Determinants of diversity in an ecological economy. What in the heck does that mean?
If we look at a wide variety of ecosystems, some are much more diverse in the number of species than are others. If we look at economic systems in the world today, some are very diverse in the number of “economic species” — sets of similar corporations. Economies vary from a low number of economic species, and a low number of individual corporations or entrepreneurs, to high levels of diversity and individual entrepreneurial entities. On the face of it the determining factors to create these four extremes seem simple enough. The greater the energy source(s) and the more abundant the raw materials, the easier it should be to have both high levels of individuals and economic species within any system. In actual biological examples this simple equation holds up for “simple” ecosystems.
Oh, and I should comment that ecosystems and economic systems as I use the terms are fundamentally in geographically defined regions. On a very broad scale, of course, both the economies of the world and the ecosystems of the world are global in scope, but the two ecol and econ systems are regional, even the current largest economic systems are based on based in a geographical region.
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