I keep digging. I keep revising that manuscript of mine – ‘Climbing the right hill – an evolutionary approach to the European market of electricity’ – in order to resubmit it to Applied Energy. Some of my readers might become slightly fed up with that thread. C’mon, man! How long do you mean to work on that revision? It is just an article! Yes, it is just an article, and I have that thing in me, those three mental characters: the curious ape, the happy bulldog, and the austere monk. The ape is curious, and it almost instinctively reaches for interesting things. My internal bulldog just loves digging out tasty pieces and biting into bones. The austere monk in me observes the intellectual mess, which the ape and the bulldog make together, and then he takes that big Ockham’s razor, from the recesses of his robe, and starts cutting bullshit out. When the three of those start dancing around a topic, it is a long path to follow, believe me.

In this update, I intend to structure the theoretical background of my paper. First, I restate the essential point of my own research, which I need and want to position in relation to other people’s views and research. I claim that energy-related policies, including those with environmental edge, should assume that whatever we do with energy, as a civilisation, is a by-product of actions purposefully oriented on other types of outcomes. Metaphorically, when I claim that a society should take the shift towards renewable energies as its chief goal, and take everything else as instrumental, is like saying that the chief goal of an individual should be to keep their blood sugar firmly at 80,00, whatever happens. What’s the best way to achieving it? Putting yourself in a clinic, under permanent intravenous nutrition, and stop experimenting with that thing people call ‘food’, ‘activity’, ‘important things to do’. Anyone wants to do it? Hardly anyone, I guess. The right level of blood sugar can be approximately achieved as balanced outcome of a proper lifestyle, and can serve as a gauge of whether our actual lifestyle is healthy.

Coming back from my nutritional metaphor to energy-related policies, there is no historical evidence that any human society has ever achieved any important change regarding the production of energy or its consumption, by explicitly stating ‘From now on, we want better energy management’. The biggest known shifts in our energy base happened as by-products of changes oriented on something else. In Europe, my home continent, we had three big changes. First, way back in the day, like starting from the 13^th century, we harnessed the power of wind and that of water in, respectively, windmills and watermills. That served to provide kinetic energy to grind cereals into flour, which, in turn, served to feed a growing urban population. Windmills and watermills brought with them a silent revolution, which we are still wrapping our minds around. By the end of the 19^th century, we started a massive shift towards fossil fuels. Why? Because we expected to drive Ferraris around, one day in the future? Not really. We just went terribly short on wood. People who claim that Europe should recreate its ‘ancestral’ forests deliberately ignore the fact that hardly anyone today knows what those ancestral forests should look like. Virtually all the forests we have today come from massive replantation which took place starting from the beginning of the 20^th century. Yes, we have a bunch of 400-year-old oaks across the continent, but I dare reminding that one oak is not exactly a forest.

The civilisational change which I think is going on now, in our human civilisation, is the readjustment of social roles, and of the ways we create new social roles, in the presence of a radical demographic change: unprecedently high headcount of population, accompanied by just as unprecedently low rate of demographic growth. For hundreds of years, our civilisation has been evolving as two concurrent factories: the factory of food in the countryside, and the factory of new social roles in cities. Food comes the best when the headcount of humans immediately around is a low constant, and new social roles burgeon the best when humans interact abundantly, and therefore when they are tightly packed together in a limited space. The basic idea of our civilisation is to put most of the absolute demographic growth into cities and let ourselves invent new ways of being useful to each other, whilst keeping rural land as productive as possible.

That thing had worked for centuries. It had worked for humanity that had been relatively small in relation to available space and had been growing quickly into that space. That idea of separating the production of food from the creation of social roles and institutions was adapted precisely to that demographic pattern, which you can still find vestiges of in some developing countries, as well as in emerging markets, with urban population several dozens of times denser than the rural one, and cities that look like something effervescent. These cities grow bubbles out of themselves, and those bubbles burst just as quickly. My own trip to China showed me how cities can be truly alive, with layers and bubbles inside them. One is tempted to say these cities are something abnormal, as compared to the orderly, demographically balanced urban entities in developed countries. Still, historically, this is what cities are supposed to look like.

Now, something is changing. There is more of us on the planet than it has ever been but, at the same time, we experience unprecedently low rate of demographic growth. Whilst we apparently still manage to keep total urban land on the planet at a constant level (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.TOTL.UR.K2 ), we struggle with keeping the surface of agricultural land up to our needs (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.ZS ). As in any system tilted out of balance, weird local phenomena start occurring, and the basic metrics pertinent to the production and consumption of energy show an interesting pattern. When I look at the percentage participation of renewable sources in the total consumption of energy (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.FEC.RNEW.ZS ), I see a bumpy cycle which looks like learning with experimentation. When I narrow down to the participation of renewables in the total consumption of electricity ( https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.RNEW.ZS), what I see is a more pronounced trend upwards, with visible past experimentation. The use of nuclear power to generate electricity (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.NUCL.ZS) looks like a long-run experiment, which now is in its phase of winding down.

Now, two important trends come into my focus. Energy efficiency, defined as average real output per unit of energy use (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP.KD) quite unequivocal a trend upwards. Someone could say ‘Cool, we purposefully make ourselves energy efficient’. Still, when we care to have a look at the coefficient of energy consumed per person per year (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE), a strong trend upwards appears, with some deep bumps in the past. When I put those two trends back to back, I conclude that what we really max out on is the real output of goods and services in our civilisation, and energy efficiency is just a means to that end.

It is a good moment to puncture an intellectual balloon. I can frequently see and hear people argue that maximizing real output, in any social entity or context, is a manifestation of stupid, baseless greed and blindness to the truly important stuff. Still, please consider the following line of logic. We, humans, interact with the natural environment, and interact with each other.  When we interact with each other a lot, in highly dense networks of social relations, we reinforce each other’s learning, and start spinning the wheel of innovation and technological change. Abundant interaction with each other gives us new ideas for interacting with the natural environment.

Cities have peculiar properties. Firstly, by creating new social roles through intense social interaction, they create new products and services, and therefore new markets, connected in chains of value added. This is how the real output of goods and services in a society becomes a complex, multi-layered network of technologies, and this is how social structures become self-propelling businesses. The more complexity in social roles is created, the more products and services emerge, which brings the development in greater a number of markets. That, in turn, gives greater a real output, greater income per person, which incentivizes to create new social roles etc. This how social complexity creates the phenomenon called economic growth.

The phenomenon of economic growth, thus the quantitative growth in complex, networked technologies which emerge in relatively dense human settlements, has a few peculiar properties. You can’t see it, you can’t touch it, and yet you can immediately feel when its pace changes. Economic growth is among the most abstract concepts of social sciences, and yet living in a society with real economic growth at 5% per annum is like a different galaxy when compared to living in a place where real economic growth is actually a recession of -5%. The arithmetical difference is just 10 percentage points, around the top of something underlying which makes the base of 1. Still, lives in those two contexts are completely different. At +5% in real economic growth, starting a new business is generally a sensible idea, provided you have it nailed down with a business plan. At – 5% a year, i.e. in recession, the same business plan can be an elaborate way of committing economic and financial suicide. At +5%, political elections are usually won by people who just sell you the standard political bullshit, like ‘I will make your lives better’ claimed by a heavily indebted alcoholic with no real career of their own. At -5%, politics start being haunted by those sinister characters, who look and sound like evil spirits from our dreams and claim they ‘will restore order and social justice’.

The society which we consider today as normal is a society of positive real economic growth. All the institutions we are used to, such as healthcare systems, internal security, public administration, education – all that stuff works at least acceptably smoothly when complex, networked technologies of our society have demonstrable capacity to increase their real economic output. That ‘normal’ state of society is closely connected to the factories of social roles which we commonly call ‘cities’. Real economic growth happens when the amount of new social roles – fabricated through intense interactions between densely packed humans – is enough for the new humans coming around. Being professionally active means having a social role solid enough to participate in the redistribution of value added created in complex technological networks. It is both formal science and sort of accumulated wisdom in governance that we’d better have most of the adult, able bodied people in that state of professional activity. A small fringe of professionally inactive people is somehow healthy a margin of human energy free to be professionally activated, and when I say ‘small’, it is like no more than 5% of the adult population. Anything above becomes both a burden and a disruption to social cohesion. Too big a percentage of people with no clear, working social roles makes it increasingly difficult to make social interactions sufficiently abundant and complex to create enough new social roles for new people. This is why governments of this world attach keen importance to the accurate measurement of the phenomenon quantified as ‘unemployment’.  

Those complex networks of technologies in our societies, which have the capacity to create social roles and generate economic growth, work their work properly when we can transact about them, i.e. when we have working markets for the final economic goods produced with those technologies, and for intermediate economic goods produced for them. It is as if the whole thing worked when we can buy and sell things. I was born in 1968, in a communist country, namely Poland, and I can tell you that in the absence of markets the whole mechanism just jams, progressively to a halt. Yes, markets are messy and capricious, and transactional prices can easily get out of hand, creating inflation, and yet markets give those little local incentives needed to get the most of human social roles. In the communist Poland, I remember people doing really strange things, like hoarding massive inventories of refrigerators or women’s underwear, just to create some speculative spin in an ad hoc, semi-legal or completely illegal market. It looks as if people needed to market and transact for real, amidst the theoretically perfectly planned society.   

Anyway, economic growth is observable through big sets of transactions in product markets, and those transactions have two attributes: quantities and prices AKA Q an P. It is like Q*P = ∑q_i*p_i. When I have – well, when we have – that complex network of technologies functionally connected to a factory of social roles for new humans, that thing makes ∑q_i*p_i, thus a lot of local transactions with quantities q_i, at prices p_i. The economic growth I have been so vocal about in the last few paragraphs is the real growth, i.e. in quantity Q = ∑q_i. On the long run, what I am interested in, and my government is interested in, is to reasonably max out on ∆ Q = ∆∑q_i. Quantities change slowly and quite predictably, whilst prices tend to change quickly and, mostly on the short term, chaotically. Measuring accurately real economic growth involving kicking the ‘*p_i’ component out of the equation and extracting just ∆ Q = ∆∑q_i. Question: why bothering with the observation of Q*P = ∑q_i*p_i when the real thing we need is just ∆ Q = ∆∑q_i? Answer: because there is no other way. Complex networks of technologies produce economic growth by creating increasing diversity in social roles in concurrence with increasing diversity in products and their respective markets. No genius has come up, so far, with a method to add up, directly, the volume of visits in hairdresser’s salons with the volume of electric vehicles made, and all that with the volume of energy consumed.

I have ventured myself far from the disciplined logic of revision in my paper, for resubmitting it. The logical flow required in this respect by Applied Energy is the following: introduction first, method and material next, theory follows, and calculations come after. The literature which I refer to in my writing needs to have two dimensions: longitudinal and lateral. Laterally, I divide other people’s publications into three basic groups: a) standpoints which I argue with b) methods and assumptions which I agree with and use to support my own reasoning, and c) viewpoints which sort of go elsewhere, and can be interesting openings into something even different from what I discuss. Longitudinally, the literature I cite needs, in the first place, to open up on the main points of my paper. This is ‘Introduction’. Publications which I cite here need to point at the utility of developing the line of research which I develop. They need to convey strong, general claims which sort of set my landmarks.

The section titled ‘Theory’ is supposed to provide the fine referencing of my method, so as to both support the logic thereof, and to open up on the detailed calculations I develop in the following section. Literature which I bring forth here should contain specific developments, both factual and methodological, something like a conceptual cobweb. In other words, ‘Introduction’ should be provocative, whilst ‘Theory’ transforms provocation into a structure.

Among the recent literature I am passing in review, three papers come forth as provocative enough for me to discuss them in the introduction of my article:  Andreoni 2020[1], Koponen & Le Net 2021[2]. The first of the three on that list, namely the paper by professor Valeria Andreoni, well in the mainstream of the MuSIASEM methodology (Multi-scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism), sets an important line of theoretical debate, namely the arguable imperative to focus energy-related policies, and economic policies in general, on two outcomes, namely on maximizing energy efficiency (i.e. maximizing the amount of real output per unit of energy consumption), and on minimizing cross sectional differences between countries as regards energy efficiency. Both postulates are based on the assumption that energy efficiency of national economies corresponds to the metabolic efficiency of living organisms, and that maxing out on both is an objective evolutionary purpose in both cases. My method has the same general foundations as MuSIASEM. I claim that societies can be studied similarly to living organisms.

At that point, I diverge from the MuSIASEM framework: instead of focusing on the metabolism of such organically approached societies, I pay attention to their collective cognitive processes, their collective intelligence. I claim that human societies are collectively intelligent structures, which learn by experimenting with many alternative versions of themselves whilst staying structurally coherent. From that assumption, I derive two further claims. Firstly, if we reduce disparities between countries with respect to any important attribute of theirs, including energy efficiency, we kick out of the game a lot of opportunities for future learning: the ‘many alternative versions’ part of the process is no more there. Secondly, I claim there is no such thing as objective evolutionary purpose, would it be maximizing energy efficiency or anything else. Evolution has no purpose; it just has the mechanism of selection by replication. Replication of humans is proven to happen the most favourably when we collectively learn fast and make a civilisation out of that learning.

Therefore, whilst having no objective evolutionary purpose, human societies have objective orientations: we collectively attempt to optimize some specific outcomes, which have the attribute to organize our collective learning the most efficiently, in a predictable cycle of, respectively, episodes marked with large errors in adjustment, and those displaying much smaller errors in that respect.

From that theoretical cleavage between my method and the postulates of the MuSIASEM framework, I derive two practical claims as regards economic policies, especially as regards environmentally friendly energy systems. Looking for homogeneity between countries is a road to nowhere, for one. Expecting that human societies will purposefully strive to maximize their overall energy efficiency is unrealistic a goal, and therefore it is a harmful assumption in the presence of serious challenges connected to climate change, for two. Public policies should explicitly aim for disparity of outcomes in technological race, and the race should be oriented on outcomes which are being objectively pursued by human societies.

Whilst disagreeing with professor Valeria Andreoni on principles, I find her empirical findings highly interesting. Rapid economic change, especially the kind of change associated with crises, seems to correlate with deepening disparities between countries in terms of energy efficiency. In other words, when large economic systems need to adjust hard and fast, they sort of play their individual games separately as regards energy efficiency. Rapid economic adjustment under constraint is conducive to creating a large discrepancy of alternative states in what energy efficiency can possibly be, in the context of other socio-economic outcomes, and, therefore, more material is there for learning collectively by experimenting with many alternative versions of ourselves.

Against that theoretical sketch, I place the second paper which I judge worth to introduce with: Koponen, K., & Le Net, E. (2021): Towards robust renewable energy investment decisions at the territorial level. Applied Energy, 287, 116552.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2021.116552 . I chose this one because it shows a method very similar to mine: the authors build a simulative model in Excel, where they create m = 5000 alternative futures for a networked energy system aiming at optimizing 5 performance metrics. The model was based on actual empirical data as for those variables, and the ‘alternative futures’ are, in other words, 5000 alternative states of the same system. Outcomes are gauged with the so-called regret analysis, where the relative performance in a specific outcome is measured as the residual difference between its local value, and, respectively, its general minimum or maximum, depending on whether the given metric is something we strive to maximize (e.g. capacity), or to minimize (e.g. GHG).

I can generalize on the method presented by Koponen and Le Net, and assume that any given state of society can be studied as one among many alternative states of said society, and the future depends very largely on how this society will navigate through the largely uncharted waters of itself being in many alternative states. Navigators need a star in the sky, to find their North, and so do societies. Koponen and Le Net simulate civilizational navigation under the constraint of four stars, namely the cost of CO2, the cost of electricity, the cost of natural gas, and the cost of biomass. I generalize and say that experimentation with alternative versions of us being collectively intelligent can be oriented on optimizing many alternative Norths, and the kind of North we will most likely pursue is the kind which allows us to learn efficiently how to go from one alternative future to another.

Good. This is my ‘Introduction’. It sets the tone for the method I present in the subsequent section, and the method opens up on the fine details of theory.

[1] Andreoni, V. (2020). The energy metabolism of countries: Energy efficiency and use in the period that followed the global financial crisis. Energy Policy, 139, 111304. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2020.111304

[2] Koponen, K., & Le Net, E. (2021): Towards robust renewable energy investment decisions at the territorial level. Applied Energy, 287, 116552.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2021.116552  .

I think I have moved forward in the process of revising my manuscript ‘Climbing the right hill – an evolutionary approach to the European market of electricity’, as a resubmission Applied Energy . A little digression: as I provide, each time, a link to the original form of that manuscript, my readers can compare the changes I develop on, in those updates, with the initial flow of logic.

I like discussing important things in reverse order. I like starting from what apparently is the end and the bottom line of thinking. From there, I go forward by going back, sort of. In an article, the end is the conclusion, possibly summarized in 5 ÷ 6 bullet points and optionally coming together with a graphical abstract. I conclude this specific piece of research by claiming that energy-oriented policies, e.g. those oriented on developing renewable sources, could gain in efficiency by being: a) national rather than continental or global b) explicitly oriented on optimizing the country’s terms of trade in global supply chains c) just as explicitly oriented on the development of some specific types of jobs whilst purposefully winding down other types thereof.

I give twofold a base for that claim. Firstly, I have that stylized general observation about energy-oriented policies: globally or continentally calibrated policies, such as, for example, the now famous Paris Climate Agreement, work so slow and with so much friction that they become ineffective for any practical purpose, whilst country-level policies are much more efficient in the sense that one can see a real transition from point A to point B. Secondly, my own research – which I present in this article under revision – brings evidence that national social structures orient themselves on optimizing their terms of trade and their job markets in priority, whilst treating the energy-related issues as instrumental. That specific collective orientation seems, in turn, to have its source in the capacity of human social structures to develop a strongly cyclical, predictable pattern of collective learning precisely in relation to the terms of trade, and to the job market, whilst collective learning oriented on other measurable variables, inclusive of those pertinent to energy management, is much less predictable.

That general conclusion is based on quantitative results of my empirical research, which brings forth 4 quantitative variables – price index in exports (PL_X), average hours worked per person per year (AVH), the share of labour compensation in Gross National Income (LABSH), and the coefficient of human capital (HC – average years of schooling per person) – out of a total scope of 49 observables, as somehow privileged collective outcomes marked with precisely that recurrent, predictable pattern of learning.

The privileged position of those specific variables, against the others, manifests theoretically as their capacity to produce simulated social realities much more similar to the empirically observable state thereof than simulated realities based on other variables, whilst producing a strongly cyclical series of local residual errors in approximating said empirically observable state.

The method which allowed to produce those results generates simulated social realities with the use of artificial neural networks. Two types of networks are used to generate two types of simulation. One is a neural network which optimizes a specific empirical variable as its output, whilst using the remaining empirical variables as instrumental input. I call that network ‘procedure of learning by orientation’. The other type of network uses the same empirical variable as its optimizable output and replaces the vector of other empirical variables with a vector of hypothetical probabilities, corresponding to just as hypothetical social roles, in the presence of a random disturbance factor. I label this network as ‘learning procedure by pacing’.

The procedure of learning by orientation produces as many alternative sets of numerical values as there are variables in the original empirical dataset X used in research. In this case, it was a set made of n = 49 variables, and thus 49 alternative sets S_i are created. Each alternative set S_i consists of values transformed by the corresponding neural network from the original empirical ones. Both the original dataset X and the n = 49 transformations S_i thereof can be characterized, mathematically, with their respective vectors of mean expected values. Euclidean distances between those vectors are informative about the mathematical similarity between the corresponding sets.

Therefore, learning by orientation produces n = 49 simulations S_i of the actual social reality represented in the set X, when each such simulation is biased towards optimizing one particular variable ‘i’ from among the n = 49 variables studied, and each such simulation displays a measurable Euclidean similarity to the actual social reality studied. My own experience in applying this specific procedure is that a few simulations S_i, namely those pegged on optimizing four variables – price index in exports [S_i(PL_X)], average hours worked per person per year [S_i[AVH)], the share of labour compensation in Gross National Income [S_i(LABSH)], and the coefficient of human capital [S_i(HC) – average years of schooling per person] – display much closer Euclidean a distance to the actual reality X than any other simulation. Much closer means closer by orders of magnitude, by the way. The difference is visible.

The procedure of learning by pacing produces n = 49 simulations as well, yet these simulations are not exactly transformations of the original dataset X. In this case, simulated realities are strictly simulated, i.e. they are hypothetical states from the very beginning, and individual variables from the set X serve as the basis for setting a trajectory of transformation for those hypothetical states. Each such hypothetical state is a matrix of probabilities, associated with two sets of social roles: active and dormant. Active social roles are being endorsed by individuals in that hypothetical society and their baseline, initial probabilities are random, non-null values. Dormant social roles are something like a formalized prospect for immediate social change, and their initial probabilities are null.

This specific neural network produces new hypothetical states in two concurrent ways: typical neural activation, and random disturbance. In the logical structure of the network, random disturbance occurs before neural activation, and thus I am describing details of the former in the first place. Random disturbance is a hypothetical variable, separate from probabilities associated with social roles. It is a random value 0 < d < 1, associated with a threshold of significance d*. When d > d*, d becomes something like an additional error, fed forward into the network, i.e. impacting the next experimental round performed in the process of learning.

In the procedure of learning by pacing, neural activation is triggered by aggregating partial probabilities, associated with social roles, and possibly pre-modified by the random disturbance, through the operation of weighed average of the type ∑ f_j(p_i, X(i,j), d_j, e_j-1,), where f_j is the function of neural activation in the j-th experimental round of learning, p_i is the probability associated with the i-th social role, X(i,j) is the random weight of p_i in the j-th experimental round, d_j stands for random disturbance specific to that experimental round, and e_j-1 is residual error fed forward from the previous experimental round j-1.

Now, just to be clear: there is a mathematical difference, in that logical structure, between random disturbance d_j, and the random weight X(i,j). The former is specific to a given experimental round, but general across all the component probabilities in that round. If you want, d_i is like an earthquake, momentarily shaking the entire network, and is supposed to represent the fact that social reality just never behaves as planned. This is the grain of chaos in that mathematical order. On the other hand, X(i,j) is a strictly formal factor in the neural activation function, and its only job is to allow experimenting with data.

Wrapping it partially up, the whole method I use in this article revolves around the working hypothesis that a given set of empirical data, which I am working with, represents collectively intelligent learning, where human social structures collectively experiment with many alternative versions of themselves and select those versions which offer the most desirable states in a few specific variables. I call these variables ‘collective orientations’ and I further develop that hypothesis by claiming that collective orientations have that privileged position because they allow a specific type of collective learning, strongly cyclical, with large amplitude of residual error.

In both procedures of learning, i.e. in orientation, and in pacing, I introduce an additional component, namely that of self-observed internal coherence. The basic idea is that a social structure is a structure because the functional connections between categories of phenomena are partly independent from the exact local content of those categories. People remain in predictable functional connections to their Tesla cars, whatever exact person and exact car we are talking about. In my method, and, as a matter of fact, in any quantitative method, variables are phenomenological categories, whilst the local values of those variables inform about the local content to find in respective categories. My idea is that mathematical distance between values represents temporary coherence between the phenomenological categories behind the corresponding variables. I use the Euclidean distance of the type E = [(a – b)²]^0,5 as the most elementary measure of mathematical distance. The exact calculation I do is the average Euclidean distance that each i-th variable in the set of n variables keeps from each l-th variable among the remaining k = n – 1 variables, in the same experimental round j. Mathematically, it goes like: avgE = { ∑[(x_i – x_l)²]^0,5 }/k. When I use avgE as internally generated input in a neural network, I use the information about internal coherence as meta-data in the process of learning.

Of course, someone could ask what the point is of measuring local Euclidean distance between, for example, annual consumption of energy per capita and the average number of hours worked annually per capita, thus between kilograms of oil equivalent and hours. Isn’t it measuring the distance between apples and oranges? Well, yes, it is, and when you run a grocery store, knowing the coherence between your apples and your oranges can come handy, for one. In a neural network, variables are standardized, usually over their respective maximums, and therefore both apples and oranges are measured on the same scale, for two.       

The method needs to be rooted in theory, which has two levels: general and subject-specific. At the general level, I need acceptably solid theoretical basis for positing the working hypothesis, as phrased out in the preceding paragraph, to any given set of empirical, socio-economic data. Subject-specific theory is supposed to allow interpreting the results of empirical research as conducted according to the above-discussed method.

General theory revolves around four core concepts, namely those of: intelligent structure, chain of states, collective orientation, and social roles as mirroring phenomena for quantitative socio-economic variables. Subject-specific theory, on the other hand, is pertinent to the general issue of energy-related policies, and to their currently most tangible manifestation, i.e., to environmentally friendly sources of energy.

The theoretical concept of intelligent structure, such as I use it in my research, is mostly based on another concept, known from evolutionary biology, namely that of adaptive walk in rugged landscape, combined with the phenomenon of tacit coordination. We, humans, do things together without being fully aware we are doing them together or even whilst thinking we oppose each other (e.g. Kuroda & Kameda 2019[1]). capacity for social evolutionary tinkering (Jacob 1977[2]) through tacit coordination, such that the given society displays social change akin to an adaptive walk in rugged landscape (Kauffman & Levin 1987[3]; Kauffman 1993[4]; Nahum et al. 2015[5]).

Each distinct state of the given society (e.g. different countries in the same time or different moments in time as regards the same country) is interpreted as a vector of observable properties, and each empirical instance of that vector is a 1-mutation-neighbour to at least one other instance. All the instances form a space of social entities. In the presence of external stressor, each such mutation (each entity) displays a given fitness to achieve the optimal state, regarding the stressor in question, and therefore the whole set of social entities yields a complex vector of fitness to cope with the stressor.

The assumption of collective intelligence means that each social entity is able to observe itself as well as other entities, so as to produce social adaptation for achieving optimal fitness. Social change is an adaptive walk, i.e. a set of local experiments, observable to each other and able to learn from each other’s observed fitness. The resulting path of social change is by definition uneven, whence the expression ‘adaptive walk in rugged landscape’. There is a strong argument that such adaptive walks occur at a pace proportional to the complexity of social entities involved. The greater the number of characteristics involved, the greater the number of epistatic interactions between them, and the more experiments it takes to have everything more or less aligned for coping with a stressor.

Somehow concurrently to the evolutionary theory, another angle of approach seems interesting, for solidifying theoretical grounds to my method: the swarm theory (e.g. Wood & Thompson 2021[6]; Li et al. 2021[7]). Swarm learning consists in shifting between different levels of behavioural coupling between individuals. When we know for sure we have everything nicely figured out, we coordinate, between individuals, by fixed rituals or by strongly correlated mutual reaction. As we have more and more doubts whether the reality which we think we are so well adapted to is the reality actually out there, we start loosening the bonds of behavioural coupling, passing through weakening correlation, and all the way up to random concurrence. That unbundling of social coordination allows incorporating new behavioural patterns into individual social roles, and then learning how to coordinate as regards that new stuff.   

As the concept of intelligent structure seems to have a decent theoretical base, the next question is: how the hell can I represent it mathematically? I guess that a structure is a set of connections inside a complex state, where complexity is as a collection of different variables. I think that the best mathematical construct which fits that bill is that of imperfect Markov chains (e.g. Berghout & Verbitskiy 2021[8]): there is a state of reality X_n = {x₁, x₂, …, x_n}, which we cannot observe directly, whilst there is a set of observables {Y_n} such that Y_n = π (X_n), the π being a coding map of X_n. We can observe through the lens of Y_n. That quite contemporary theory by Berghout and Verbitskyi sends to an older one, namely to the theory of g-measures (e.g. Keane 1972[9]), and all that falls into an even broader category of ergodic theory, which is the theory of what happens to complex systems when they are allowed to run for a long time. Yes, when we wonder what kind of adult our kids will grow up into, this is ergodic theory.

The adaptive walk of a human society in the rugged landscape of whatever challenges they face can be represented as a mathematical chain of complex states, and each such state is essentially a matrix: numbers in a structure. In the context of intelligent structures and their adaptive walks, it can be hypothesized that ergodic changes in the long-going, complex stuff about what humans do together happen with a pattern and are far from being random. There is a currently ongoing, conceptual carryover from biology to social sciences, under the general concept of evolutionary trajectory (Turchin et al. 2018[10]; Shafique et al. 2020[11]). That concept of evolutionary trajectory can be combined with the idea that our human culture pays particular attention to phenomena which make valuable outcomes, such as presented, for example, in the Interface Theory of Perception (Hoffman et al. 2015[12], Fields et al. 2018[13]). Those two theories taken together allow hypothesising that, as we collectively learn by experimenting with many alternative versions of our societies, we systematically privilege those particular experiments where specific social outcomes are being optimized. In other words, we can have objectively existing, collective ethical values and collective praxeological goals, without even knowing we pursue them.

The last field of general theory I need to ground in literature is the idea of representing the state of a society as a vector of probabilities associated with social roles. This is probably the wobbliest theoretical boat among all those which I want to have some footing in. Yes, social sciences have developed that strong intuition that humans in society form and endorse social roles, which allows productive coordination. As Max Weber wrote in his book ‘Economy and Society’: “But for the subjective interpretation of action in sociological work these collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action”. The same intuition is to find in Talcott Parsons’ ‘Social system’, e.g. in Chapter VI, titled ‘The Learning of Social Role-Expectations and the Mechanisms of 138 Socialization of Motivation’: “An established state of a social system is a process of complementary interaction of two or more individual actors in which each conforms with the expectations of the other(’s) in such a way that alter’s reactions to ego’s actions are positive sanctions which serve to reinforce his given need-dispositions and thus to fulfill his given expectations. This stabilized or equilibrated interaction process is the fundamental point of reference for all dynamic motivational analysis of social process. […] Every society then has the mechanisms which have been called situational specifications of role-orientations and which operate through secondary identifications and imitation. Through them are learned the specific role-values and symbol-systems of that particular society or sub-system of it, the level of expectations which are to be concretely implemented in action in the actual role”.

Those theoretical foundations laid, the further we go, the more emotions awaken as the concept of social role gets included in scientific research. I have encountered views, (e.g. Schneider & Bos 2019[14]) that social roles, whilst being real, are a mechanism of oppression rather than social development. On the other hand, it can be assumed that in the presence of demographic growth, when each consecutive generation brings greater a number of people than the previous one, we need new social roles. That, in turn, allows developing new technologies, instrumental to performing these roles (e.g. Gil-Hernández et al. 2017[15]).

Now, I pass to the subject-specific, theoretical background of my method. I think that the closest cousin to my method, which I can find in recently published literature, is the MuSIASEM framework, where the acronym, deliberately weird, I guess, stands for ‘Multi-scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism’. This is a whole stream of research, where human societies are studied as giant organisms, and the ways we, humans, make and use energy, is studied as a metabolic function of those giant bodies. The central assumption of the MuSIASEM methodology is that metabolic systems survive and evolve by maxing out on energy efficiency. The best metabolism for an economic system is the most energy-efficient one, which means the greatest possible amount of real output per unit of energy consumption. In terms of practical metrics, we talk about GDP per kg of oil equivalent in energy, or, conversely, about the kilograms of oil equivalent needed to produce one unit (e.g. $1 bln) of GDP. You can consult Andreoni 2020[16], Al-Tamimi & Al-Ghamdi 2020[17] or Velasco-Fernández et al. 2020[18], as some of the most recent examples of MuSIASEM being applied in empirical research.

This approach is strongly evolutionary. It assumes that any given human society can be in many different, achievable states, each state displaying a different energy efficiency. The specific state which yields the most real output per unit of energy consumed is the most efficient metabolism available to that society at the moment, and, logically, should be the short-term evolutionary target. Here, I dare disagreeing fundamentally. In nature, there is no such thing as evolutionary targets. Evolution happens by successful replication. The catalogue of living organisms which we have around, today, are those which temporarily are the best at replicating themselves, and not necessarily those endowed with the greatest metabolic efficiency. There are many examples of species which, whilst being wonders of nature in terms of biologically termed efficiency, are either endemic or extinct. Feline predators, such as the jaguar or the mountain lion, are wonderfully efficient in biomechanical terms, which translates into their capacity to use energy efficiently. Yet, their capacity to take over available habitats is not really an evolutionary success.

In biological terms, metabolic processes are a balance of flows rather than intelligent strive for maximum efficiency. As Niebel et al. (2019[19]) explain it: ‘The principles governing cellular metabolic operation are poorly understood. Because diverse organisms show similar metabolic flux patterns, we hypothesized that a fundamental thermodynamic constraint might shape cellular metabolism. Here, we develop a constraint-based model for Saccharomyces cerevisiae with a comprehensive description of biochemical thermodynamics including a Gibbs energy balance. Non-linear regression analyses of quantitative metabolome and physiology data reveal the existence of an upper rate limit for cellular Gibbs energy dissipation. By applying this limit in flux balance analyses with growth maximization as the objective function, our model correctly predicts the physiology and intracellular metabolic fluxes for different glucose uptake rates as well as the maximal growth rate. We find that cells arrange their intracellular metabolic fluxes in such a way that, with increasing glucose uptake rates, they can accomplish optimal growth rates but stay below the critical rate limit on Gibbs energy dissipation. Once all possibilities for intracellular flux redistribution are exhausted, cells reach their maximal growth rate. This principle also holds for Escherichia coli and different carbon sources. Our work proposes that metabolic reaction stoichiometry, a limit on the cellular Gibbs energy dissipation rate, and the objective of growth maximization shape metabolism across organisms and conditions’.  

Therefore, if we translate the principles of biological metabolism into those of economics and energy management, the energy-efficiency of any given society is a temporary balance achieved under constraint. Whilst those states of society which clearly favour excessive dissipation of energy are not tolerable on the long run, energy efficiency is a by-product of the strive to survive and replicate, rather than an optimizable target state. Human societies are far from being optimally energy efficient for the simple reason that we have plenty of energy around, and, with the advent of renewable sources, we have even less constraint to optimize energy-efficiency.

We, humans, survive and thrive by doing things together. The kind of efficiency that allows maxing out on our own replication is efficiency in coordination. This is why we have all that stuff of social roles, markets, institutions, laws and whatnot. These are our evolutionary orientations, because we can see immediate results thereof in terms of new humans being around. A stable legal system, with a solid centre of political power in the middle of it, is a well-tested way of minimizing human losses due to haphazard violence. Once a society achieves that state, it can even move from place to place, as local resources get depleted.

I think I have just nailed down one of my core theoretical contentions. The originality of my method is that it allows studying social change as collectively intelligent learning, whilst remaining very open as for what this learning is exactly about. My method is essentially evolutionary, whilst avoiding the traps of evolutionary metaphysics, such as hypothetical evolutionary targets. I can present my method and my findings as a constructive theoretical polemic with the MuSIASEM framework.

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[2] Jacob, F. (1977). Evolution and tinkering. Science, 196(4295), 1161-1166

[3] Kauffman, S., & Levin, S. (1987). Towards a general theory of adaptive walks on rugged landscapes. Journal of theoretical Biology, 128(1), 11-45

[4] Kauffman, S. A. (1993). The origins of order: Self-organization and selection in evolution. Oxford University Press, USA

[5] Nahum, J. R., Godfrey-Smith, P., Harding, B. N., Marcus, J. H., Carlson-Stevermer, J., & Kerr, B. (2015). A tortoise–hare pattern seen in adapting structured and unstructured populations suggests a rugged fitness landscape in bacteria. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(24), 7530-7535, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1410631112    

[6] Wood, M. A., & Thompson, C. (2021). Crime prevention, swarm intelligence and stigmergy: Understanding the mechanisms of social media-facilitated community crime prevention. The British Journal of Criminology, 61(2), 414-433.  https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azaa065

[7] Li, M., Porter, A. L., Suominen, A., Burmaoglu, S., & Carley, S. (2021). An exploratory perspective to measure the emergence degree for a specific technology based on the philosophy of swarm intelligence. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 166, 120621. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2021.120621

[8] Berghout, S., & Verbitskiy, E. (2021). On regularity of functions of Markov chains. Stochastic Processes and their Applications, Volume 134, April 2021, Pages 29-54, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spa.2020.12.006

[9] Keane, M. (1972). Strongly mixingg-measures. Inventiones mathematicae, 16(4), 309-324. DOI

[10] Turchin, P., Currie, T. E., Whitehouse, H., François, P., Feeney, K., Mullins, D., … & Spencer, C. (2018). Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(2), E144-E151. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1708800115

[11] Shafique, L., Ihsan, A., & Liu, Q. (2020). Evolutionary trajectory for the emergence of novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Pathogens, 9(3), 240. https://doi.org/10.3390/pathogens9030240

[12] Hoffman, D. D., Singh, M., & Prakash, C. (2015). The interface theory of perception. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 22(6), 1480-1506.

[13] Fields, C., Hoffman, D. D., Prakash, C., & Singh, M. (2018). Conscious agent networks: Formal analysis and application to cognition. Cognitive Systems Research, 47, 186-213. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2017.10.003

[14] Schneider, M. C., & Bos, A. L. (2019). The application of social role theory to the study of gender in politics. Political Psychology, 40, 173-213. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12573

[15] Gil-Hernández, C. J., Marqués-Perales, I., & Fachelli, S. (2017). Intergenerational social mobility in Spain between 1956 and 2011: The role of educational expansion and economic modernisation in a late industrialised country. Research in social stratification and mobility, 51, 14-27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2017.06.002

[16] Andreoni, V. (2020). The energy metabolism of countries: Energy efficiency and use in the period that followed the global financial crisis. Energy Policy, 139, 111304. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2020.111304

[17] Al-Tamimi and Al-Ghamdi (2020), ‘Multiscale integrated analysis of societal and ecosystem metabolism of Qatar’ Energy Reports, 6, 521-527, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2019.09.019

[18] Velasco-Fernández, R., Pérez-Sánchez, L., Chen, L., & Giampietro, M. (2020), A becoming China and the assisted maturity of the EU: Assessing the factors determining their energy metabolic patterns. Energy Strategy Reviews, 32, 100562.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2020.100562

[19] Niebel, B., Leupold, S. & Heinemann, M. An upper limit on Gibbs energy dissipation governs cellular metabolism. Nat Metab 1, 125–132 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42255-018-0006-7