Designing a Peace Economy: Disrupting the Business Model of the War Complex

Peter JonesBusiness models, Ecological economics, Peace Economics, World Systems

Presented at International Society for Systems Sciences, ISSS 2025 PDF Presentation There is a line in Orwell’s 1984: “The war is not meant to be won, the war is meant to be continuous.” We see a major difference between classical territorial conflicts and modern warfare with the predominance of the military-industrial complex (MIC), or using Ray McGovern’s term MICIMATT (Military Industrial Congressional, Intelligence, Media, Academic, Think Tank). The MIC has overtaken its purpose of ensuring industrial readiness for war materiel and has become a goal-seeking system. We can observe the functional purpose for continuous and escalating wars in the US has been to generate capital for the investors of the MIC, in the largest public-private partnership on earth. To recognize the additionally reinforcement of the business model involving Wall Street as a flywheel to the MIC, we should add “Investors” to the term now, making this “MICIMMAT-IC.” We face moral …

Why is innovation NOT a US priority?

Peter JonesBusiness models, Cultural innovation, Innovation

Thomas Friedman’s Sunday NY Times article, which informed readers have already seen, raises this question. Why does the US continue to ignore innovation, particularly of the scientific kind, as a national priority? Why do the political conversations in the US continue to fall back on backwater cultural issues and divisive policy? Why does the war economy seem to be the most reliably financed of the innovation engines that Federal US taxes support? While we still have enormous innovative energy bubbling up from the American people, it is not being supported and nurtured as needed in today’s supercompetitive world. Right now, we feel like a country in a very slow decline — in infrastructure, basic research and education — just slow enough to lull us into thinking that we have all the time and money to play around in Tbilisi, Georgia, more than Atlanta, Georgia. How important is this issue? A …