Adrian Bejan | Wealth Hierarchy, from Design in Nature
Adrian Bejan presents three parts that go together, starting with how movement gives us the idea of the physics of wealth, underpinned by the natural birth of hierarchy on the map. He then turns to the birth of the beltway around the city, meaning beltways happened. He ends with the basic physics of attractiveness, also known as beauty, and calls it a pleasant surprise because there’s only one idea. He connects the urge to move stuff in an area with less fuel to a road map with a few larger and many small pathways, and then shows data where gross domestic product GDP and annual consumption of fuel crowd on a diagonal with a slope of one.
He says the road map is a hierarchical display of movement, with a few larger pathways and many smaller ones. The large ones are traveled by big movers, and the smaller ones by smaller movers.
He says the money people pay to make movement possible represents wealth, and the annual measure of wealth is called the gross domestic product GDP. He says fuel consumption to move stuff is synonymous with what people report as wealth: money spent annually.
He describes a companion drawing in which GDP per capita and fuel per capita show the same distribution along the diagonal. He says the wealthier burn more, and the purpose of that so-called fuel consumption is to move stuff.
He says life is movement because the antonym of no movement is death, and he calls reducing fuel consumption an argument for reducing the movement of life. He says no living group is reducing fuel consumption and never will, because history is a progression toward greater movement.
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