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David Korowicz

David Korowicz is a physicist who studies the interactions between economics, energy, climate change, food security, supply chains, and complexity.

Conventional macroeconomics is not up to the task of understanding society’s a changing risk landscape. Other tools are needed. David has been a pioneer in drawing upon ideas from fields such as ecology, complexity and systems science, and behavioral science to shed light on emergent risks, vulnerabilities and uncertainties. He has written influential studies on the nature of the globalised economy as a complex living system; the financial and socio-economic implications of a peak in global oil production; the propagation of financial and monetary shocks through trade networks and critical infrastructures; and the limits to growth.

David an independent consultant. He was a ministerial appointment to the council of Comhar, Ireland’s sustainable development commission. He was head of research at The Ecology Foundation, and is on the executive committee of Feasta, The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability - a think-tank.

Anger & Complicity in a Time of Limits

By Alexander Ač, David Korowicz, Resilience.org

As a species we’re very sensitive to intra-human drama, and in a time of growing crisis, tend to frame narratives as those who are with us and those against.

  • March 25, 2014

Ignorance by consensus

By David Korowicz, Feasta

How could such acknowledged experts, well resourced, stuffed with economists and consulted by governments, get things so wrong?

  • November 14, 2012

Trade Off: Financial system supply-chain cross contagion: a study in global systemic collapse

By David Korowicz, Feasta & Metis Risk

This new study explores the implications of a major financial crisis for the supply-chains that feed us, keep production running and maintain our critical infrastructure. It also provides a framework for looking at global complexity, vulnerability risk and collapse dynamics. A broad financial collapse is argued to be likely arisng from credit over-expansion and the emergent effects of peak oil and food. A scenario involving the collapse of the Eurozone to show that increasing socio-economic complexity could rapidly spread irretrievable supply-chain failure across the world.

  • June 18, 2012

Richard Douthwaite 1942-2011

By David Korowicz, Feasta, The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability

Richard Douthwaite, economist, environmentalist, co-founder of Feasta and much-loved colleague and friend, died on Monday November 14th after a long illness. We will miss his unique and far-ranging intellect, the clarity of his thought and writing, his warmth and his laughter. Funeral arrangements will be posted on the Feasta website.

  • November 15, 2011

On the cusp of collapse: Complexity, energy & the globalised economy

By David Korowicz, Feasta & New Society Publishers

The systems on which we rely for our financial transactions, food, fuel and livelihoods are so inter-dependent that they are better regarded as facets of a single global system. Maintaining and operating this global system requires a lot of energy and, because the fixed costs of operating it are high, it is only cost-effective if it is run at near full capacity. As a result, if its throughput falls because less energy is available, it does not contract in a gentle, controllable manner. Instead it is subject to catastrophic collapse.

  • October 10, 2011

In the world, at the limits to growth

By David Korowicz, Feasta, The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability

A battered and highly unstable world economy is probably at the peak of global energy and food production, and declines may be imminent. Yet our tightly interconnected and globalised civilisation, and the economy that maintain it require increasing such production to remain functional. As a result, Ireland is unlikely ever to come out of recession, and the world is not in the middle of a financial crisis but at the edge of a civilisational one. We urgently need to re-assess where we are, the assumptions that underpin our interpretations of the world, what is likely to happen, and how we might move forward.

  • May 27, 2011
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