“Living systems, and by logical extension economic systems, are negentropic engines — they consume free energy to build and maintain structure and, Gibbs free energy, to do work rather than dissipate into equilibrium or maximum entropy. Both free energy and Gibbs free energy are captured from the local environment in obeisance to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Total entropy of the living system and its local environment increases. As the living system, or legitimately constructed to utilize structures that minimize entropy, economic system, moves further from maximum entropy, the local systems environment moves closer to it by more than the living system moves away.”
JMF and Claude brainstorm after Schrödinger, “What is Life?”
The commons as a legitimate economic system must operate locally to distance that system from equilibrium by reducing entropy while increasing entropy by a greater amount within a larger frame of reference.
A commons is an economy organized around a shared resource, such as a pasture or an oasis. The novel aspect of this work is to consider aggregate demand, stated in common currency, another commons, as a shared resource, a commons, around which an economy has been built.
The clearest notion of that relationship of countering entropy while obeying the Second Law of Thermodynamics is expressed in finance and law as the role of a fiduciary steward, in this case, of a commons. In the case of aggregate demand as commons such a fiduciary steward would manage the commons to move it farther from equilibrium including assessing damages consequent to misuse of it resulting in degradation. It is essential to the perspective of a negentropy institution and by implication the steward of such an institution that it does not obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics consciously. The Law conserves the thermodynamic situation without intent by any actor.
Do Well and Be Well.
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