Flying Buttresses
European buildings that are hundreds of years old were often constructed over the course of hundreds of years. Castles often started with a single watch tower on a hill and grew from there.
When I lived in Germany, my husband and I would go visit castles on weekends. We would look for the oldest tower in the 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 seeing, but I seen 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 whomever 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.
I don't see a world doomed to fail because we have too many people. I see a world injecting more information into the system and swapping out knowledge for physical resources.
When I lived in Germany, my husband and I would go visit castles on weekends. We would look for the oldest tower in the 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 seeing, but I seen 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 whomever 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.
I don't see a world doomed to fail because we have too many people. I see a world injecting more information into the system and swapping out knowledge for physical resources.
We may not successfully complete this transition because it's not being evenly and consistently embraced. Old practices rooted in old ideas malinger.