I come from Canada.
Canada owes its successful past to the capturing and use of its vast resources living in or under forests and lakes. All these resources can be tapped and used by means of technologies that understand and embody the results of economies of scale. In pioneering times, the settlers noticed that beaver were using the forest to create artificial lakes. The pioneers mistakenly killed off the beaver and used their pelts for hats and pouches for gun powder.
Hudson Bay economics
The ancient Lake family, namesakes, who managed the Hudson Bay Company, a firm created to kill off the beaver for their hides for over a century, were responsible for much of this. Fact is that our very own ancestors were pretty damn ignorant of the effect that they were having on the long term prospects for natural life in Canada. Not so the beaver, Canada's greatest resource, but now lost! Well almost!
Beaver technology, profit, and economies of Scale
The beaver were very smart and exploited an technological principle of economies of scale. The beaver realized that they could create a most hospitable environment by means of dams located brilliantly at key points in their environment. Beaver are and were smart, full stop. They are and were industrious, and we can learn a lot about energy use, sustenance and creation from them. The beaver outlasted many prehistoric creatures by creating a wonderful environment which the settlers to Canada have managed to destroy, very effectively destroy.
Dead or dying towns across Canada
I say this as a Canadian raised in a sawmill wood furniture factory and fishing town that no longer has any sawmills, or furniture factories, and almost no fishing. The process of eliminating the furniture and saw milling industry and producing unemployment is an economic process that the neoclassical economic theories do nothing to explain.
Economic growth in my home town killed the golden goose. That is, it killed the main sources of employment in the town which were its lumber, furniture and fishing businesses. Hell! What went wrong? What went right? Somehow fishing was restored, albeit on a more limited basis, but only just restored!
Bad economics destroys economies and natural environments
The real mistake of people in the pioneering environment was that they were out for themselves and did not understand the long term implications of their actions. They were good people, but the effect they had on the world of their own children was destructive of resources and potential through economies of scale built into the natural environment, misunderstood and eliminated by settlers through ignorance. This bad process continues unabated throughout and across Canada, even accelerating in its destructiveness.
The stupidity of all this is that the perpetrators of this misdeed don't even know what they have left behind as a depleted legacy. There is no natural guide in the human brain to explain bad economics. When people form groups they copycat bad and destructive behaviour without knowing that what they are doing is fundamentally misfitting within their natural environment. The natives watched this process and still do, helpless in their struggle to get the 'white' man to understand the bad ideas running through 'his' brain.
It could be very different with just a small amount of real thought.
