Principle of Subsidiary Function.7 This rule holds that the most effective arrangement to perform any function whatsoever will always assign that function to the smallest and most local unit that can actually perform it.

the primary constraints on the production of wealth are the natural limits imposed by the annual yield of energy resources and raw materials from the primary economy.

The end of the age of cheap abundant energy thus brings with it an unavoidable reshaping of our most basic ideas about economic development. For the last three centuries or so, as already discussed, the effective meaning of this phrase has centered on the replacement of human labor by machines powered by fossil fuel. All the other measures of

First, it tends to draw all economic activity into its own ambit by supplanting other forms of exchange with monetary exchange.

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

The more completely an economy becomes subject to money, the more difficult it becomes to include primary goods in economic calculations. The Salmon People are perfectly capable of participating in a gift economy, but there’s no way they can cash a check — or, for that matter, write one.

The primary economy consists wholly of those nonhuman processes that yield economic goods to human beings. Thus a farm and the crops grown on it are part of the secondary economy, while the soil, water, sun and genetic potential in the seed stock that make the farm and its crops possible are part of the primary economy. In the same way, a mine

Free markets are subject to the same problem. There have been many examples of market economies in history that were not controlled by governments, but there have been no examples of market economies that were not controlled at all, and if one were to be set up, it would remain a free market for maybe a week at most. Adam Smith himself explained

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