The Wealth of Nature: Economics as If Survival Mattered

It still makes a great deal of sense to start growing some of your own food, to radically downscale your dependence on complex technological systems, to reduce your energy consumption as far as possible, to free up at least one family member from the money economy for full-time work in the domestic economy and so on.

the political classes of the industrial world convinced themselves that money was the source of wealth rather than the mere measure of wealth it actually is.

From the early days of the industrial revolution into the early 1970s, the United States possessed the immense economic advantage of sizeable reserves of whatever the cutting-edge energy source happened to be. During what Lewis Mumford called the ecotechnic era,1 when waterwheels were the prime mover for industry and canals were the core transporta

It can be a troubling experience to turn the pages of Rainbook or The Book of the New Alchemists, to name only two of the better products of that mostly forgotten era, and compare the sweeping view of future possibilities that undergirded their approach to a future of energy and material shortages with the cramped imaginations of the present.

Retirement as a social habit was entirely a product of the zenith of the age of abundance. For a brief window of time — rather less than a century — it made financial and political sense for nations in the developed world to pay their elderly citizens to stay out of the work force, in order to keep unemployment down to politically bearable levels.

Any economic activity that is solely a means of bringing in money will be held hostage to the vagaries of the tertiary economy, whether those express themselves through inflation, credit collapse or what have you. Any economic activity that produces goods and services directly for the use of the producer and his or her family and community will be

As the rising spiral of economic trouble continues, we can expect drastic volatility in the value and availability of money — and here again, remember that the word “money” refers to any form of wealth that only has value because it can be exchanged for something else.

Warren Johnson’s Muddling Toward Frugality

This was the secret weapon of the guild economy, and it helped drive an age of technical innovation. As Jean Gimpel showed in The Medieval Machine, the stereotype of the Middle Ages as a period of technological stagnation is utterly off the mark. Medieval craftsmen invented the clock, the cannon and the movable-type printing press, perfected the ma