Economics as we know it today is broken. Unable to explain, to predict or to protect, it is need of root-and-branch replacement. Or, to borrow from Alan Greenspan, it is fundamentally “flawed”. But where do we look for inspiration in facilitating what is the mother of all paradigm shifts? Interestingly, the most insightful and strikingly innovative ideas are coming from all directions other than the economics profession. Ecology offers the insight that the economy is best understood as a complex adaptive system.

Excerpted from Jonathan Dawson, head of economics at Schumacher College:

“This opens up exciting new territory for research and exploration on multiple fronts. Let me touch on just three of these here. The first relates to the optimal performance point of sustainable systems. A team of researchers led by Bernard Lietaer found that ecosystems make a trade-off between efficiency and resilience, sacrificing substantial possible gains in efficiency (in terms of volume of output) in order to maintain the resilience of the system. Think of a forest that selects a high level of biodiversity, which includes many puny or ‘insignificant’ species, to protect itself against an outbreak of pests or other shocks.

Lietaer’s team applied this finding to the design of our global monetary systems, arguing that today’s monetary monoculture has paid a high price for its unparalleled efficiency (the capacity to direct investments globally at the push of a button) in terms of vulnerability to herd-like behaviour and system collapse. To optimise the prospects of sustainability, they argue, there needs to be a greater diversity of complementary money types. The question is how this insight be applied elsewhere in our hyper-efficient, just-in-time, deeply unresilient economy?

A second area of ecologically-inspired fresh thinking is in the emergence of new dispersed enterprise and organisational forms. Enabled by the growing power of information technology, whole new ways of doing business and organising society are emerging, whose strength lies not in economies of scale but in economies of co-operation and symbiosis. Thus, peer-to-peer financing is emerging as a competitor to the bank. Dispersed local food producers are organising via food hubs to provide an alternative to the supermarket. Time banks and civic participation in the design and delivery of care and health services are starting to take the strain off the welfare state.

All these developments distribute decision-making throughout the system and offer the potential for lower-carbon as well as more democratic and values-based forms of organisation. What can we learn from mycelium that can help us better understand and realise this potential?

A final vibrant area of exploration lies in the field of linguistic deconstruction and reconstruction. This emerges from a recognition that fresh ways of thinking are inhibited by the mechanistic and reductionist ideology that is encoded into the very language we use and the narratives through which we make meaning of the world.

In the field of international aid, to take but one example, concepts of “first world/third world”, “poverty” and “aid” frame and channel the debate that can be had in ways that are profoundly unhelpful in a multi-polar, post-growth world. In the words of Wolfgang Sachs: “Once the scale of incomes had been established, such different worlds as those of the Zapotec people of Mexico, the Tuareg of north Africa, and the Rajasthani of India could be classed together; a comparison to the ‘rich’ nations demanded relegating them to a position of almost immeasurable inferiority. In this way, ‘poverty’ was used to define whole peoples, not according to what they are and want to be, but according to what they lack.”

This moment of history calls on us to rewrite the dictionary and create new stories, much as the generations following on from Copernicus did to reflect the new world-view that emerged from his astronomical insights. The new language and stories that we need will emerge from the language of ecology and will speak of connection in place of separation; networks in place of nodes; synergy in place of win:lose or cut-throat competition. In fact, this new vocabulary is already emerging from new internet enabled phenomena such as open source software, crowdsourcing and biomimicry.

A core task of today’s thinkers, activists and entrepreneurs is that of re-civilising and re-enchanting the grey science that is neoclassical economics. The good news is that this project is already well underway, even if it is sometimes difficult to see as it is not encoded in the dominant language of everyday use. The term the industrial revolution was not coined until one hundred years after the process could, in retrospect, be seen to have started. History is likely to make the same observation about the ecological revolution through which we are currently living.”