Systems diagrams for visualizing macroeconomics

For an anthropologist like myself the work of H.T. Odum has great significance. For 40 years his research has explored the workings of open systems of all sorts found in nature, including the biosphere’s systems of humanity (Odum, 1971, 1983, 1996; Odum and Odum, 1976, 2001; Odum et al., 1998). There is perhaps no more interesting systemic relationship than that between people and nature, and between people and other people. For anthropologists therefore, the research of H.T. Odum can provide essential understanding of the functioning and dynamics of the ecosystems that have co-evolved with humans as foragers, as agriculturalists, as archaic states, and as they exist within contemporary world systems. Systems principles of hierarchy, scale, diversity, self-organization, and others can each be applied to understand cultural self-organization. A direct outgrowth of H.T. Odum’s work on humanenvironmental systems has been his interest in ecological economics (Odum, 1996). Many of the other articles in this issue have addressed emergy, and I will not re-review the concept or methods. This paper will instead assume a familiarity with emergy accounting and systems ecology, and add to them an anthropologist’s understandings of sociocultural self-organization, political-economy, and cultural evolution as they can enlighten and enliven the debate between ecological economics and neoclassical economics. This article will present a visual “discussion” of the underlying “basic assumptions” of macroeconomics as