The Unsustainability and Origins of Socioeconomic Increase
Published by Mark S. Meritt January 5th, 2001 in Documentary Motion Picture Features, Documentary Motion Picture Series, Books, Papers, Other Projects, LibraryTags: anthropology, Books, business and livelihood, cultural evolution, Documentary Motion Picture Features, Documentary Motion Picture Series, ecology, economics, evolution, library, Other Projects, Papers, paradigm shift, science general, sociology, systems sciences.
This paper was written as a masters thesis for the City University of New York Graduate Center’s Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program. It describes the unsustainable nature of our civilization and suggests ways to achieve sustainability. It won the Liberal Studies department’s first Annual Thesis Prize for best departmental thesis.
Read the The Unsustainability and Origins of Socioeconomic Increase .pdf.
Read in Portuguese!
Janos Biro took it upon himself to create an abridged Portuguese translation of this thesis so that it would be available for a Brazilian audience.
Based on…
This thesis was in great part based on the following papers, written earlier in Mark’s masters studies:
- Population Ecology and People, by Mark S. Meritt — December 14, 1999
- The Social Full House: Circumscription and the Evitability of Complexity, by Mark S. Meritt — May 18, 1999
- Sociobiology and the Nature/Nurture Debates, by Mark S. Meritt — December 31, 1999
- The Unsustainability of Economic Growth, by Mark S. Meritt — May 25, 2000
Spinoffs
From the completion of the thesis until the birth of his daughter in mid-2003, Mark did a large amount of additional research as part of developing a general audience book which expands on this paper. A full book proposal was completed though without accompanying sample chapters. For this reason and other more dramatic ones (described in Mark’s essay Forcing the Balance), the book project has not yet made further progress since the writing of the proposal. Mark sincerely hopes that the right circumstances will evolve one day to allow him to write the book, as well as to develop companion projects in other media, most notably a website and a documentary motion picture.
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7 Responses to “The Unsustainability and Origins of Socioeconomic Increase”
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I’m both astounded and delighted. Astounded at your ability to integrate the output of so many different minds into a seamless whole. Delighted that someone has undertaken a task I would be most unwilling to undertake myself–and probably in fact incapable of undertaking. Cheetahs run fast, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they would do well in the Kentucky Derby. Incredibly, you’ve made more sense of my ideas than I knew was there! (And negotiated your way around all the pitfalls that suck in so many of my readers.) There are only two or three people of whom I can say with confidence, “This person gets what I’m saying”–and this thesis proves you’re one of them… Congratulations!
Merely citing your paper does not do justice to the help that it has been to me. Whenever I get stuck trying to express an idea I open up your PDF, search for a few words, and there it is. I recognize the amount of work and talent that went into this thesis. It should be a book and, in book form or not, required reading for many fields of study.
Let me tell you that I have made a Portuguese short version of your thesis so some people from Brasil could read it. I also posted it in my Daniel Quinn Yahoo Group, Uma Nova Cultura, but unfortunately very few people here know about you or Daniel Quinn. Your work is a great source of inspiration to me.
After reading your masters thesis, I am very impressed. Nowhere else yet have I seen anything that comes as close to explaining our situation in this world, including Daniel Quinn’s own writings. In just one paper, you’ve managed to fill countless gaps in my understanding of this message, sharpening my mosaic by a full order of magnitude. Thank you. I eagerly await your “general audience book”… A book written to be as fidelic and still comprehensible to a wide audience would be a very valuable tool for helping our culture to shift from its current self-destructive paradigm to a sustainable — and presumably much more comfortable — one.