energy.

This brings us back to notions like White’s Law. Benjamin Shender approached this directly, and with a full mathematical model, in “Energy in Society. Jeff Vail powerfully pointed to the connection between energy and power in “Energy, Society & Hierarchy,” where he puts it quite succinctly:

Control over economic activity translates directly into political power (politics being generally defined as the decision process of how to distribute finite resources within a context of infinite desires). Similarly, control of certain energy resources needed to engage in economic activity translates directly into control over economic activity, which translates into political power.

The Anthropik Network