Flying Buttresses

Old European buildings that are hundreds of years old were often constructed over hundreds of years. Castles, for example, often started with a single watch tower on a hill and got added to over time.

When I lived in Germany, my husband and I would go look at castles on weekends. We would look for the oldest tower in building and it was often obviously in a different style from later work.

I'm less familiar with how churches got built and I can't find an image or a name to go with what I remember, but I remember seeing pictures of a church with flying buttresses and some of the buttresses were very thin and some were much thicker. My recollection is that the original architect died before the church was completed and whoever completed the building didn't have faith that the thinner buttresses were really adequate.

So they made the buttresses thicker and hundreds of years later the church still stands and the thin buttresses have proven to be just as good as the thick ones in terms of longevity, soundness of construction and so forth.

The first architect was more knowledgeable than the one who came after him. He understood that with the right design, you needed less material to make the thing work.

That's the essence of the butterfly economy: It's an economy where knowledge has the power to dramatically shrink the footprint of physical resources needed to comfortably support a person.

We are currently having growing pains and I wish I could play handmaiden to the birth of a new economy, but I probably can't. I'm just an unknown blogger who, like Rodney Dangerfield, gets no respect.

And maybe I'm not even needed. Maybe the economy will find its own way without someone at the helm to direct it.

But I don't see a world doomed to fail because we have too many people. I see a world on the cusp of choosing to succeed by injecting more information into the system and swapping out knowledge for physical resources -- or choosing to fail because we can't be arsed to get with the program and debug our own wetware and what not.