A CASE FOR THE MINIMUM: LEAST EFFORT AS META UMBRELLA

摘要

George Kingsley Zipf, late Harvard professor, author of HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND THE PRINCIPLE OF LEAST EFFORT, believed deeply in the power of a minimizing principle to explain living behavior. Modeling his proposal on the Principle of Least Action in Physics, Zipf claimed that life is driven by the need to minimize calorie burning effort. By defining effort as "the average rate of probable work," Zipf would explain a hacker slaving away at some Internet startup as being motivated by the urge to minimize lifetime effort by retiring a millionaire at age 30. The principle is not negated when actual paths don't work out (stock options do become worthless). The significance of Zipf is that in today's technology fueled globalized economy, the instinct to minimize effort, if true, may be getting us into deeper and deeper trouble. Not exerting effort when you didn't have to may have made sense in the context of hunting and gathering. But today, when virtually everything is sold to us on the promise of eliminating one kind of effort or another, the sum total of effort removed has become a major source of both human and planetary depletion. Low available energy (exergy) consuming human effort is being replaced on an unprecedented global scale by power multiplying, high exergy consuming, product consumption. If, in fact, unsustainable rates of resource consumption are being driven by massive, globalized, marketing campaigns capitalizing ever more cleverly on our ship-out-of-water instinct to minimize effort, those proposing non-least effort paths to a sustainable future would be wise to take Zipf into account. We propose that the Principle of Least Effort deserves another look.