Midsize Jake wrote:
Why doesn't he just stick to economics? He's good with economics.
Well, you did ask.
The reason he's good with economics is that he treats as it science, not social science. I can sense VM's blood pressure mounting. LaRouche, like the Renaissance dudes that he admires, sees the universe as developing in a purposeful, non-arbitrary way. (As an aside, here's an analogy that I came up with: It's like a maturing organism. As a human makes the transition from an infant to an adult, the proportions change, so that the limbs elongate and become a greater proportion of the body relative to the head. Should we take that to mean that the muscle and bone cells of the limbs are winning the competition for scarce resources, and the head is losing?) LaRouche was attracted to Vernadsky because Vernadsky's theory of evolution operates that way; I suppose it might be fair to call it "teleological." LaRouche rejects the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics, because it applies only to closed, dead systems. The universe itself LaRouche characterizes as "anti-entropic."
This puts LaRouche at odds with the Malthusians, who dominate many fields of intellectual activity in the English-speaking world. LaRouche doesn't believe in "scarce resources"; he believes in a progression of resources, where humans learn to utilize a new resource base before the old one is tapped out. He also believes a progression of
types of resources, so that each successive resource base is more highly concentrated and burns at a higher temperature than the previous one (that's one aspect of your dreaded "energy flux density.") For example, from firewood, to coal, to petroleum, and then on to things which don't involve burning per se, such as nuclear. This makes us quite different from animal species who do in fact operate on a fixed resource base.
This kind of "evolution" in economic practice is coherent with the self-developing quality LaRouche sees in the universe generally, and he warns that if man
doesn't operate that way, he goes extinct. Contrast this with the Malthusians, who argue that we ought to mimic the animals and treat resources as fixed and finite.
This outlook caused LaRouche to warn, beginning in the 60s, that there was a shift underway not only in economic policy, but in science and culture as well, where the idea of progress was being cast aside. By adopting practices that were at odds with the general tendency of the universe, we were inviting disaster. He also identified that Monetarist notion, that allocating capital to financial speculation is essentially just as good and valid as investing in physical production (if not better), as the immediate threat (along with the environmentalist rejection of technological progress.) Perhaps on that point, financial speculation, you may agree.