Industrial Ecology Inspired Puzzle

In this post I will try to come up with a industrial-ecology inspired puzzle and then provide three alternative explanations for it. I have decided to choose a puzzle from my home country which I thought would be interesting for my mostly European classmates to listen. Having grew up with the stories and memories from my elders such as Turkey was once one of the several countries which was capable of its own needs and economically independent in terms of food and agriculture, and also having been in the Netherlands for a couple of weeks, which is famous for its very efficient and mechanized agriculture and which has the third ranking in the world despite its low population and land inspired my puzzle. Here it is:

The national agriculture and animal husbandry activities in Turkey is decreasing over years, and the country has started to import its several once characteristic goods such as such as wheat, cattle, olive oil, tea, watermelon, etc.

1. The country has unsuccessfully performed in the agriculture technology race among the past 30 years. From the other point the western countries have invested in research and development activities and technological development with enough funds and human power. That may be the reason behind favoring importing rather than farming because the first one is more profitable and rational people always choose the most profitable alternative.

2. The people are lazy. They are living under a nice weather without the motivation of searching for a growth in economy. They are not trying to improve their quality of seeds over years. They rather decide to use the imported seeds which are ready to use easily.

3. Turkey was poorly governed by incapable leaders, and they have given so many privileges and compromises to international companies and other countries. They deliberately left the farmers alone without giving them any support to survive in the competition in the market. (This explanation might sound rather extreme, it is partly because I am sharpening the phrases but it is actually what is being argued in the country in some groups. Well, I hear you saying conspiracy theories are beyond our subject but I have decided to add it because as always it is interesting to hear.)

Introduction, Impressions

Greetings, welcome to my blog which is created with the motivation from one of my courses I am taking in TU Delft. The name of the course is Social Systems: Policy and Management, and it is in the Industrial Ecology master program. As an exchange (visitor) student in this class and the course, I think after all these years of tough mathematics, this will be an excellent opportunity for me to extend into social sciences. It has already started with this blog, which is my first blog ever, and together we will see what will happen in the future.

Social sciences were always my close interest, however I had not had the chance to interact with them in an academic format. With my background in Industrial Engineering and specialization in System Dynamics, this course will be very useful for my desire in creating scientific and valuable work with combining social sciences, natural sciences and engineering.One of my early impressions on Industrial Engineering during my bachelor years was something like that: why do we have to use these same, old, one dimensional, and sometimes unhealthy objective functions? In engineering what we are working on are complex, very difficult; however, well defined and well structured problems, and because of that we are able to acquire some results which can be expressed in numbers. But the structure is built according to the objective functions I mentioned before, to write in words they are either maximizing profit or minimizing cost and sometimes maximizing revenue, so it is not surprising to have results from an usual model telling the analyst to keep on operating with fossil fuels for the next 50 years: We do not even have to run the model, since it is all well defined mathematics. (Note: In many applications these models and methods are excellent) What happens if we take out the sovereignty of the cost accounting from our models? Then it is not well defined anymore and it is hardly to get any exact solutions. The problems become even more complex and more difficult. This might a problem for some people, but I do not think the same way. Coming to my first impressions in social science perspective on industrial ecology: I think it is better if we try to understand the system; its flows, stocks and causal relations; and then make critical and creative efforts in designing our policies with it. As the famous saying depicts we have to favor for doing the right things.