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EXPLORER
DPA-AWG speaker tackles U.S. economy
What Happens When Assumptions are Wrong?
By COURTNEY CHADNEY, EXPLORER Correspondent
AAPG
It’s a directly simple but perhaps deeply
disturbing conclusion:
“Everything we know is wrong.”
To be specific, Patrick Leach says
everything is wrong about what we know
about the U.S. economy.
That’s not just his opinion. That’s the
title of a talk he’ll be sharing this month
at the AAPG Annual Convention and
Exhibition (ACE) in Pittsburgh.
Leach is an author and CEO of
Decision Strategies, a consulting firm that
helps clients in the oil and gas industry
untangle the complexities of the decisionmaking
process.
He’s also the speaker for the Division
of Professional Affairs-Association for
Women Geoscientists luncheon that
will be part of the upcoming ACE in
Pittsburgh.
His basic premise about why
everything we know about the economy is
wrong:
All the logic, intuition and metrics
humans have for making decisions were
developed during a time when resources
were abundant, human populations
were relatively small and we could afford
to focus on maximizing returns today
because tomorrow always held new
frontiers filled with limitless riches.
But today, he believes, the primary
objective of most modern societies
– constant economic growth – is
mathematically unstable and impossible.
Adam Raised a Cain
Leach’s inspiration stemmed from
Stuart Kauffman’s “At Home in the
Universe.”
“I began to wonder if the increased
economic volatility and global economic
stagnation we see these days might be
related to a fundamental change in the
nature of the global economy,” Leach
said, “as everything has become more
interconnected.”
After further investigation, Leach
decided that the common accepted
economic theory of Adam Smith’s
“Invisible Hand” needed to be challenged.
“Adam Smith developed his theories
at a time when the world’s resource base
must have looked essentially infinite,”
Leach said. “As a result, underlying
many of his – and our – approaches to
economics is an assumption that there is
always more stuff out there to get.”
Leach said he concluded we as
a country have moved from a laborconstrained
economy into a resourceconstrained
one – and that meant if we
don’t begin to change our way of thinking,
we could be in some serious trouble.
“Every previous society that grew,
developed and prospered to the point
where their environment could no longer
sustain their standard of living ultimately
faced a choice,” Leach said. “Change
your behavior or collapse.”
The Unanswered Question
He hopes his ACE
LEACH luncheon talk will
inspire convention
goers to challenge some of their preexisting
beliefs about the economic world.
“I would like the audience to really
Patrick Leach, author and CEO of Decision Strategies, will speak
on “Everything We Know Is Wrong” at the upcoming Division of
Professional Affairs-Association for Women Geoscientists luncheon
during the AAPG Annual Convention and Exhibition in Pittsburgh.
The luncheon will begin at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, May 21, at the
Westin Hotel.
consider the possibility that we have
moved into a new era of a hyperconnected
global economy, one in which
we find ourselves repeatedly bumping up
against resource limitations,” he said.
Leach believes geologists, of all
people, have the most chance of
understanding this new theory, because
geologists understand that one hundred
years is not a very long time.
“The fact that our society has seen
enormous success over the past 200
years or so doesn’t mean that the
trend will continue, regardless of our
technological prowess,” he said. “We are
currently faced with the same decision
that successful societies of the past have
faced.”
His question: Can we learn from their
mistakes?
EXPLORER
Leach realizes his message isn’t easy
for some to accept.
“By historical standards, Western
civilization is still pretty young,” he said.
“The fact that we’ve made huge progress
for the past 200 years or so does not
mean that it will automatically continue.”
WWW.AAPG.ORG MAY 2013
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