1.3.1 Principle 1: Maintain strong, cross-scale circulation of key flows, such as energy, information, resources, and money.
Due to the interconnected, mutually beneficial functions that all sectors and levels of our economic metabolism play, cross-scale movement of money, knowledge, and essential resources is crucial. Employers need employees to pay wages and provide goods, while employees are necessary for employers to produce goods. Energy, water, dioxide, nitrogen, and other important biophysical currencies are both necessary for the long-term sustainable approach of societies and economies at the ecological system and biosphere scales, and they are subject to the same quantitative analysis as well as the whole understanding as other flow networks. The Keynesian interpretation of how aggregate demand influences economic health shows the crucial role cross scaled circulation performs in network health. Low earnings, the lack of corporate debt, and frequent layoffs, in flow terms, cause circulation to drop to lower levels, which causes necrosis. A general drop in aggregate demand and an eventual economic collapse occur when money doesn’t really reach the general populace. The multiplier effect metric in economics determines how many often a unit of currency will be exchanged before leaving a market. Likewise, flows can be monitored and evaluated for information and money in socioeconomic networks as well as for energy, water, and dioxide in environmental networks. In each of these situations, the knowledge gained will be extremely important for the stability of the economy and other systems.