David Witzel

Key Insight: Growth in Living Systems vs. Economics

David is exploring how to integrate regenerative and living systems thinking into traditional technocratic public policy frameworks, with "growth" as a key bridging concept.

Core Question

How to integrate:

Regenerative notions (developed over last few years, emerging in many spaces)
Technocratic public policy background (his professional foundation)

The Growth Framework

Problem in Public Policy:

Doesn't focus on living systems
May talk about "systems" but not often
Focuses on "optimization and efficiency"
These become "proxies for something good"
Result: "tend to get trapped into making things a little bit better"
Rarely achieve "positive sum outcome abundance kind of notions"

Economics and Growth:

Traditional economics relies heavily on growth:

Poverty Solution: "How do you get rid of poverty? Well, you grow."
Stability: "Economies tend to be robust while they're growing, they tend to get very fragile while they're not."

Living Systems and Growth:

"Living systems are kind of critical. Growth matters a ton to living systems."

Central Inquiry

"What are the kinds of growth and the perspectives on growth that would inform traditional economics in a more of a living systems way?"

"Are there examples, basically metaphors, that we can take from biological systems around growth that would inform traditional economics in new ways?"

Sourdough Metaphor

Inspiration: Someone's Stanford application essay about the history of sourdough

The Story:

Pioneers crossing the country kept sourdough starters alive
Women pioneers kept sourdough next to their breasts to keep it warm crossing mountains
The sourdough being alive
The growth of sourdough as a metaphor

Status: "That's as far as I've got" - needs to explore further with AI

On Economics

Nuanced View: "A lot of people kind of want to just throw it away and say economists are fools... they're funny, I like to make fun of them, so... but there's a lot of wisdom in economics, too."

Proposal: "We should think of it as Indigenous knowledge, probably"

Goal: Not to discard economics but to retrofit regenerative thinking into "our own borrowed old framings"

Chat Contributions

Shared with Klaus Mager: Nature article on regenerative ag economics

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44264-025-00100-1

Asked Klaus about Gates Foundation ag strategy critiques and whether they reinforce regenerative approaches.

Contributed to financial discussion: "1 big problem is timing - taking money out too early or going back in too late"

Asked Jerry Michalski if he'd read Dan Brown's earlier book "Origin" (about rogue AI)

On Bitcoin discussion: Simply asked "bitcoin?"

Related Concepts

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