Joe Tainter: “Surplus, Complexity, and Simplification”
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
00:00
How Much Energy Do We Consume?
The average American in the United States consumes around 2,000 calories a day but our axosomatic or how much energy we use outside of our bodies is around 200,000 kilocalories a day. There's almost 100 to 1 axosomatic magic wand that we invisibly see as part of this complex society. But what you're implying is that because most of that is this subsidy we get from mining fossil hydrocarbons and only paying for the cost of extraction, not the cost of creation nor pollution, that in the past there would have been a disincentive to complexify too much.
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