There’s a reason for that, and it ties back into the distinctions among the primary, secondary and tertiary economies central to the argument of this book. The primary economy of Nature and the secondary economy of the production of goods and services by human labor are natural systems subject to negative feedback loops that tend to hold them in ba

For all I know, the ancient civilizations that built vast piles of stone to the honor of their gods may have been entirely right to say that Marduk, Osiris, Kukulcan et al. were well pleased by having big temples erected in their honor, and reciprocated by granting peace and prosperity to their worshippers. It may just be a coincidence that directi

The guild had the responsibility under feudal municipal laws to establish minimum standards for the quality of goods, to regulate working hours and conditions and to control prices. Economic theories of the time held that there was a “just price” for any good or service, usually the price that had been customary in the region since time out of mind

Lewis Mumford titled one of his most significant works The Myth of the Machine

It’s worth noting that most of today’s economic theories admit entropy, in one way or another, into the secondary economy: it’s generally admitted that producing goods and services consumes resources and produces waste and that energy fed into the process is lost to entropy in one way or another. Most current economic thought, however, explicitly r

Warren Johnson’s Muddling Toward Frugality

From a historical perspective, then, a money system of the sort we use today is simply one culturally specific way of managing the distribution of goods and services within a particular kind of human society. What sets money apart from other systems is not its convenience — quite the contrary; such alternatives as household production of goods and

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Kenneth Boulding, Herman Daly and Robert Costanza

This will also require, of course, a reorientation of economic statistics. Today’s figures, as discussed in detail earlier, ignore the primary economy completely, measure the secondary economy purely in terms of the tertiary — calculating production in dollars, say, rather than potatoes and haircuts — and focus obsessively on the tertiary. This fix