The Wealth of Nature: Economics as If Survival Mattered

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

Once again, money is not wealth. It is a measure of wealth, and it also functions as a social mechanism for distributing wealth. It means nothing unless there is real wealth — actual, nonfinancial goods and services produced by the primary and secondary economies — to back it up. In a healthy market economy, there’s a rough balance between the amou

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.

In a world where the accelerating exploitation of natural resources and the accumulation of paper wealth are major sources of problems, while the human labor at the core of the secondary economy is the most renewable resource we have, we arguably tax the wrong things.

Third, one of the ironies faced by a society that has reached the point of negative returns on complexity as a means of problem solving is that thereafter, the only way it can solve its problems is by not solving its problems. Any attempt to solve problems by adding additional complexity will simply make matters worse, while allowing some particula

Second, whenever common measures of wealth are controlled by institutions, those who manage those institutions become powerful and can be counted on to maintain and expand their power whenever possible.

The effects of the Dutch tulip mania and the South Sea bubble were restricted to a relatively small proportion of their respective societies; this was hardly true of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and seems to be turning out even less true of the Great Recession now under way.

The second distinctive feature of a money economy is that it makes it harder, not easier, to value certain very large classes of goods.

What can be measured is only a subset of what can be known, and what can be known, at least in any given situation, is only a subset of what exists; nor does the fact that some properties of a thing can be measured according to some numerical scale prevent it from having other properties at least as important that are not subject to that kind of me