Ecosynomics — The Study of Deviance and Diversity in Human Agreements — Another Framing

The emerging field of Ecosynomics explores deviance and diversity in human agreements.

Deviance.  We study what agreements make groups deviate away from treating each other as creative human beings, and what agreements underlie groups that are sustainably human and creative.  Our data so far, from 94 countries, shows that the  agreements underlying the positive deviants and the negative deviants are completely different, with the negative deviants starting from scarcity and the positive deviants starting from abundance.

Diversity.  When we see that people look at and formulate their agreements through the four lenses of economic, political, cultural, and social perspectives, answering the 12 Big Questions everyone must address, consciously or unconsciously, we find an infinite diversity in how people have answered these questions.  This means that as every group has answered these questions for themselves, they have taken a different path, not that they are better or worse at seeing how to be on the same path.  The mainstream story is that some groups are better than others at being economically self-sufficient in a market-based system focused on financial wealth.   This assumes everyone sees the same agreements when looking through the lenses of how much, who decides, on what criteria, for what rules of interaction.  Our data shows that the set of agreements underlying each group starts from seeing different resources, deciding differently about them, based on values specific to the individuals making up the group, which leads to a specific set of rules for their interactions.  What looks like different degrees of the same kind are different kinds.

This wide deviance in and diversity of human agreements makes for a very interesting field of study, where many assumed that all of the answers were already given.  The only issue seemed to be better application of the one acceptable set of understood agreements.  Now we see a much more interesting issue: what specific set of agreements best support the experience and outcomes each group wants to have?