Every now and then some powerful ideas collide. I was just at the Houston for a luncheon on the MIT energy initiative and which meant that I couldn’t read the new books from Amazon until today. So I’m reading the “Qing Formation in World Historical Time” and then I get to page 279 in a article that Jack Goldstone writes and then suddenly…..
The ulimate bottleneck in preindustrial economies was quite simple. It lay not in land or other raw materials but in energy. Given sufficient energy, land could be enriched by irrigation, and applications of distantly produced fertilizers, fibers could be imported and economically worked into finished products, grain could be harvested and threshed with far less manpower, bricks and other construction materials could be cheaply fired and moved, construction and transportation bottlenecks could be overcome. Whenever breakthroughs in energy use occurred – in wind or water power, in peat or coal or charcoal or coke – gains generally followed.
The got me thinking, there are three elements in the world
- matter
- energy
- information
And matter, energy, and information both exist in
- time
- space
This gets back to thermodynamics and finance. There are some very basic physical connections between time, energy and information, and information is connected to money in a market economy, because money is the means by which information travels between different points.
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