Kolkata, India (August 13, 2015) Sustainability and its various social derivatives have been exercising the minds and capabilities of political scientists, practising politicians, social scientists and economists, struggling to find an adequate response to the ongoing troubled times. Systemic crises such as the current socio-economic-environmental upheaval threatening to engulf humanity and its very existence, call for serious introspection by all sections of society: of the common man, scientist, entrepreneur and law-maker. Without an adequate scientific awareness of holistic-sustainability to promote, advance and inspire sustainable development – understood as “a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are all in harmony and enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations” – among scientists, academics and the mainstream, the ongoing crisis is unlikely to be satisfactorily addressed.
In the candid appraisal of Christine Lagarde, Managing Director IMF, “In the past, economists have underestimated the importance of inequality. They have focused on economic growth, on the size of the pie rather than its distribution. Today, we are more keenly aware of the damage done by inequality. Put simply, a severely skewed income distribution harms the pace and sustainability of growth over the longer term. It leads to an economy of exclusion, and a wasteland of discarded potential.” Without the scientific foundation of nonlinear self-organising emergence, sustainability is unlikely to emerge from the ideological haze imposed by politicians, bureaucrats, and entrepreneurs, into mainstream quantitative science. Today, the Gini coefficient – a common measure of income inequality of 0 when everybody has equal income and 1 when all goes to a single person – with an average of 0.315 in OECD countries, exceeding 0.4 in the United States and approaching 0.5 in Chile and Mexico, is far too untenable for cosmetic niceties. The Working Report Understanding Sustainability. Bio-Economic, Entropic-Exergic, Self-Organizing Emergence of Life is an unorthodox diagnostic endeavour of distribution of the pie as a necessary complement of its size, with the additional potential of stimulating a much-needed solution. Failure to adapt cooperative entropic distribution to competitive exergic growth inevitably leads to the tragedy of malignant-boom provoking heat-bust death.
ICH solicits and invites active participation from scientists, entrepreneurs and individuals troubled and distressed at the current breakdown of human relations and social etiquette by a “more is better” portfolio of limitless desires and wants leading, according to some, onto post-humanism. ICH looks forward to fulfilling its mandate by responding to questions, comments, expressions of interest, collaborative proposals and requests for complimentary copies of Understanding made to the ICH press contact below:
Press Contact for ICH:
Professor Ashok Sengupta,
Founder-Director, Institute for Complex Holism Kolkata
Telephone: 91-33-25915729, E-Mail: osegu@iitk.ac.in.
About ICH:
The Institute for Complex Holism Kolkata is designed as an international hub of research on complexity-holism-sustainability. This “world-class residential research centre mandated to critical inquiry in the foundation of Competition-Cooperation-Adaptation and Sustainability” seeks to adopt holistic sustainability – a third variant beyond the weak and strong types – as the paradigm governing environment-society-economy complex in which limit cycles and periodic points, born of its natural adversarial give-and-take dynamics, permit a richer homeostasis than the traditional non-declining social welfare/utility criterion; (holistic) sustainability “is the art of healthy, enduring living from the past into the future, choreographed by competition-cooperation-adaptation of the self-organizing, emergent present”.