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Unequal Exchange
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This paper uses the concepts of human carrying capacity and natural capital to argue that prevailing economic assumptions regarding urbanization and the sustainability of cities must be revised in light of global ecological change. While we are used to thinking of cities as geographically discrete places, most of the land "occupied' by their residents lies far beyond their borders. In effect, through trade and natural flows of ecological goods and services, all urban regions appropriate the carrying capacity of distant "elsewhere', creating dependencies that may not be ecologically or geopolitically stable or secure. The global competition for remaining stocks of natural capital and their productive capacity therefore explains much of the environment-development related tension between North and South. Such macro-ecological realities are often invisible to conventional economic analyses yet have serious implications for world development and sustainability in an era of rapid urbanization and increasing ecological uncertainty. -from Author
Recent critics of unequal exchange have argued that not only does the theory critically depend upon the unrealistic assumption of complete speciali zation (no nonspecific commodities) but also that unequal exchange tends to be self-cancelling and empirically insignificant. Each of these criticisms is examined and found to be lacking. The theory is first extricated from the confusing and ir relevant environment of the labor theory of value and a price-denominated fun damental theorem is stated and proved. Unequal exchange is then generalized to account for nonspecifics in a logically consistent way. Though the fundamental theorem does not hold for nonspecifics, a numerical example in which surplus is transferred shows that any criticism of unequal exchange based on its alleged in ability to handle nonspecifics must be empirical in nature rather than logical. It is next shown that while unequal exchange may indeed disappear in the long run for a variety of reasons, nothing in the theory itself implies that it is necessarily self- cancelling. It is argued that capitalists are not attracted to the periphery by low wages but by high profits which depend upon transportation costs and nontraded goods as much as low wages. Finally a 67-sector model of world trade is intro duced in an attempt to assess the empirical relevance of unequal exchange. It is shown that some 38% of the value of peripheral exports is required to equalize the rate of profit under existing wage differentials.
This chapter surveys the development of international capital mobility since the mid-nineteenth century. It documents the long U traced out by the creation of a well-integrated global capital market by 1914, its collapse during the interwar years, and its resurrection since 1970. This description is enhanced by reference to the open-economy “trilemma” faced by policymakers when choosing between capital markets, domestic monetary targets, and exchange rate regimes. The chapter examines a wide array of new evidence, including data on gross asset stocks, interest rate arbitrage, real interest differentials, and equity-return differentials. On all measures examined, the degree of international capital mobility appears to follow this U pattern, being high before World War I, low in the Great Depression, and high today. A commentary is also included at the end of the chapter.
This chapter illustrates that the globalization of world markets has been of prime economic importance in two key eras: the age of mass migration, which rose to a crescendo between 1850 and 1913; and the era of “constrained” mass migration of the last fifty years. The focus is on intercontinental migrations: from Europe to the New World and from parts of Asia to other areas around the globe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and primarily from the third world to the first world and the Persian Gulf in the late twentieth century. The chapter begins by mapping out the different eras of international migration and labor mobility over the last four centuries, and then examines the underlying forces that drove mass migration in the two eras of globalization. Next, it considers the effects of migration on sending and receiving countries, and the impact of these economic effects on what has been dubbed the “policy backlash.” Although the fundamentals driving international migration were similar in the two periods, the nature, direction, and consequences of the flows reflect changes in the structure and integration of the international economy. The effects of international migration are conditioned both by structural changes in the world economy and by changes in policy regimes. In turn, the policy regimes have evolved in response to changing economic structures, political developments, and migration itself. The chapter concludes with an overview of migration flows and policy in the past, and with speculation about the future. A commentary is also included at the end of the chapter.
We fail to mandate economic sanity, writes Garrett Hardin, "because our brains are addled by...compassion." With such startling assertions, Hardin has cut a swathe through the field of ecology for decades, winning a reputation as a fearless and original thinker. A prominent biologist, ecological philosopher, and keen student of human population control, Hardin now offers the finest summation of his work to date, with an eloquent argument for accepting the limits of the earth's resources--and the hard choices we must make to live within them. In Living Within Limits, Hardin focuses on the neglected problem of overpopulation, making a forceful case for dramatically changing the way we live in and manage our world. Our world itself, he writes, is in the dilemma of the lifeboat: it can only hold a certain number of people before it sinks--not everyone can be saved. The old idea of progress and limitless growth misses the point that the earth (and each part of it) has a limited carrying capacity; sentimentality should not cloud our ability to take necessary steps to limit population. But Hardin refutes the notion that goodwill and voluntary restraints will be enough. Instead, nations where population is growing must suffer the consequences alone. Too often, he writes, we operate on the faulty principle of shared costs matched with private profits. In Hardin's famous essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons," he showed how a village common pasture suffers from overgrazing because each villager puts as many cattle on it as possible--since the costs of grazing are shared by everyone, but the profits go to the individual. The metaphor applies to global ecology, he argues, making a powerful case for closed borders and an end to immigration from poor nations to rich ones. "The production of human beings is the result of very localized human actions; corrective action must be local....Globalizing the 'population problem' would only ensure that it would never be solved." Hardin does not shrink from the startling implications of his argument, as he criticizes the shipment of food to overpopulated regions and asserts that coercion in population control is inevitable. But he also proposes a free flow of information across boundaries, to allow each state to help itself. "The time-honored practice of pollute and move on is no longer acceptable," Hardin tells us. We now fill the globe, and we have no where else to go. In this powerful book, one of our leading ecological philosophers points out the hard choices we must make--and the solutions we have been afraid to consider.
The Cambridge History of Latin America is a large scale, collaborative, multi-volume history of Latin America during the five centuries from the first contacts between Europeans and the native peoples of the Americas in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to the present. Ideas and Ideologies in Twentieth-Century Latin America brings together chapters from Volumes IV, VI, and IX of The Cambridge History to provide in a single volume the economic, social and political ideologies of Latin America since 1870. This, it is hoped, will be useful for both teachers and students of Latin American history and of contemporary Latin America. Each chapter is accompanied by a bibliographical essay.
This text offers insight into one of the classic questions of history: why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As the author shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, he demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade. The author argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths. Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths, paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.
“Financial” imperialism is a fashionable term. It is supposed to be different in nature from the “mercantile” imperialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to have matured during the last quarter of the century and to have led to the “informal” and then the “formal” takeover of the world, culminating in the sharing out of the last unoccupied territories—Africa, the Ottoman Middle East, and Indochina. This theory has been put to severe trial recently. The huge colonial empires, which had taken centuries to build, broke up in a few years without proportionate violence and without any marked impoverishment of the great imperial parent states or any reduction in their capacity to exploit the rest of the world.
One of the most widely discussed theories concerning the terms of trade of developing countries is the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis, independently published in 1950 (Prebisch 1950; Singer 1950). This hypothesis proclaimed a structural tendency for the terms of trade of developing countries to deteriorate in their dealings with industrial countries. In the original form this related mainly to the terms of trade between primary commodities and manufactured goods from the industrial countries. The historical statistical basis was an analysis of British terms of trade during the period 1873–1938 which corresponded to this image of exports of manufactured goods in exchange for primary commodities.
This piece, written in 1949 when Hans Singer was working as an economist in the United Nations, has ever since been the subject of debate, rebuttal and rehabilitation. Initially it was often dismissed, but as additional data on international price trends and trade relations became available, the Prebisch-Singer thesis, the name by which it became known, was increasingly accepted. Today it is seen as one of the earliest pieces showing the long-run asymmetries between the richer and more powerful countries and the poorer and weaker ones, and the implications this has for development, economic relationships and income distribution in the world. When he left the United Nations and joined IDS in 1969, Hans Singer revisited the piece, emphasizing how technology needed to be incorporated as one of the key factors underlying the long-run trends.
This book presents an economic survey of international capital mobility from the late nineteenth century to the present. The authors examine the theory and empirical evidence surrounding the fall and rise of integration in the world market. A discussion of institutional developments focuses on capital controls and the pursuit of macroeconomic policy objectives in shifting monetary regimes. The Great Depression emerges as the key turning point in recent history of international capital markets, and offers important insights for contemporary policy debates. Its principal legacy is that today's return to a world of global capital is marked by great unevenness in outcomes regarding both risks and rewards of capital market integration. More than in the past, foreign investment flows largely from rich countries to other rich countries. Yet most financial crises afflict developing countries, with costs for everyone. © Maurice Obstfeld and Alan M. Taylor 2004 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.
The perception of the international economic system as one of industrial center and agrarian periphery, in which the former dominates the latter, has had a tremendous influence in the analysis of underdevelopment; the significance of the idea is impossible to gauge because its acceptance is still expanding. Raúl Prebisch's analytical terms, and the concomitant theory of trade relations, now known as unequal exchange, have been adopted not only by the followers of a dependency theory tradition in Latin America, stemming directly from Prebisch, but also by non-Latin American writers (assuredly, with extensive modifications) such as Arghiri Emmanuel, André Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, Johan Galtung, and Samir Amin.
A world-system analysis of the ecological rift generated by capitalism requires as one of its elements a developed theory of the unequal ecological exchange between center and periphery. After reviewing the literature on unequal exchange (both economic and ecological) from Ricardo and Marx to the present, a new approach is provided, based on a critical appropriation of systems ecologist Howard Odum's emergy (spelled with an m) analysis. Odum's contribution offers key elements of a wider dialectical synthesis, made possible in part by his intensive studies of Marx's political-economic critique of capitalism and by Marx's own theory of metabolic rift.
This article discusses various ways in which conventional discourse on sustainability fails to acknowledge the distributive, political, and cultural dimensions of global environmental problems. It traces some lineages of critical thinking on environmental load displacement and ecologically unequal exchange, arguing that such acknowledgement of a global environmental `zero-sum game' is essential to recognizing the extent to which cornucopian perceptions of `development' represent an illusion. It identifies five interconnected illusions currently postponing systemic crisis and obstructing rational societal negotiations that acknowledge the political dimensions of global ecology: 1) The fragmentation of scientific perspectives into bounded categories such as `technology', `economy', and `ecology'. 2) The assumption that the operation of market prices is tantamount to reciprocity. 3) The illusion of machine fetishism, that is, that the technological capacity of a given population is independent of that population's position in a global system of resource flows. 4) The representation of inequalities in societal space as developmental stages in historical time. 5) The conviction that `sustainable development' can be achieved through consensus. The article offers some examples of how the rising global anticipation of socio-ecological contradiction and disaster is being ideologically disarmed by the rhetoric on `sustainability' and `resilience'.
The demographic, ecological, and infrastructural effects of extractive economies differ significantly from those of productive economies. Analysis of underdevelopment in extractive export economies requires time-lagged models of the cumulative effects of the sequence of local modes of extraction organized in response to world-system demands. Such a model, organized around the predominance of specific commodities at different times, is derived from a critical synthesis of various theories of development and underdevelopment. The propositions in this model are examined through a case study of the sequence of extractive export economies in the Amazon Basin from the time of colonial conquest to the present.-Author
The neo‐Marxian Unequal Exchange literature has been largely bypassed in mainstream discussions of theories of comparative advantage during the 1970s. In so far as the Unequal Exchange literature attempts to explain international ‘factor price’ non‐equalisation for labour, the problems addressed are of more general relevance. In my work on this topic, I have attempted to distinguish between studies within a classical Marxian tradition (some of which have been recently written) and those neo‐Marxian writers whose work is more broadly compatible with the Sraffa or neo‐Ricardian analysis of comparative advantage. The purpose of this paper is to survey the latter sub‐set of the neo‐Marxian literature, not only because of its importance in many discussions of Third World issues, but also because of its own intrinsic merits.
An accepted proposition of Marxist theories of non‐equivalent exchange is that international trade involves a transfer of labour value from the low to the high wage country. It is argued that in systems in which intermediate goods are used and traded this proposition cannot be shown to hold of necessity, even though standard ‘unequal exchange’ assumptions are accepted.
In the great divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) proposes a radical revision of our understanding of the pattern of economic evolution in the eastern and western ends of Eurasia over the course of the early modern and modern periods, roughly late Ming and Qing. A recent restatement of the standard or traditional view can be found in the macro-economic historian Angus Maddison's account of world economic development in the very long run, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (2001), which sums up his argument in Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run (1998). According to Maddison, “Western Europe overtook China … in per capita performance in the fourteenth century. Thereafter China [was] … more or less stagnant in per capita terms until the second half of the twentieth century” (2001, 44). In contrast, Pomeranz insists that if the comparative focus is placed, as only makes sense, not on Europe or China as a whole—both of which contained the most disparate regions at vastly different levels of economic development—but on the most advanced, or core, areas within each, it can be seen that, by as late as 1800, there was little to choose between them, in terms of the character of the economy, the nature of growth, or its results (2000, 7–8).
On serait tenté de souscrire à l'affirmation de Schumpeter, à savoir que « l'abîme qui sépare Marx de Keynes est… beaucoup moins large que celui qui sépare Marx de Marshall et de Wicksell ». Mais un « abîme moins large » n'en demeure pas moins un abîme et les diverses tentatives faites jusqu'ici, à partir des deux bords, en vue d'y jeter la passerelle de 1' « Économie généralisée », ne semblent pas très réussies.
Une de ces tentatives est représentée par un exposé remarquable que l'économiste marxiste, Paul Boccara, a fait à l'École Pratique des Hautes Études à la Sorbonne, dans lequel un effort systématique a été déployé pour faire converger les deux doctrines. Bien sûr, Boccara ne met les deux doctrines en parallèle que sur un point précis, ce que Marx appelle la surproduction de capital. Nous supposons en outre qu'il admette que dans l'ensemble, et hormis ce point particulier, les deux systèmes soient fondamentalement différents et irréductibles. Mais nous croyons que même sur ce chapitre, et peut-être sur celui-là encore plus que sur certains autres, l'incompatibilité des prémisses interdit certains rapprochements et c'est ce que nous nous proposons de démontrer.
Ce second article poursuit l'explicitation d'une problématique et de concepts spécifiquement néo-ricardiens, toujours dans le cadre du modèle sraffaien à produit unique, mais lorsqu'il y a discrimination salariale entre diverses mains-d'œuvre au travail pourtant homogène. Les concepts dégagés précédemment sont généralisés, mais s'avèrent insuffisants pour expliquer le non-transfert d'activités vers les régions ou mains-d'œuvre à bas salaires. L'investigation des phénomènes de répartition propres à ces économies discriminantes conduit à comparer les prix des marchandises à leurs valeurs dans la même économie, mais en l'absence de discrimination, la marchandise étalon étant prise comme invariante en valeur. Les inégalités entre prix et valeurs permettent alors de formaliser un concept d'échange inégal analogue à celui élaboré par Emmanuel et à mettre en évidence des relations d'exploitation par le commerce particulièrement stables entre certaines sous-économies. Ces nouveaux concepts, profondément différents de ceux de la théorie des jeux, vont éclairer l'énigme soulevée plus haut des non-transferts d'activité. On montre en effet que de tels transferts augmentent l'exploitation si la discrimination reste constante. Là encore, la pertinence pour l'analyse de l'évolution des structures de production des concepts nécessaires à la mesure de phénomènes de répartition dont l'autonomie est postulée montre la fécondité de ce postulat fondamental, tout autant qu'elle illustre le thème ricardien de l'influence cruciale de la répartition sur le développement. /// This second paper continues the delineation of specific neo-ricardian concepts and approach. Sraffa's single product industry model is now generalized so that the labor force, although homogenous, may entail differently paid groups. The long period analysis, discussed previously, is extended to these discriminating economies, but fails to explain why activities are not transferred to the groups or regions with lower wages. The distinctive feature of the short period analysis is to compare the commodity prices to their values in the same economy without discrimination, the standard commodity being the unit of value in both cases. Differences between prices and values lead to the possibility of unequal exchanges between subeconomies. One is able to formalize several relationships of exploitation through trade which are similar but not identical to Emmanuel's. These new concepts help clarify the above riddle since the contemplated transfers of activity happen to increase the exploitation if the discrimination stays constant. As such transferts allow for increased profits and wages, no similar result can be obtained by use of a game theoretical or neo-classical approach. Here again measuring distribution phenomena which are assumed autonomous, leads to the formalization of concepts that are found relevant to the dynamic analysis of the economy, thus illustrating the ricardian theme of the determining influence of distribution on development.
The paper measures productivity growth in seventeen countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. GDP per worker and capital per worker in 1985 US dollars were estimated for 1820, 1850, 1880, 1913, and 1939 by using historical national accounts to back cast Penn World Table data for 1965 and 1990. Frontier and econometric production functions are used to measure neutral technical change and local technical change. The latter includes concurrent increases in capital per worker and output per worker beyond the highest values achieved. These increases were pioneered by the rich countries of the day. An increase in the capital-labor ratio was usually followed by a half century in which rich countries raised output per worker at that higher ratio. Then the rich countries moved on to a higher capital-ratio, and technical progress ceased at the lower ratio they abandoned. Most of the benefits of technical progress accrued to the rich countries that pioneered it. It is remarkable that countries in 1990 with low capital labor ratios achieved an output per worker that was no higher than countries with the same capital labor ratio in 1820. In the course of the last two hundred years, the rich countries created the production function of the world that defines the growth possibilities of poor countries today.
Redistributive land reforms have begun to attract the attention of scholars and policy makers once again. In this paper, we review old arguments and bring them up-to-date in the light of recent research. We begin with the case in favour of redistributive reforms focusing on fragmented factor markets and systems of labour control, of which concentration of land ownership is but one aspect. We then examine land reform in practice, focusing on distinct regional features and outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the transition economies of the former Soviet bloc and, as examples of success, East Asia (including China and Vietnam). Next we discuss the macroeconomic context and the two-way direction of causality between a redistribution of productive assets and the overall performance of the economy. We underline the import-ance of weakening the system of labour control, eliminating landlord bias and correcting urban bias. Finally, we argue that a prominent feature of all suc-cessful land reforms has been a high degree of land confiscation; full compensa-tion and various types of 'market friendly' land reform are unlikely to be successful.
We reassess the contribution of Sir Arthur Lewis's 1954 paper entitled ‘Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour’ to our understanding of economic development, and to the establishment of development economics as an academic discipline. We argue that Lewis's key insight into the structural dualism characterizing developing countries mapped out a new and distinctive field for development economics and policy. The paper has had a profound impact over the last 50 years and continues to yield valuable lessons for understanding the nature of economic transformation.
All organic economies were subject to constraints upon growth for reasons familiar to the classical economists, but their relative success in coping with these constraints differed substantially. This is visible both when comparing different areas at the same point in time and when comparing the circumstances of a given economy at different points in time. In this article the state of the English economy in 1300 is compared with its state in 1800. At the former date the balance between output and population was unfavourable. A run of poor harvests spelled grave and widespread suffering. Five hundred years later this had ceased to be true. The particular focus of the article is upon the significance of a rising level of productivity per head in agriculture, not simply in supplying food but in providing the raw materials and energy needed if industry and transport were to expand. In the circumstances of an organic economy both were heavily dependent upon the ‘surplus’ made available by a productive agriculture after meeting the needs of the population for food.
A leading authority on economic globalization argues that industrialization in the core countries of northwest Europe and its overseas settlements combined with a worldwide revolution in transportation to produce deindustrialization and an antiglobal backlash in industrially lagging poorer countries.
In Globalization and the Poor Periphery before 1950 Jeffrey Williamson examines globalization through the lens of both the economist and the historian, analyzing its economic impact on industrially lagging poor countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Williamson argues that industrialization in the core countries of northwest Europe and their overseas settlements, combined with a worldwide revolution in transportation, created an antiglobal backlash in the periphery, the poorer countries of eastern and southern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
During the "first global century," from about 1820 to 1913, and the antiglobal autarkic interwar period from 1914 to 1940, new methods of transportation integrated world commodity markets and caused a boom in trade between the core and the periphery. Rapid productivity growth, which lowered the price of manufactured goods, led to a soaring demand in the core countries for raw materials supplied by the periphery. When the boom turned into bust, after almost a century and a half, the gap in living standards between the core and the periphery was even wider than it had been at the beginning of the cycle. The periphery, argues Williamson, obeyed the laws of motion of the international economy. Synthesizing and summarizing fifteen years of Williamson's pioneering work on globalization, the book documents these laws of motion in the periphery, assesses their distribution and growth consequences, and examines the response of trade policy in these regions.
How the rise of globalization over the past two centuries helps explain the income gap between rich and poor countries today.
Today's wide economic gap between the postindustrial countries of the West and the poorer countries of the third world is not new. Fifty years ago, the world economic order—two hundred years in the making—was already characterized by a vast difference in per capita income between rich and poor countries and by the fact that poor countries exported commodities (agricultural or mineral products) while rich countries exported manufactured products. In Trade and Poverty, leading economic historian Jeffrey G. Williamson traces the great divergence between the third world and the West to this nexus of trade, commodity specialization, and poverty.
Analyzing the role of specialization, de-industrialization, and commodity price volatility with econometrics and case studies of India, Ottoman Turkey, and Mexico, Williamson demonstrates why the close correlation between trade and poverty emerged. Globalization and the great divergence were causally related, and thus the rise of globalization over the past two centuries helps account for the income gap between rich and poor countries today.
Why did the industrial revolution take place in eighteenth-century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia? In this convincing new account Robert Allen argues that the British industrial revolution was a successful response to the global economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows that in Britain wages were high and capital and energy cheap in comparison to other countries in Europe and Asia. As a result, the breakthrough technologies of the industrial revolution - the steam engine, the cotton mill, and the substitution of coal for wood in metal production - were uniquely profitable to invent and use in Britain. The high wage economy of pre-industrial Britain also fostered industrial development since more people could afford schooling and apprenticeships. It was only when British engineers made these new technologies more cost-effective during the nineteenth century that the industrial revolution would spread around the world.
The Industrial Revolution brought into being a distinct world, a world of greater affluence, longevity and mobility, an urban rather than a rural world. But the great surge of economic growth was balanced against severe constraints on the opportunities for expansion, revealing an intriguing paradox. This book, published to considerable critical acclaim, explores the paradox and attempts to provide a distinct model’ of the changes that comprised the industrial revolution.
The focus of this paper is on how an ecological perspective might provide us with an analytically more precise way of defining `unequal exchange.' It is only by looking at the ecological conditions of human economies that we can adequately conceptualize the mechanisms which generate inequalities in distribution. Considerations of market power aside, neoclassical economic ideology has dispelled all possible criteria for assessing a market transaction as unequal or unfair. One way to assess the occurrence of unequal exchange may be to look at the direction of net flows of energy and materials (concrete, productive potential), but without falling into the trap of equating productive potential with economic value. On the contrary, it can be analytically demonstrated that unequal exchange emerges from a kind of inverse relationship between productive potential and economic value. The notion of a reasonable market price conceals the fact that what is being exchanged are intact resources for products representing resources already spent. If we consider, longitudinally along the production process, any given set of fuels and raw materials destined to be transformed into a given product plus waste, its content of available energy will be inversely related to its utility or price. In other words, the more of its original energy that has been dissipated, the higher its price. This means that `production' (i.e. the dissipation of resources) will continuously be rewarded with ever more resources to dissipate, generating ecological destruction and global, core/periphery inequalities as two sides of the same coin.
An understanding of energy principles is needed in order for mankind to make the best energy-effective choices for the future. A review of how energy controls our lives is combined in this book with a systems view of energy. Diagrams of flow systems and interacting parts illustrate the many interrelations of money, energy, production, natural resources, etc. Designed as an introductory textbook, the principles of energy systems and their support of humanity are described in lay terms. Analysis of the recent energy crisis is followed by a hopeful challenge to achieve a steady state by choosing energy cost-benefit methods for the use of natural resources. Exercises and activities for the student are suggested. (19 references) (DCK)