Revisiting the Image of Limited Good: On Sustainability, Thermodynamics, and the Illusion

of Creating Wealth
Author(s): Paul Trawick and Alf Hornborg
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 56, No. 1 (February 2015), pp. 1-27
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
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Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 1, February 2015 1

Revisiting the Image of Limited Good

On Sustainability, Thermodynamics, and the Illusion of Creating Wealth

by Paul Trawick and Alf Hornborg

Two worldviews are now contending for cultural dominance: the open-system model long promoted by economists,
here called the “image of unlimited good,” and a more traditional closed-system view, Foster’s “image of limited
good,” still widely found among peasant societies today. The former rests on the assumption that people “create”
wealth, an illusion that conflates the properties of wealth’s real and virtual forms while ignoring the economy’s
extreme reliance on fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that as
“growth” occurs in such a system, it fundamentally destroys; thus the net sum cannot be positive, and the system
is not expanding but steadily running down. The latter rests on the assumption that most of the “goods” valued
by people in life are scarce, being derived from finite raw materials through the expenditure of human labor and
extrasomatic energy. Such goods are therefore “subtractable,” their limited supply forming a commons that must
somehow be shared. Based on an ethnological argument centering on the successful management of scarce water
for irrigation, a shift toward the closed-system worldview is shown to be necessary if people are to act collectively
to limit their expanding consumption, a change already widely underway, particularly in the global South.

Several decades ago anthropologists learned of a belief, ap-
parently held by people in peasant societies throughout the
world, that any affluence enjoyed by one person inevitably
comes at the expense of someone else. In the heyday of mod-
ernization theory, this zero-sum or closed-system view of the
world was labeled “the image of limited good” (Foster 1965)
and regarded by its critics as a cultural misconception stand-
ing in the way of development. Today, the planetary predic-
ament unleashed by highly unstable growth, increasing eco-
nomic polarization, peak oil, and climate change appears to
be vindicating the intuitions of historical and contemporary
peasant populations, now transposed from the village to the
global scale. Although the acknowledging of biophysical con-
straints on the economy still tends to be rejected by main-
stream economists, who refer to it as the “Malthusian fallacy,”
current concerns about sustainability are opening up oppor-
tunities for a renewed discourse on the limits to growth, not
least on what the technological transcending of those limits
tends to entail in terms of the displacing or “outsourcing” of
both labor inputs and environmental loads. These concerns
are very much aligned with those of the alternative globali-
zation and Occupy Wall Street movements as they were with
intellectual predecessors such as dependency theorists.
Paul Trawick is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department
of Anthropology at Idaho State University (921 South 8th Avenue,
Stop 8005, Pocatello, Idaho 83209-8005, U.S.A. [trawpaul@isu.edu]).
Alf Hornborg is Professor in the Human Ecology Division of Lund
University (221 00 Lund, Sweden). This paper was submitted 1 XII
11, accepted 3 III 14, and electronically published 29 I 15.
Malthus, like Ricardo and Marx, was right about some
things and wrong about others. He famously worried that
there ultimately had to be limits on the amount of land suit-
able for cultivation and for supporting human populations
regardless of the state of development of production tech-
nology. Ricardo was then astute in observing that nineteenth-
century Britain was proving itself able to transcend those
limits by substituting labor and capital for land while out-
sourcing its land requirements to other continents. And Marx
was prescient in pointing out that capitalists accumulate
wealth through exploiting other people’s labor by minimizing
wages while maximizing profits from sales, a process that he
noted was being extended imperialistically to other countries.
But Ricardo and Marx had their own shared blind spot, par-
ticularly regarding the ephemeral nature of environmental
constraints and the inherent virtues of technological progress.
Although it is not possible to predict exactly when or where
the limits to economic growth will be reached in a particular
part of the world, because development strategies tend to
displace such limits in time and/or space, it is no longer
reasonable to conclude that such limits do not exist. And
neither Ricardo nor Marx really foresaw them.
The open-system worldview that they appear to have
shared, here called “the image of unlimited good”—which is
adhered to today by most economists (Hornborg 1992, 2001,
2011, 2013a, 2014a, 2014b)—emerged out of the historical
experience of a highly privileged segment of the population
of nineteenth-century Europe. It reflects both a misunder-
standing and a mystification of the related phenomena of
economic growth and technological development, a fact that

䉷 2015 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2015/5601-0001$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/679593

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 2 Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 1, February 2015
has become increasingly obvious from its incapacity to deal
with twenty-first-century issues of sustainability. Although
their perceptions focused on different scales and levels of
social organization—local, national, and global—and had
very different ontologies, the peasants of Tzintzuntzan (Foster
1965), peasants in Colombia echoing the preindustrial phy-
siocrats (Gudeman and Rivera 1990), Thomas Malthus
(1820), Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971a), and William
Catton (1980) all adhered to a contrasting worldview and
were not wrong: there are limits to the extent and the spread
of material affluence. This is because its cost—the other side
of the coin of growth—is a corresponding environmental de-
cline that ultimately has to be shared by everyone. It is pre-
cisely when such limits appear to be transcended by novel
technologies and sources of energy that we have reason to
suspect some new form of environmental load displacement,
some new externalization of costs, whose victims have now
become the majority of people on the planet.
The use of imported natural resources in devising tech-
nologies that replace local labor is a phenomenon that ev-
erywhere hinges on the relative price of labor. Thus, it deserves
to be examined with new eyes by social scientists concerned
with widening inequalities in the global distribution of wealth.
These are profoundly anthropological issues, as they illustrate
that the material modes of operation of economic systems
are driven by cultural worldviews (Gudeman 1986), all-en-
compassing perspectives that are rarely examined but are now
in great need of close scrutiny.
Real Wealth versus Virtual Wealth: A Source
of Conceptual Confusion
Economists have long championed “growth” in the gross do-
mestic product as the key to widespread and cumulative en-
hancements in human well-being, and they have strongly pro-
moted it as an alternative to the redistribution of already
accumulated wealth. Yet as Sen (1999), Stiglitz (2002), Wade
(2003), Callinicos (2003), Pollin (2005), and others have
shown, such expansion—for example, the increasing per cap-
ita consumption of goods and services—is only taking place
in certain parts of the world and, even within that limited
set of developed and newly developing countries, its benefits
are largely confined to the privileged classes, the nouveau
riche, and the traditional elites. Everywhere that it is now
underway, such growth is in fact a destructive boon and a
luxury being enjoyed by a minority at the expense of the
majority (Nash 1994, 2007), a fact that is illustrated dramat-
ically by the declining real income—very evident now for
several decades—of the middle and lower classes in all of the
“developed” countries.
The profoundly uneven benefits of this “growth” are re-
flected in the most skewed distribution of income and re-
sources the world has seen, certainly since the dawn of the
industrial age, a pattern that is steadily getting worse. A unique
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study funded by the United Nations (Davies et al. 2008) re-
cently concluded that the richest 1% of the world’s people
now own approximately 40% of the existing assets, and the
richest 10% own an astonishing 85%, while the bottom 50%
own less than 1% of the total available wealth. An unprece-
dented amount is now concentrated in so few hands that the
per capita distribution cannot be represented graphically on
a single printed page in a way that the average person can
understand (Korten 2001:110–112). This is the kind of society
that three decades of neoliberalism has produced under the
famous Anglo-Saxon model (Gray 1998), that is, the freeing
up of markets, particularly those involved in finance, which
were formerly thought to be capable of regulating themselves.
People’s reaction to this kind of news is instructive and
reveals a great deal about their view of the world. When the
findings of the United Nations study were first announced in
the Guardian newspaper in England in 2006, Madsen Pirie,
an economist then directing the Adam Smith Institute in
London—a free-market think tank—commented on the fig-
ures, disagreeing with a statement by Oxfam that the current
distribution of wealth is unfair and ought somehow to be
corrected:
The implicit assumption behind this [assertion] is that there
is a supply of wealth in the world and some people have
too much of that supply. In fact wealth is a dynamic; it is
constantly created. We should not be asking who in the past
has created wealth and how we can get it off them. . . .
Instead the question should be how more and more people
could create wealth. (Guardian, December 6, 2006)
One frequently hears these references to wealth creation
nowadays in the media, generally made by financiers, pundits,
and politicians, in statements that invariably suggest we can
all somehow join in the process. They go unchallenged be-
cause they express an almost sacred proposition lying at the
heart of the worldview sustaining the relatively unregulated
form of capitalism that now prevails in most countries. Such
remarks are in fact a kind of category mistake, as we will see
below, and are ironic at a time when an unprecedented
amount of this “created” wealth—that is, virtual wealth in
the form of finance capital—has suddenly vanished, inducing
a global economic crisis and precipitating the most massive
bailout of private-sector entities by government and “the pub-
lic”—that is, of banks and bankers and wealthy investors in
general—that the world has ever seen.
Note that if real wealth, the kind that cannot abruptly
disappear, is not constantly created, then the argument against
redistributing it by imposing upper limits on its accumulation
and consumption quickly falls apart. Certainly the argument
would be greatly weakened if the creative process supposedly
lying at the heart of global capitalism were shown to be an
illusion. This would clearly be welcomed by members of the
Occupy Wall Street movement, who in 2011 took to the streets
all over the world to express outrage about the highly skewed
Trawick and Hornborg Revisiting the Image of Limited Good
distribution but who seemed to be searching for a coherent
alternative vision to guide them.
In order to debunk the proposition that people create
wealth and to see more clearly how the global system works
from an ecological or materialist point of view, the properties
of two basic kinds of wealth must be distinguished and the
common mistake of confusing them by using the concepts
interchangeably—as in the above example—must be cor-
rected. Such clarifications form part of a radical critique that
has emerged during recent decades through the work of eco-
logical economists, one whose implications for worldview
have yet to be recognized widely, even in affluent parts of the
world. Several observers have noted a widespread tendency
to confuse the two basic forms of wealth, evident today among
experts and nonexperts alike, the first of whom was Nobel
laureate Frederick Soddy (1921, 1926).
“Real wealth”—sometimes referred to as “productive cap-
ital,” but a category still in need of precise definition—can
be said to consist of material goods such as fossil fuels after
they have been extracted and refined; other raw materials that
have been transformed from their natural state; land that has
been altered to make it habitable or productive; food of all
kinds; manufactured goods such as tools, machinery, and
technology; and consumer items in general. As Marx was the
first to point out, these tangible forms of wealth, which typ-
ically become traded commodities, are produced through the
expenditure of human energy, that is, labor, which imbues
raw materials with utility or use value as well as with exchange
and surplus value. But the adding of that value also requires
the expenditure of huge amounts of extrasomatic or non-
human energy, a vital input on which he placed far less em-
phasis.1 As both Soddy and Georgescu-Roegen (1971a, 1971b,
1975) later observed, such inputs are finite and, in a situation
of growing population, increasingly scarce, a point that echoed
the early argument of Malthus.
“Virtual wealth,” on the other hand—sometimes referred
to as “finance capital” or, more usefully, “credit money”
(Graeber 2011)—consists of intangible and abstract forms of
wealth such as stocks, bonds, securities, and derivatives: paper
or even merely digital assets that originate in the issuing of
credit and debt and the simultaneous creating of money by
banks. Although people do create such wealth—nowadays
mainly bankers at the behest of governments—its value is
merely symbolic, potential, or virtual, that is, largely imagi-
nary and effectively projected into the future.2 Note that very
little expenditure of energy is required to produce such virtual
1. No less than other economists since the days of the physiocrats,
Marx at times appears to have confused physics and economics (cf.
Hornborg 2014b). It is always potentially misleading, and thus inadvis-
able, to apply anthropocentric concepts such as “wealth” or “use value”
to physical quantities such as energy. The notion of “real wealth” should
thus be provided with quotation marks.
2. The abstract nature of pecuniary wealth was evident even before
the advent of paper money, but the material constraints of gold and silver
at least implied a physical limitation on the creation of money.
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3
wealth and very little labor and raw materials as well, a fact
that highlights the contrast being made here and that un-
derlines the entirely symbolic and socially constructed nature
of the resulting value. If “real wealth” ultimately consists of
inputs of physical matter-energy, virtual wealth is imaginary
or fictive in the sense that it does not require such inputs.
Essentially consisting of a kind of promissory note on fu-
ture flows of income, paper money and other virtual assets
do not degrade with time, as does everything else in the
physical world, including the sun on which all life on Earth
depends. On the contrary, they have the unique property of
growing exponentially and increasing in value at compound
rates of interest, thereby contradicting the laws of thermo-
dynamics, nature’s most fundamental laws (Soddy 1921,
1926). By reproducing themselves in this ultimately illusory
way, such virtual assets act as powerful catalysts that increase
the production and consumption of real wealth, further ac-
celerating the ongoing and linked processes of wealth con-
centration and thermodynamic decline, as we will see below.
Thus their “creation” is ultimately—and quite inevitably—a
destructive process, that is, destructive of order, as a number
of ecological economists have pointed out, and as a growing
number of people in the world now seem to understand.
Virtual Wealth, Financialization, and Crisis
In order to illustrate the defining characteristic of finance
capital and to show how the “creation of wealth” works, let
us say that someone—either a real individual or a “juridical”
one, that is, a corporation—takes out a loan of $1,000 from
a bank. The first thing to note is that no cash actually changes
hands when credit is given in these transactions; today they
merely consist of an exchange of promissory notes, or prom-
ises to pay with future income or assets, issued by both parties.
The interest-bearing note of debt will remain with the bank
of origin, to be paid off by the borrower at compound interest,
with the cash coming from their future wages or, in the case
of a business firm, from future profits. Note that this debt,
a flow of future income, has been “created” by the bank only
in the sense that the flow would not go where it ultimately
ends up without the issued credit. The material and energetic
inputs required for the financed activity have not been created
because without the lending agreement, these tangible assets
would merely be spent up and used up by someone else in
some other way. Nothing real has been created except a new
creditor/debtor relationship and a corresponding change in
the flow of the future income of the debtor. To speak here
of the “creation of wealth” is therefore to engage in a fun-
damental mystification that obscures the heart of what is really
going on and draws attention away from the ensuing deg-
radation and dissipation of all the necessary energy and ma-
terial resources.
Meanwhile, the borrowed money, if spent as a unit on some
investment or on consumption, will end up as a set of elec-
tronic digits in an account file in another bank. Under current
 4 Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 1, February 2015
political conditions, the bank can then lend most of that
fictitious money again at compound interest—as before, with-
out any currency actually changing hands—issuing more
credit and thereby creating more virtual wealth in a sort of
repeating loop (Korten 2001:182–185; Soddy 1921:24–56,
1926:303–305). This process is widely misunderstood today;
people commonly assume that it is the savings of individuals,
or their monthly earnings entrusted to banks in personal
checking accounts, that is lent and passed on temporarily to
other people. In fact only a very small amount comes from
that source; the rest is simply created by the banks out of
nothing—and profited on through the charging of compound
interest—when bankers decide to take on a certain amount
of risk and to issue credit (Coggan 2011; Daly and Farley
2003; Douthwaite 1996; Graeber 2011; Lancaster 2010).
The idea that banks actually “lend” money to people in
these situations, temporarily giving up something that belongs
to them, which justifies the notion that banks and bankers
should be paid interest for the “opportunity cost” of the lent
capital, is largely an illusion, one that has long been promoted
by a transnational capitalist class of extremely wealthy people
(Sklair 2000) who profit from the confusion at the expense
of everyone else. What the banks are seemingly giving up is
merely the future product of their debtors’ own labor, which
they are effectively extracting beforehand.
As many authors have noted, such “borrowed” but actually
created money is then lent by the banks again and again, to
consumers and to businesses, at compound interest, and also
lent by banks to each other. In the United States, fractional
reserve requirements supposedly restrict the amount to 90%,
or $900 of the initial $1,000 loan. This ultimately means—as
Herman Daly, David Korten, David Graeber, and others have
pointed out—that, through the continual relending of this
shrinking 90%, every $1,000 deposited within the banking
system soon multiplies into $10,000 of newly created digital
money, all bearing interest and accumulating in the accounts
of banks (Korten 2001:182–185). This process of “wealth cre-
ation” actually drives the printing of money and determines
the money supply in most developed countries, a fact that
again is not widely understood. Modern paper currency—the
essence of Soddy’s virtual wealth—is physically created by
banks out of nothing through the issuing of credit and the
creation of debt, such as that incurred by governments in
order to finance wars, whether “cold” or “hot” (Graeber
2011).
In the United States it is the Federal Reserve Bank, which
is merely a consortium of privately owned banks headed by
a government-appointed chairman, that does this. The
world’s other central banks, such as the Bank of England and
the European Central Bank, operate in basically the same way.
In each case an initial government debt, underwritten by pur-
chased treasury bonds, is monetized by the reserve “bank”
and the respective national mint through the printing of cash
money and then circulated widely by lending it to other pri-
vate banks, which in turn lend it to businesses and to indi-
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viduals. What this means is that if everyone involved were to
suddenly pay off their debts while doing no more lending
there would soon be no money in circulation, a fact of which
relatively few people seem to be aware.
Nowadays, in the era after the abandonment of the gold
standard in 1971, paper money, like the digital money in bank
accounts—modern forms of what Graeber (2011:73–75) calls
credit money, which itself has a very long history—embodies
and represents nothing more than debt; that is its primary
function. Traded massively worldwide every day as a com-
modity, the value of currency—whether in cash or electronic
form—ultimately rests on the trust and confidence of people
that existing debts will eventually be repaid, even though that
would be disastrous if it really happened. In many countries,
there are no capital reserve requirements and no reserve bank-
ing system, particularly the offshore tax havens and centers
of global finance. There the amount of self-reproducing
wealth created by private banks through the “lending” of
money is potentially limitless.
All of this is to say nothing about the practice—also largely
unregulated today—of banks selling the consumer debt cre-
ated through their lending, of repackaging it and selling it to
each other and to wealthy investors as a commodity, while
insuring themselves against any possible future loss due to
default on the initial loans. In the case of the housing market,
the resale of this debt and the buying of the insurance—in
the form of derivatives such as “collateralized debt obliga-
tions” and “credit default swaps”—became so massive by 2008
that it brought the entire system of global finance to the brink
of collapse. Note that this reselling is just as dubious, from
a moral point of view, as the right to create money by issuing
credit and interest-bearing debt in the first place. We hear a
great deal today about the responsibility of debtors to repay
loans and to avoid bankruptcy for the benefit of society but
nothing about the duty of creditors to hold on to the resulting
debt and to fully absorb the risk they have undertaken.
This is the legacy ultimately created by the political deci-
sion, made early in the sixteenth century in Europe, to legalize
usury. That pivotal decision to recognize the opportunity cost
of lending coinage—real-wealth money made from naturally
scarce gold and silver—was endorsed by Luther and later by
Calvin during the Protestant Reformation, which eventually
forced the Pope and other leaders of the Catholic Church to
follow along (Graeber 2011:321–323; Hyde 1983:122–140).
Initially the interest rate was limited by the early European
states to no more than 5% per year, and usury continued to
be closely regulated thereafter through caps on the rate right
up until the financial system was deregulated almost com-
pletely at the end of the twentieth century. In any case, that
decision ultimately led to the invention of a wide array of
purely virtual forms of wealth—paper money and its many
derivatives—all based on lending and on usury, a practice
that was previously considered to be exploitative and inher-
ently sinful by Christians and Muslims alike.
Today, this process of magical multiplication of other peo-
Trawick and Hornborg Revisiting the Image of Limited Good
ple’s future income—that is, of the benefits of making loans
but not the material and other associated costs of doing it—
ultimately generates a huge amount of virtual wealth, all bear-
ing interest, thereby generating the enormous profits and ex-
orbitant salaries that have come to characterize the banking
sector in the era of financial deregulation. Those profits are
generally reinvested today, speculatively, within the financial
sector and used in the purchase or sale of other forms of
finance capital in an effort to increase their yield continuously.
Many of those extremely lucrative “instruments” were only
recently created thanks to deregulation; and many—such as
the commodity indexes widely traded by hedge funds, a wid-
ening array of derivatives, and the opportunity to engage in
high-frequency trading more generally—are exclusively avail-
able to members of the transnational or global elite.
The entire financial system has become highly unstable as
a result because of the uncontrolled spreading of risk together
with the accompanying concentration of profit, which now
threaten the future of most people on the planet (Krugman
2008, 2012; Radelet and Sachs 1999; Stiglitz 2010). The system
has always been unstable, for that is a part of its inner logic
of creating and accumulating wealth, but deregulation has
made it more volatile now than ever before (Harvey 2010).
The current situation, wherein the famous “moral hazard”
has been allowed to become structural or endemic to the
banking system—so that it massively shifts future income
from debtors to creditors, from the increasingly poor to the
increasingly rich—led the editor of the world’s most prom-
inent financial newspaper, Martin Wolf (2008) of the Financial
Times in London, to say recently, “No other industry has a
comparable talent for privatizing gains and socializing losses.”
The lifelong servicing of personal debt through continual
interest payments to agents in the financial, insurance, and
real estate sectors of the economy has, in the view of some
analysts, become the “new road to serfdom” (Hannan 2010;
Hudson 2006; Toussant 2004), which people today tend to
embark on without even thinking about it. A permanent re-
lationship of dependency on finance capitalists for credit now
seems to be widely accepted as somehow natural or certainly
necessary for modern life. This personal relationship may help
to explain people’s complacency about the recent bank bail-
outs, which, along with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
(Stiglitz and Blimes 2008), have created enormous national
deficits that have effectively mortgaged the future of hundreds
of millions of people, especially the young. Note that this
situation is analogous to the paralyzing debt servitude that
people in “Third World” countries experienced during the
1970s through the 1990s, a legacy of economic dependency
that has not gone away. Instead, such servitude has become
the defining feature of modern economic life under globali-
zation.
Most people in the world now spend the majority of their
working lives, that is, of their labor time, working for someone
else—generally a big corporation or a subcontractor of such
a corporation—that is itself concerned with increasing profits
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5
and accumulating more and more finance capital for its share-
holders and its top executives (the fiduciary duty of the cor-
porations and their chief executive officers). Whether they
work in the service or the manufacturing sector, such people
are engaged throughout every working day in “making
money” and “creating wealth” for someone else, while at an
individual level this is mainly done in order to (1) satisfy the
immediate subsistence, education, and health-care needs of
family members, thus reproducing the household as a unit
of production, and (2) pay off their taxes and their accu-
mulating debt. Meanwhile, the hope of an accompanying
wage increase, adjusted for inflation—of growth in their “real”
income in “real” dollars—to support all the previous con-
sumption, fades and has been doing so for several decades
now for most people, even in “developed” countries like the
United States.
The experience of living under the new debt servitude—
so increasingly like the lived colonial reality of poor and ex-
ploited people everywhere but especially those in Latin Amer-
ica (see Escobar 2010a; Mignolo 2010; Walsh 2010)—is one
of working harder and harder, faster and faster, just to try to
stay in the same place relative to everyone else, as many critics
have observed. The same logic applies to the ongoing inten-
sification of resource extraction (Pérez Rincón 2006). This,
paradoxically, is how open-system thinking is generated in
most “modern” people and how the hegemony of the unlim-
ited-good worldview is ultimately maintained. Such people
simply have to believe that all of this effort, all of this fruitless
daily struggle in fighting a losing battle, is somehow mutually
beneficial to everyone in the long run in a fluctuating and
cyclical kind of “positive-sum” game (cf. Wright 2000).
Unless they are subalterns or indigenous people—who of-
ten tend to know that the “game” has a different logic and
that the struggle will in fact never cease—such people cling
to a basic faith that it will all somehow come right in the
end, with the market’s invisible hand doing its promised
magic by redistributing all of that “created” wealth, trickling
it down so that their children, too, can eventually benefit.
Today, after the recent financial collapse, they do this even as
it becomes increasingly obvious that the collective future of
those children has effectively been mortgaged. Such faith can
only be maintained, in a seemingly rational and logical man-
ner, within an expanding universe wherein wealth—that is,
real as well as virtual wealth—is continually being created.
This, we assert, is the sacred proposition lying at the heart of
the open-system worldview of global capitalism. But no such
universe exists.
The awareness of bankers, on the other hand, is not difficult
to fathom, as they now spend most of their work time gam-
bling with the money—that is, with the commoditized debt—
of other people while off-loading all of the associated risk.
There can no longer be any illusion among them of creating
any wealth within an expanding physical world. Given the
magnitude of the economic crisis that such thinking has in-
duced around the globe, and the real possibility that such
 6 Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 1, February 2015
periodic crises will now be allowed to continue (Harvey 2010;
Volker 2010), as well as the protracted daily struggle of most
people merely to survive and to stay employed in the game,
an obvious question arises: will a moment ever come when
the majority of people finally see what is going on and decide
they have had enough and their worldview suddenly changes?
David Graeber (2011:365), our most eloquent authority on
the whole phenomenon of debt,3 notes that Henry Ford once
said that “if ordinary Americans found out how the banking
system really worked, there would be a revolution tomorrow.”
Such a comment, given its original source, confirms the extent
of the public’s mystification about the nature and the origins
of wealth.
The steady, credit-driven growth of consumption during
the last 30 years created a rising tide of optimism in global
society that has now abruptly been reversed. That sudden
change, brought on by the ongoing crisis, has effectively called
into question certain secular myths that are all derived from
the sacred presupposition underlying the dominant capitalist
worldview. These too are central fictions supporting free-mar-
ket ideology and sustaining the culture of overconsumption
that prevails so widely today, especially in the global North.
They include the popular and populist metaphor that “a rising
tide lifts all boats.”
The current global distribution of household wealth, which
has grown steadily more skewed for several decades, shows
that the metaphor is a false and misleading one. A global “free
market” is, after all, just a massive system of voting in which
people vote with their money, and the more money one has,
the more votes he or she gets (Chang 2007). Starting with
the neoliberal revolutions of Reagan and Thatcher, the po-
litical process of most states has effectively been distorted and
subverted in this fundamental way, co-opting the very heart
of democracy and other forms of modern governance.
The end result has been the accumulation of vast amounts
of finance capital by an increasingly wealthy transnational
class of people—the famous 1%, who are the world’s main
creditors—at the expense of the majority, the other 99%, who
are the world’s debtors. The conflict of interest between bor-
rowers and lenders that underlies such “growth,” although
seemingly new—and certainly becoming more intense every
day—is in fact a fundamental one with a long history that
lies at the very core of the “free market” and indeed of modern
democracy (Coggan 2011; Graeber 2011).
The facts of postmodern life have yet to dislodge another
pervasive idea, strongly promoted today by the corporate me-
dia, that we can all somehow become rich and famous in a
world potentially consisting of winners and no real or per-
manent losers. We all can have our 15 minutes of fame and
can cash in heavily on that moment when it arrives; we too
3. It is noteworthy, however, that Graeber’s (2001, 2007, 2011) vo-
luminous and insightful critiques of conventional economic theory are
completely silent on material aspects such as energy, technology, and
ecology.
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can be a star, be rich and famous, and have all the luxury
goods and the associated “bling.” Such bits of conventional
wisdom, reflected today in the expanding plethora of reality
TV shows, in turn express a “positive-sum” or open-system
model of the global economy, the view—strongly promoted
for decades now by free-market economists—that the world
consists of an unlimited and expanding “pie” of wealth. This
essentially inflationary model is strongly appealing because it
depicts a world where everyone can prosper without limit,
with no need for anyone to sacrifice for the benefit of others—
for example, the next generation—by forgoing any oppor-
tunities to consume. Such financial folklore again rests on the
sacred postulate that wealth is created by people, so that it is
not “subtractable” or characterized by the quality that econ-
omists call “rivalness,” of which more will be said below.
If such false propositions are seen as true, then people’s
decisions about spending money and about consuming more
generally appear not to have any third-party effects, any op-
portunity costs or resulting losses in quality of life that are
borne by someone else. That belief, too, is simply false, as
Herman Daly and Richard Farley, two of the founders of
ecological economics, have noted in discussing the concept
of virtual wealth and other insights presented in the early
work of Frederick Soddy.
This undisciplined, imaginary magnitude was used as a sym-
bol and counter for real wealth, which has an irreducible
physical dimension, and cannot be created or annihilated.
Money is a problem precisely because it leads us to think
that wealth behaves like its symbol, money; that because it
is possible for a few people to live on interest, it is possible
for all to do so; that because money can be used to buy
land, and land can yield a permanent revenue, therefore
money can yield a permanent revenue. (Daly and Farley
2003:255)
The fact is that money, which symbolizes only debt, cannot
and will not do this kind of magic for everyone. The notion
that it can is, like all illusions, based on a fundamental mis-
perception of reality along with a deliberate, widespread, and
very clever bit of ideological sleight of hand.
Production as Destruction: The Finite
Materiality of Real Wealth
Real wealth, unlike its virtual counterpart, is something that
human beings do not and cannot create in godlike fashion
the way they create ideas and symbolic phenomena such as
value. Yet the whole episteme of modern or Western culture—
the philosophical and metaphysical tradition lying at its core
and dating all the way back to Descartes—ascribes that il-
lusory power to humankind, that is, to man (Foucault 1970;
Grosfoguel 2010:68). As a category, real wealth consists of the
transformed products of low-entropy forms of matter-energy
that are themselves scarce by definition and subject to nature’s
laws. Such wealth—sometimes referred to as “productive cap-
Trawick and Hornborg Revisiting the Image of Limited Good
ital” but basically just manufactured “stuff”—being a highly
ordered form of matter-energy, can only be transferred from
one person to another, converted into a different and less-
ordered form, and ultimately consumed and degraded, lead-
ing in every case to a gradual increase of heat, waste, and
disorder (Georgescu-Roegen 1971a, 1971b, 1975). Its pro-
duction takes place within a largely closed planetary system—
that is, one that can exchange energy and information with
its cosmic environment but not significant inputs of matter
(Martinez-Alier 1987; Rifkin 1989). Within such a system the
“creation” of wealth is an illusion because real-wealth pro-
duction is a physically destructive process.
Far from increasing the total amount of order and well-
being existing on the planet, as neoliberal theorists would
have us believe, economic growth—the increasing per capita
consumption of goods and services—steadily reduces it, caus-
ing increasing disorder within the system as a whole. To the
extent that the world economy is fundamentally dependent
on limited stocks of mineral resources such as fossil fuels,
phosphates, and metal ores, the model of a limited world
inevitably in decline merely expresses the Second Law of Ther-
modynamics, the famous entropy law, as we will see below.
It is not derived, like the other worldview, from a narrative
generated by affluent men jostling for wealth, power, and
prestige in the playing of some language game; rather, it ex-
presses a single, universal, and potentially revolutionary truth.
In the long run there is no way that the majority of the
world’s people can benefit from such growth, which is in fact
destructive of order, that is, of usable raw materials and avail-
able energy. Admittedly, conceiving the ideas and technolog-
ical insights that underlie production is very creative indeed—
sometimes even miraculously so—but the process of indus-
trial transformation itself is exactly the opposite, as Geor-
gescu-Roegen, the founder of ecological economics, pointed
out long ago. Why, then, do we call it “growth” and continue
to speak—as Bill Clinton so enthusiastically does—of “grow-
ing the economy?” Perhaps it would be best if, when talking
about wealth in general, we dispensed with the metaphor of
creating it.
All of the above points would be true of the global economy
no matter how we chose to construct it. But note the full
extent of our reliance today on a limited and very dirty supply
of fossil fuels. In the United Kingdom, roughly 88% of the
total energy consumed by people each day comes from these
(International Energy Agency 2004, 2009), while the much
bigger economy of the United States is just as dependent, with
hydrocarbons now accounting for approximately 86% of its
energy consumption. The United States uses up a huge per-
centage—approximately 30%—of the planet’s dwindling oil
stock. This is to say nothing of petroleum’s importance as a
raw material in making plastics and other synthetic com-
pounds, materials that form a major component of the built
environment in affluent parts of the world and that are now
the predominant form of waste or trash contaminating both
terrestrial and marine ecosystems. According to the Inter-
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7
national Energy Agency (2009, 2010, 2013), we have nearly
reached—almost exactly as predicted—the critical consump-
tion threshold known as “peak oil.” The recent surge of oil
coming from fracking in the United States and from the rising
exploitation of tar sands in Canada are not exceptions to this
phenomenon, as many people seem to think, but rather clear
illustrations of it. At a global level, more than 80% of the
total energy consumed daily by people in one form or another
now comes from nonrenewable fossil fuels, a figure that varies
significantly among countries but has generally shown a dra-
matic increase, especially in developing nations, during the
last few decades.
In a world characterized by continued population expan-
sion and the increasing per capita consumption of finite non-
renewable resources, the more we squander the limited re-
sources that are available, by converting them into physical
wealth, the faster the accompanying environmental decline
and the bigger and more disruptive of our lives the problems
of poverty, pollution, and climate change will become. In
effect, the less time we will have as a species to make other
and better institutional arrangements (see Rifkin 1989:64–65).
All of the seemingly creative activities we engage in require
raw materials and extrasomatic energy, and all of them con-
sume and degrade that matter-energy, most of which is a
direct substitute for displaced human labor. As Georgescu-
Roegen noted, like Soddy (1926) before him, “In entropy
terms, the cost of any biological or economic enterprise is
always greater than the product. . . . Any such activity nec-
essarily results in a deficit” (1971b:80, emphasis added).
This, rather than the fictions of wealth creation, the rising
economic tide, and the self-regulating market, is what science,
both natural science and social science, now tells us. In the
physical world, and in the “real economy,” the creation of
wealth is an illusion, because to produce it, to accumulate it,
and to consume it is fundamentally to degrade and to destroy.
The current global system of economic and cultural produc-
tion is thus violent by its very nature, a violence in which all
affluent people are to some degree complicit. Agribusiness,
strangely enough, provides the best illustration of all of these
points. In the United States and other “developed” countries,
spectacular yields per hectare are achieved by virtually pump-
ing extracted petroleum products back into the ground and
into the air—tractor fuel, petrochemical fertilizers, and in-
secticides—while rapidly eroding the topsoil and mining the
groundwater stored in underlying aquifers. This is what most
farmers now do on a daily basis, whether they work for an
agribusiness corporation or are struggling to hold on to a
family farm. The self-contradiction that this generally in-
volves, the utter negation of the traditional values that have
always underlain stewardship of the land, has been empha-
sized by many people (e.g., Berry 1977, 1981), as has the
extent of the resulting cognitive dissonance and stress that
many farmers now suffer from. From a scientific point of
view, such creation through destruction is the defining feature
of economic growth as we now define it.
 8 Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 1, February 2015
The efficiency of the U.S. food production system, as mea-
sured by its energy input-to-output ratio, is shockingly low
and utterly unsustainable, as most farmers today must be
keenly aware, simply because it costs them so much money
and drives them so far into debt to continue to participate
in that energy-intensive system. For every kilocalorie of food
energy consumed by people in America today, 10 kilocalories
of energy—mostly petroleum derived—are consumed and
made unavailable for anyone else on the planet to use in the
future (Giampietro and Pimentel 1993, 1994; Pimentel 1993).
A large part of this consists of fuel for tractors and other
equipment to replace the labor that has been displaced from
the cultivation process, but the greatest amount is expended
on packaging and on transport after the food leaves the farm.
In the short space of 50 years, this basic distortion of ag-
riculture by agribusiness has “progressed” to such an extent
that fossil-fuel inputs now constitute approximately 60% of
the total energy used in food production, while the solar
energy harnessed through photosynthesis accounts for only
40%. Meanwhile, the nutritional content of our food has
declined dramatically even as the environmental costs of the
industrialized production process have steadily gone up. Be-
cause agriculture is the sector of the economy tied most di-
rectly to solar energy capture—the process on which the food
chain and the whole web of life depend—there can be no
clearer illustration of the fact that economic “growth” as we
have conceived it historically is fundamentally both inefficient
and destructive. The belief that this kind of “progress” is
somehow creative and benign and can therefore go on for-
ever—that is, is sustainable—emerged during the heyday of
the seriously flawed worldview that we refer to as “the image
of unlimited good” (Hornborg 1992; Nash 2007).
Vindicating the Image of Limited Good
One of the first anthropologists to employ the concept of
worldview was George Foster (1965), who spoke of a general
“cognitive orientation” that guides people in their behavior
and that is shaped by a set of axioms or presuppositions about
the world and how it works. Pointing out that we are not
necessarily conscious of our worldview or able to say much
about it, because the presuppositions are culturally inherited,
Foster argued that people in peasant societies tend to share
a distinctive model of reality, one profoundly shaped by their
material poverty and the closed nature of their local social
worlds, which as we now know are based on a relatively
sustainable and labor-intensive kind of traditional agriculture
(Mayer 2002; Netting 1993). The central axiom of that model
he called the “image of limited good.”
According to this hypothesized folk understanding, there
is only a limited amount of “good” available in the world;
thus any good that one person acquires and enjoys necessarily
comes at the expense of someone else, denying them of that
same chance to acquire it. Foster insisted that peasants see
their impoverished local worlds as closed systems and that
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they apply this simple idea to everything desirable in life:
access to resources like land, water, and labor; the crops pro-
duced yearly through cultivation of the land; the opportunity
to earn money and enhance one’s social status; and the en-
joyment of less tangible things such as a sense of honor and
prestige or even parental love.
Peasants, he said, are highly aware of their lack of any power
to increase the quantities of these that are available, so that
any such “good,” “like land, is seen as inherent in nature,
there to be divided and re-divided, if necessary, but not to
be augmented” (Foster 1965:296). Consequently, their sub-
sistence-oriented village societies feature norms that discour-
age any effort to acquire more goods and thus to draw at-
tention to oneself or to do anything else that might threaten
the stability of established social relationships, which are based
on the sharing of a prevailing scarcity.
Foster’s argument was criticized for being tautological and
providing a rationale for contradictory kinds of behavior as
well as for lacking scientific rigor (e.g., Kaplan and Saler 1966).
Furthermore, he sided with the “developmentalists” of his
day by expressing confidence that capitalism and the opening
up of rural markets would eventually increase the material
resources available to peasants so that ultimately they would
be able to abandon their traditional worldview and adopt a
more modern one (Nash 2007). Neither he nor most of his
critics ever argued that there really is a limited good out there
and that peasants are more in touch with reality than “mod-
erns” are.
He did, however, point out that a closed-system worldview
could, theoretically, just as easily sustain strong leadership and
lead to widespread cooperation as it could promote envy and
jealousy among individuals, the behavioral outcomes on
which he unfortunately placed the greatest emphasis. In any
case, his work soon faded from view, but it was not forgotten.
As one of the earliest attempts to consider the behavioral
implications of a closed-system worldview, his work was des-
tined to be revived.
Foster’s influence can be seen in the later work of Stephen
Gudeman (1986; Gudeman and Rivera 1990) and other con-
temporary anthropologists, but its implications are most
clearly spelled out by June Nash (2007; also see Nash 1994),
who uses the concept as a central theme in discussing her
years of experience with Mayan people affiliated with the
Zapatista political movement in highland Mexico. She also
employs it in reflecting on her previous experience in working
with displaced peasants and tin miners in Bolivia and an
intervening period of study of Mandalese rice cultivators in
Burma. For her, the idea of limited good is indispensable in
accounting for the remarkable resilience of all of these people
and the rural peasant societies of which they are a part.
The Zapatistas, still the most highly visible political move-
ment of peasants on the world stage, are of course known
for extraordinary forms of leadership and cooperation that
extend across lines of gender, age, and other social divisions
as well as for the practice of direct democracy. Nash portrays
Trawick and Hornborg Revisiting the Image of Limited Good
their ongoing struggle for autonomy and self-defence in the
militarized zone of Chiapas, like other similar confrontations
occurring today in Bolivia and other parts of the global South,
as a conflict between two distinct ways of seeing the world:
the “notion of limited good” and the “specter of the unlimited
good.” And there is no doubt about which of the two world-
views she considers more accurate as a depiction of physical
and social reality.
The growing awareness of the finite nature of the good has
transformed the expectations of unlimited possibilities into
a specter of paradise lost for growing multitudes of impov-
erished people. . . . Those whose response is to declare war
on all who compete for control of diminishing oil, water,
minerals and other resources are beginning to encounter
resistance from social movements that seek to reinforce in-
ternational covenants on the environment and the rights of
the poor. I hope to rescue Foster’s insights on the peasant
worldview and what that may offer for those concerned with
a sustainable future for world populations. (Nash 2007:36)
Nash’s account firmly grounds the peasant worldview in
the practical activity of people—both indigenous people and
those who, like the Zapatistas, also call themselves campesinos,
or peasants—who derive their livelihood from cultivating,
investing their limited labor every day in the exploitation of
scarce resources such as tiny plots of land and inadequate
flows of irrigation water. Her overall argument (see also Nash
1994), like Foster’s before her, implies that when a person’s
subsistence and physical survival—that is, their food or “daily
bread”—come directly from such a limited resource base and
their own constant household labor, they cannot help but to
see the world clearly as it is, a world in which everyone’s
livelihood is similarly derived, that is, from limited and ex-
haustible resources, whether they work in a tiny rainforest
plot or in an office on Wall Street.
There is, of course, an academic version of this general way
of viewing the world, a school of thought in political economy
known as dependency theory. It originated in Latin America
and, despite rumors to the contrary, it too is alive today and
still very much a part of popular culture in the global South,
although perhaps in need of some rejuvenation.
The classic anticolonial formulations of Cardoso, Frank,
Amin, Petras, and others published in the 1960s and 1970s
pointed to the disadvantageous position shared by most peo-
ple in the “underdeveloped” countries lying at the periphery
of the world system, with its historically derived division of
labor. Their arguments focused on the “unequal terms of
exchange” that result from this structural marginality, rooted
in colonialism, which have persisted largely unchanged
through time. These circumstances constrain people in the
developing countries by keeping real wealth, in the form of
primary products (minerals, fossil fuels, other raw materials,
and agricultural produce) along with the profits resulting from
their exportation, flowing out of the periphery and accu-
mulating in the hands of people in the developed countries.
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9
This has been well documented in studies of the so-called
physical trade balances of less-developed nations (e.g., Pérez
Rincón 2006).
The essence of the dependistas’ argument has always been
that the game of global capitalism is fixed in terms of a pre-
determined division of labor and exploitative terms of trade,
and that the net sum of all of this production and interna-
tional trade is basically zero. Wallerstein (1974, 1979, 1984,
1995) took up the challenge of providing a more complex
model in his famous “world-systems” analysis wherein the
same dynamics take place within a three-tiered hierarchy of
core, semiperipheral, and peripheral countries. Widely influ-
ential today, especially among academics and cultural theorists
in Latin America, this formulation places the BRIC nations
(Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and other semiperipheral
countries in the advantageous intermediate position that they
now occupy within the global economy.
According to this body of theory, the vast majority of the
profits generated by the investment of foreign capital in the
developing or peripheral countries—initially for the extrac-
tion of primary products and, nowadays, also increasingly for
the assembly of low-cost consumer items in sweatshops—
have always been repatriated by foreign capitalists to the met-
ropolitan or core countries where they live or put into offshore
bank accounts in order to avoid taxes. The rest has been
exported by the allies of foreign capital—complicit national
elites—into foreign bank accounts and then either used to
finance consumption or reinvested, usually in speculative en-
terprises and in hedge funds. The end result in either case
has been the “development of underdevelopment” (Escobar
1995; Frank 1966): the gradual enrichment of people in the
global North at the expense of most of those in the South,
where the profits resulting from international trade would
otherwise have been invested or spent.
The dependistas’ original argument was somewhat under-
stated, being overly focused on relations of international trade
while largely ignoring the worsening inequalities of wealth
that are evident today within all countries, both the metro-
politan or core ones and those of the semiperiphery and
periphery. As numerous works have subsequently shown (Ar-
righi 1994; Hardt and Negri 2000; Sen 1999; Stiglitz 2002;
Wade 2003)—especially the aforementioned United Nations
study of the world distribution of household wealth (Davies
et al. 2008)—most recent growth has in fact occurred at the
expense of the majority of people in both the developed and
the developing countries. Across the globe it can now be seen
as the internally stratifying and class-based phenomenon that
it always was, which many critical theorists regard as a process
of increasing internal domination and, at a cultural level,
widening “coloniality” (Mignolo and Escobar 2010).
This perspective casts a sceptical and pessimistic light on
the seemingly spectacular growth that is suddenly evident
today in Latin America and even in Africa. The growth now
occurring there is almost entirely based—as the dependistas
originally argued and as some of them ultimately predicted
 10
(O’Hara 2004; Perez 2003; Petras and Veltmayer 2001)—on
the exporting of primary products and now even on the “grab-
bing” of the best agricultural land, as in Africa, mainly to
support the ongoing expansion of industry and consumption
in China and other parts of Asia.
Most of the recent critiques of globalization lend support
to this view in terms of their gloomy prediction of no sig-
nificant social and economic mobility and no substantial long-
term economic gain for the vast majority of the world’s people
(see, e.g., Grosfoguel 2010). It has even been suggested that
some governments in the Southern Hemisphere should con-
sider “decoupling” their economies as much as possible and
moving toward a more self-reliant strategy for development,
particularly in the domain of food production (Barkin 1998;
Bello et. al. 2000; Taylor 1991). Many Latin Americans will
be struck by the fact that this is precisely the kind of “eco-
nomic nationalist” path pursued by governments throughout
Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s by popular leaders
such as Allende, Roldos, Torrijos, and Velasco until they were
deposed and assassinated, allegedly with U.S. government
support (Perkins 2004).
Dependency theory and world-systems analysis continues
to be highly influential today in Latin America and other parts
of the global South, but its star has faded somewhat in recent
years, just at the time when the seemingly spectacular growth
in the hemisphere began to arise. By and large, this body of
work overlooks the crucial role of energy, and despite the
strong focus on primary products and scarce raw materials,
it does not actually portray the global economy as a closed
system. Perhaps its effect has diminished for these very rea-
sons. The irony is that a revival of sorts could easily have
come about long ago, inspired by an unlikely source: eco-
nomic theory.
Economic Theory and Energy: Revisiting the
“Science of Scarcity”
Although it is not widely known outside the academic dis-
cipline, the canonical versions of market theory of the nine-
teenth century were based on a general equilibrium model
that depicted the economy as a closed system governed by
the laws of Newtonian mechanics as well as the newly dis-
covered First Law of Thermodynamics. The global economy
was said to be a closed system in which total economic value
or utility was conserved even as value was converted from
one form into another through production and exchange.
Beinhocker notes some of the implications in a recent over-
view of the history of the discipline.
Traditional economics typically portrays value as a fixed
quantity that is converted from one form to another. . . .
New wealth isn’t actually created; rather, the world begins
with a finite set of resources that are allocated among pro-
ducers, who in turn create a finite set of commodities that
are allocated among consumers. One can allocate that wealth
in ways that are more or less efficient, just as one can burn
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Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 1, February 2015
a lump of coal in ways that are more or less efficient, but
in general equilibrium models the economy can’t create new
wealth any more than a lump of coal can reproduce. This
emphasis on a fixed pie of wealth caused the English econ-
omist Lionel Robbins in 1935 to famously call economics
the “science of scarcity.” (Beinhocker 2005:67)
One would never suspect any of this today, mainly because
the “neoclassical synthesis” emerged in the 1950s, whereby
the traditional theory was abruptly fused with endogenous
growth theory, as Beinhocker goes on to explain. Unfortu-
nately, that awkward synthesis—basically an academic coup
d’état—completely changed the theory of markets as a way
of representing the physical and social worlds. The “fixed pie”
of wealth was replaced with an “expanding-pie” view—one
based on an entirely new and faulty assumption of limitless
and inexhaustible natural resources—which was apparently
more consistent with the political agenda of most economists,
or at least those of the dominant Chicago School, the famous
shapers of the Washington Consensus.
According to the version of events handed down in the
lore of the discipline, the basic elements of the original theory
were established independently by several prominent thinkers
of the nineteenth century: Ricardo, Walras, Jevons, Pareto,
and others. Yet as Mirowski (1984) has shown, those ideas
were generally borrowed or copied directly from physics:
“economic theory was appropriated wholesale from mid-
nineteenth-century physics; utility was redefined so as to be
identical with energy” (8). And if value was to be equated in
the social world with a kind of energy, then that value, ac-
cording to the newly discovered first law, had somehow to
be conserved in economic transactions. Both Mirowski and
Beinhocker criticize early economists for this unacknowledged
borrowing and for inappropriate use of what for them is only
a loosely fitting metaphor: value as a kind of social energy.
Yet they also chide the early theorists for having basically
ignored the second law of thermodynamics, the so-called en-
tropy law.
Mirowski (1991:88–98) casts doubt on the relevance of both
laws to economics and is quick to point out that value or
“utility” is ultimately a subjective and social phenomenon that
cannot simply be reduced to embodied energy, as Georgescu-
Roegen (1971a, 1971b, 1975) emphatically showed. But he
seems to overreact in suggesting that economists today should
abandon energetics altogether. What would the implications
have been for classical market theory as originally formulated
of the second law, which was not widely understood even by
physicists until the latter part of the nineteenth century?
The second law of thermodynamics states that in an isolated
system, energy, although conserved in absolute quantity, in-
evitably undergoes a qualitative change that proceeds in only
one direction. The available or free energy steadily degrades,
turning into bound energy and thereby becoming unavailable
and incapable of doing any further work (Georgescu-Roegen
1971b:76–83). The second law is often dismissed as irrelevant
Trawick and Hornborg Revisiting the Image of Limited Good
to processes in the biosphere, as the earth is not an isolated
but a closed system, receiving a continuous input of energy
from the sun. It is commonly argued that direct use of solar
energy will enable us to recycle dissipated materials to an
extent that would make thermodynamic constraints irrelevant
(e.g., Kåberger and Månsson 2001). Nevertheless, the contin-
ued strong reliance of the world economy on finite stocks of
fossil fuels and other mineral deposits indeed implies that the
entropy law is of crucial significance for economics. Not only
does it mean that we will run out of those finite stocks but
also that the disorder generated in their conversion into com-
modities, for example, carbon dioxide—unlike the heat gen-
erated by biological processes—will remain with us in the
biosphere. Georgescu-Roegen (1993) argued that photovoltaic
power, because of its massive material requirements, cannot
replace fossil fuels as an important source of energy for mod-
ern civilization (cf. Ayres 1998; Hornborg 2014a). He is cur-
rently being vindicated by studies indicating that solar energy
has a comparatively low-energy return on (energy) investment
as well as having significant negative environmental conse-
quences (Andersen 2013; Prieto and Hall 2013; cf. Hornborg
2014a). The trap of our need for material or stored forms of
energy appears to be one that we cannot escape.
Entropy, as a mathematical measure of the disorder or
randomness prevailing in the encompassing system, signifies
gradual degradation increasing inexorably with time. The
early economists, when they appropriated the energy concept,
were only dimly aware of the significance of this increasing
disorder, which of course gives a direction to time and to
history and imparts an irreversibility to all human affairs.
Thus they equated value with energy in general rather than
with available or free energy, as they probably would have had
they been aware of the newly discovered second law. Geor-
gescu-Roegen’s (1971a) insights were to demonstrate that,
rather than being strictly parallel phenomena or being posi-
tively correlated, value and energy are in one sense inversely
correlated in economic processes (Hornborg 1992, 2001). As
the value or utility of a given set of resources is increased
through the transformations that we think of as production,
the remaining energy available in those same resources de-
creases. Again, this illustrates that the production of wealth
is inherently destructive of order.
The implications of considering thermodynamic laws in
economics could have been profound because we cannot “cre-
ate” or increase the total amount of free energy and low-
entropy matter that is available for use on the planet. The
first and second laws, taken together, are simply incompatible
with endogenous growth theory; their proper appreciation
would arguably have prevented the neoclassical synthesis and
precluded the emergence of the expanding-pie worldview,
which is promoted most strongly today by neoclassical econ-
omists, the high priests of capitalism.
Had the early economists correctly equated the “creation”
of value with the degradation of available matter-energy, the
worldview promoted by the discipline today would be radi-
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11
cally different. Value would not be said to be conserved or
even augmented as economic “growth” unfolds within an
expanding global economy founded on the depletion of finite
mineral stocks. Instead, it would be seen as undergoing an
accelerating and inevitable decline, as does the total sum of
matter-energy available, at least under current conditions.
This insight would have strengthened the scientific credibility
of political economy and given dependency theory and related
forms of critical theory greater clarity and force than they
have today.
The opportunity to generate wealth, and thus the oppor-
tunity to prosper economically, would be seen to be just as
limited as the quantities of land and other natural resources—
both renewable and nonrenewable—from which all human
activity (including labor) is ultimately derived. Prosperity
would be regarded as a kind of scarce commodity, achievable
by limited numbers of people during limited periods of time.
Its cost, in terms of the entropy and general disorder pro-
duced, would be capable of being passed on to some other
people in some other place (i.e., externalized) or even in some
other time, as indeed it commonly is, in the form of exported
pollution and waste, widespread environmental degradation,
endemic poverty, and a warming and increasingly unstable
global climate.
The economy would thus be portrayed not as a self-reg-
ulating mechanism, an abstract “free market,” but as the com-
plex political, social, cultural, and material phenomenon that
it actually is, one based on a fundamental and inescapable
scarcity. Some countries would be seen to have occupied a
privileged position in both geographical space and in histor-
ical time, having been effectively able to spend up the future
that other countries might otherwise have experienced. Today
it would be even more obvious that it is a new global class
or society of people—the “high-net-worth” and “ultra-high-
net-worth” individuals now found in very small but growing
numbers in all of the world’s countries—who are effectively
colonizing and displacing the rest of us, gobbling up our
collective future in this way. Certainly our cultural image of
wealth would have changed as a result, along with our illusions
about creating it, and perhaps even our ideas about how that
wealth—more correctly seen as a gift of nature and thus a
form of common property—should rightly be distributed.
Although he lacked this overall clarity of vision, the words of
Alfred Marshall, one of the foremost economists of the early
twentieth century, nevertheless ring true today.
Man cannot create material things. . . . When he is said to
produce material things, he really only produces utilities; or
in other words, his efforts and sacrifices result in changing
the form or arrangement of matter to adapt it better for
the satisfaction of wants. (Marshall 1947:63, cited in Mi-
rowski 1991:290)
 12
The Current Distribution of the Closed-
System Worldview
At this point it might be asked, who subscribes to the closed-
system worldview today and who does not? Although the issue
has never been adequately explored, an “entropic” worldview
(see Rifkin 1989) was clearly traditional at one time to many
of the world’s indigenous peoples, as Nash (2007) insists. It
is still widespread, for instance, among rural populations in
Latin America (Gudeman and Rivera 1990). It is probably
still widespread today among groups inhabiting limited
patches of the Amazon rainforest (see, e.g., Reichel-Dolmatoff
1974, 1978), and it may formerly have prevailed among
hunter-gatherers living in circumscribed territories within
more temperate zones such as aboriginal California (Bean and
Blackburn 1976). At the other end of the spectrum of socio-
cultural complexity, we believe that the closed-system model
probably predominates today among most of the world’s sci-
entists, who intuitively understand that all forms of economic
activity on the planet—like all biological processes—are gov-
erned by the laws of thermodynamics, as Georgescu-Roegen
pointed out several decades ago.
The closed-system worldview is highly consistent with the
political agendas of countless subaltern groups allied with the
worldwide alternative globalization movement who partici-
pate in the biannual World Social Forum (Correa-Leite 2005;
De Sousa 2006; Sen and Waterman 2012). Via Campesina,
the extraordinary global peasant and neopeasant organization,
would be an obvious example. Another example is the mem-
bers of the emerging decolonial movement, an expanding
group of academics—most of them social scientists and crit-
ical culture theorists from Latin America, many of whom are
women—who are exploring collectively the close historical
and ideological links between modernity and coloniality and
who are seeking “un paradigma otro,” another way of thinking
about and talking about the postmodern world (Mignolo and
Escobar 2010:33). Their collective project seeks nothing less
than a fundamental “decolonization” of thought itself (Es-
cobar 2010a; Mignolo 2010; Walsh 2010): to free most people
throughout Latin America and the world from domination
by an alien and modernist Western tradition. We suggest that
a step in this direction might be to adopt, or to endorse, a
closed-system worldview. Indeed, this model is fundamental
to and profoundly compatible with the “relational” worldview
that members of this growing movement, especially Arturo
Escobar (2010b), are now advocating as a kind of culmination
of the whole poststructuralist effort in the humanities and
the social sciences.
The closed-system worldview continues to be widely sus-
tained today by the materiality and the limited and cyclical
nature of the peasant labor process (Trouillot 1988), which
still holds many poor subsistence farmers tightly within its
grasp. This is especially true when the resources being utilized
belong not to individuals but to the peasant community and
are worked to some extent in a communal manner, as we will
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Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 1, February 2015
see below. This subsistence labor, which has always been ig-
nored by economists in their analyses of the dynamics of
capitalism, as Nash has emphasized in her work with the
Zapatistas (Nash 1994), is primarily devoted to reproducing
the peasant household as an economic and social unit, that
is, to maintenance, sustenance, and sustainability, and only
secondarily to accumulating any capital (Mayer 2002; Netting
1993).
The limited labor so continually and heavily invested is of
course gendered labor, with women playing a central role in
that daily household struggle, and often today it is done by
women alone, without the support of a man. Wherever this
subsistence orientation persists—or where a strong appreci-
ation of its economic significance exists, as among the mem-
bers of the decolonial movement—the limited-good world-
view is likely to prevail. Wherever people are being exploited
by forcing them to work harder and harder just in order to
survive and for less and less material gain, that extractive and
essentially colonial reality provides fertile ground for the
emergence of a “limited-good” perspective.
Both of the worldviews under discussion are in fact sub-
scribed to, to some extent, by most people today, whether
knowingly or not. We carry both of them around in our heads,
and we are often confused about how and when to use them
appropriately. The relationship between them is, we would
argue, somewhat paradoxical and homologous to the one that
Parry and Bloch (1989) analyze so compellingly in their ex-
ploration of the two conflicting and competing discourses—
seemingly found in most societies throughout much of human
history—that people engage in when talking about money.
One discourse is a positive one generated by a short-term
view, focusing on the liberating power of money for the “in-
dividual” and his creative pursuit of his own self-interest. The
other is a more negative longer-term view, focussing on the
destructive and ultimately demonic nature of that selfish pur-
suit if allowed to continue unchecked to the point that it
undermines a more fundamental concern for the common
good, thus threatening the very foundation of society. The
strong moral message conveyed by the myths and rituals of
a great many peasant societies throughout the world, Parry
and Bloch (1989) argue, is that the latter discourse must
always take precedence over and somehow limit the former,
as a kind of final judgement about money and the morality
of exchange.
One of the worldviews that we have at our disposal today,
the image of limited good, must now displace and take pre-
cedence over the other, because we now know that it is sup-
ported resoundingly by science as well as by other, more local
regimes of truth and knowledge existing today throughout
the world. It is supported by the other knowledges of many
peoples, many Others, whose voices have for so long been
ignored and silenced, particularly in the global South. Mean-
while, the contrasting and dominant worldview, the image of
unlimited good, has been shown to be literally bankrupt and
utterly refuted. Neoliberalism and free-market theory have
Trawick and Hornborg Revisiting the Image of Limited Good
effectively been dethroned in the wake of the global financial
crisis (see, e.g., Keen 2011), making possible, at least theo-
retically, a dramatic convergence that actually reflects, for the
first time in history, the lived experience of the majority of
people on the planet.
What would be the implications of such a thing happening?
Would people become more cooperative in sharing the limited
amount of “good” that is available, or would they merely
compete and fight over it with even greater intensity, perhaps
being overcome by envy and even resorting to the sort of
witchcraft that seems to be universal in peasant societies?
Rather than a more equitable and cooperative world, the out-
come could be the darker dynamic portrayed in Taussig’s
(1980, 1991) various accounts of “the devil and commodity
fetishism” in South America, or in the Comaroffs’ (1999)
disturbing tales of a new form of human sacrifice geared
toward the trade in people’s body parts that is occurring today
widely in Africa. The implications of such work are clear: as
poor and marginalized but still “traditional” people struggle
to survive in a world characterized increasingly by market-
driven greed and scarcity, they sometimes resort to sorcery
and even to violence in their pursuit of wealth and power.
That some people do so is hardly surprising, given the es-
sentially magical and latently violent nature of the dominant
capitalist worldview (see Austen 1993).
Beinhocker (2005:430), in a recent book on the origins of
wealth, points to the crucial importance of worldview in de-
termining the kind of economic behavior that people engage
in. He emphasizes the need for a cultural conviction that there
are payoffs for reciprocity and self-restraint but claims that
“societies that believe in a fixed pie of wealth have a difficult
time engendering cooperation.” No evidence is given to sup-
port the latter assertion. Again, the statement reflects the prej-
udice that is nearly universal today among economists: surely
people will only cooperate with each other if they are part of
a system that is somehow expanding in terms of total available
wealth. But a “zero-sum” or “fixed-pie” worldview can just
as easily support strong leadership and widespread cooper-
ation as it can encourage envy and mutual mistrust among
individuals; that is the point that Nash makes so convincingly
in her reflections on the Zapatistas. Beinhocker’s error, like
so many other economists before him, is to assume that in
a fixed-pie context where “the good” is seen to be limited,
there are no rewards for cooperation. Nothing could be fur-
ther from the truth, as the ethnographic record clearly shows.
The Prospects for Cooperation in a Closed-
System World: Lessons from Water
Management in Irrigation
One of the major developments of the last 30 years in an-
thropology and other social sciences has been the emergence
of a vast literature on the management of “common-prop-
erty” or “common-pool” resources, forms of natural wealth
that belong, not to individuals, but to communities and to
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13
local user groups (Bromley 1992; McKay and Acheson 1987;
National Research Council 1986; Ostrom 1990, 2000; Ostrom
et. al. 1999, 2002). A great surge of studies has focussed on
the communal management of pasturelands, forests, inshore
fisheries, and water for irrigation, many of them inspired by
a desire to refute Hardin’s (1968) classic argument on “the
tragedy of the commons.” These analyses reveal the complex
dynamics behind many local situations, documenting and ex-
plaining many different outcomes, positive and negative, in
people’s efforts to cooperate in sharing scarce resources. But
on the whole they show that human beings, when they face
a mutual scarcity, are quite capable of working together and
resolving the “commons dilemma,” the supposedly inevitable
conflict between the interests of the individual, assumed by
Hardin to be entirely selfish, and the cooperative needs of the
group.
The solution, and the key to avoiding a tragic outcome, is
for individuals to exert a form of mutual self-restraint, as
Hardin noted, each limiting her consumption so that the
resource can be utilized in a sustainable way that is beneficial
for everyone in the long run. A great number of ethnographic
studies have shown that local resource users are capable, by
working together, of devising their own institutions or rules
that accomplish this. They do not necessarily need to be co-
erced into doing it by an authoritarian state—one of Hardin’s
proposed solutions—nor would they benefit from having the
resource privatized so that it can be allocated in a more selfish
and competitive way by markets—his other proposed solu-
tion. At a relatively small scale and on a local level, people
can do this on their own without a supporting institutional
context provided by outsiders, and they have been doing it
for a very long time.
The ethnographies in each case show how a fixed pie of
natural wealth is shared within one or more user groups, a
scarce resource that is “subtractable” in the sense that one
person’s use of it comes at the expense of everyone else by
reducing the overall amount that is available. Natural re-
sources cannot be expanded, or they can be increased only
with great difficulty; they can merely be recycled at very low
cost by natural ecosystems and thus renewed. Their avail-
ability is ultimately driven by gravity and by the cyclical dy-
namics of the earth’s hydrosphere, and here of course we are
speaking of water, the quintessential subtractable common-
pool resource, particularly water used for irrigation. This
unique resource, we suggest, can usefully be viewed here as
being a kind of proxy for, or as being representative of, real
material wealth.
Some distinctive characteristics of water as a common-pool
resource must also be noted. First of all, the boundaries of a
sustainable irrigation system are necessarily fixed, like the
boundaries of the planet, that is, the land area irrigated and
the total number of people using the resource. But the amount
of water flowing through the systems every year is not. That
flow or throughput varies widely between years but diminishes
notably every year during the dry season, thereby imposing
 14
a cyclical scarcity, somewhat like that of the fluctuating global
market. People can do nothing to increase the total amount
that becomes available for use in a given year, as all irrigators
understand and can clearly see in their daily work. They can
only use the water more or less efficiently by wasting or not
wasting the resource, and by obeying or not obeying the rules
for using and consuming it. And in sustainable irrigation
systems, that choice of behavior directly determines the length
of the irrigation cycle.
Again and again in Peru, Mexico, the southwestern United
States, Spain, India, Nepal, Bali, and the Philippines, relatively
autonomous communities of irrigators—peasants and small
subsistence farmers in nearly every case—have been shown
to share this vital form of natural wealth in a sustainable way
by imposing upper limits on their consumption of a scarce
resource on which the lives and livelihoods of all households
depend.4 This kind of self-restrained collective action, now
known to characterize a great many local hydraulic societies
throughout the world, is an achievement that policy makers,
until recently, thought to be impossible. The benefits and costs
of operating the systems and using the water are fully inter-
nalized by the community in each case, through a basic kind
of circularity or self-closure, that is, the exclusion of outsiders
from using the resource (Trawick, Ortega, and Palau 2014).
The benefits are realized and internalized through an intensive
labor process in which all households are continually engaged:
that of distributing the water daily, of using it—mainly for
household subsistence—and of maintaining the canal system
each year through communal and usually highly festive group
work. Most of this labor, it should be noted, falls into the
special category of work being discussed here, that is, that
intended primarily for subsistence and for the production of
use value as opposed to exchange value.5
Comparative analysis of data on sustainable irrigation sys-
tems in a wide array of countries shows that these communal
systems, which are bottom-up forms of social and political
organization, together constitute the most striking example
of convergent social evolution ever identified in the ethno-
graphic record (Trawick, Ortega, and Palau 2014). They are
based on the central principle of equity or fairness, which
seems to be defined and achieved by all of these local farmers
throughout the world in basically the same way (Trawick
2001a, 2001b, 2002a, 2002b, 2003, 2005, 2008, 2010). The
4. A large number of studies document positive outcomes in com-
munity-managed irrigation; they are summarized in Trawick, Ortega, and
Palau (2014). For a debate about how equity is defined in these systems
and how much they all have in common in that respect, see Trawick
(2005) and Boelens and Davila (1998) as well as Beccar, Boelens, and
Hoogendam (2002) and Boelens and Hoogendam (2002).
5. It is important to note, however, that in Valencia, Spain, one of the
largest and most complex successful systems that has been studied (Glick
1970; Maass and Anderson 1978; Ostrom 1990; Trawick 2008; Trawick,
Ortega, and Palau 2014), the irrigators are all small commercial farmers
who do cultivate for household subsistence but mainly produce for the
markets and supermarkets that today help to provision a city of over a
million people.
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Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 1, February 2015
specific rules—in each case institutions that are local, tradi-
tional, and in that sense collectively chosen—require that the
water scarcity be shared by all users on a single schedule of
rotation in such a way that it affects all land and all landowners
in the same way and to a similar extent.
That achievement is highly significant because the com-
munities are stratified in every case, including both large land-
holders and smaller ones, so that like all human societies, they
contain significant internal differences in wealth. While ir-
rigation is taking place, at a rhythm or pace that is the same
for everyone, a basic proportionality is maintained among
household water rights, a uniform land-to-water ratio that
limits the total volume of water consumed by the farmers
during each distribution round. These upper limits are im-
posed by the farmers simply by following traditional rules
and techniques in carrying out routine work, thereby exerting
numerous forms of self-restraint throughout their daily effort.
A remarkable symmetry is ultimately created, a basic equity
that pervades the existing set of rights and the set of corre-
sponding duties and governs the relationship between rights
and duties. The rules in each case require that the contri-
butions of households to yearly maintenance of the canal
system, in the form of labor, food, money, and other inputs,
be proportional to the amount of irrigated land that each
family has and thus to the amount of water that people use.
Because of this pervasive symmetry created through constant
work—work shaped by communal institutions expressing a
need and a desire for cooperation, fairness, and mutual self-
restraint—and endorsed in most cases by unifying ritual, this
type of system has been called “the moral economy of water”
(Trawick 2001b, 2010).
The studied examples range in complexity from small-scale
systems operated by a single peasant community to multi-
community systems covering many thousands of hectares and
requiring the daily coordinated action of tens of thousands
of small commercial farmers. They exist today in remote cor-
ners of the Andes—the highlands of Ecuador, Peru, and Bo-
livia—in small peasant communities throughout much of the
Middle East and Asia, and in the bustling tourist zone of
Valencia on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, one of the
world’s most cosmopolitan cities. The institutions governing
them in these cases are hundreds of years old, and they appear
to have emerged repeatedly, and often independently, on dif-
ferent continents, forming the heart of distinct Andean and
Islamic hydraulic traditions (Glick 1970; Maass and Anderson
1978; Ostrom 1990, 1992; Trawick 2001b; Trawick, Ortega,
and Palau 2014).
From a practical point of view, fairness in these contexts
has always meant the same thing that it does today: no one
person or household is allowed to accumulate or use so much
water that they jeopardize the rights and the livelihood of
everyone else. In a context of scarcity, no one may irrigate
more often, or use more water, than the prevailing conditions
allow in situations where mutual well-being and the mini-
mization of social conflict are widely shared goals. Similarly,
Trawick and Hornborg Revisiting the Image of Limited Good
people’s duties to give back to the community are propor-
tional to the benefits that they derive from living there and
using its resources.
Such collective agreements are achievable and sustainable
because the canal systems are highly transparent in that com-
munity members are routinely able to monitor each other’s
behavior in the act of irrigating. People can tell through direct
observation whether or not the rules are generally being
obeyed. The rules are simple and known to everyone, re-
quiring the unbroken movement of water—canal by canal
and field by field—through well-defined and contiguous sec-
tors of irrigated land. Consequently, the stealing of water—
the most socially disruptive form of cheating or free riding—
is easily detected, reliably punished, and extremely rare. Order
and self-restraint generally prevail.
Scaling Upward from the Local to the Global
Unfortunately, worldview has not been examined in any of
these irrigation studies, so it is not possible to claim that the
limited-good model predominates among farmers in any of
the systems, as likely as that may seem. These local societies
merely demonstrate what people tend to do with such a fun-
damental and necessary “good”—water—once they realize
that it is indeed limited and is circulating within a system
that is effectively closed. But what would it take to create the
same kind of outcome in the production, distribution, and
consumption of material wealth and of scarce resources more
generally, at a global level?
A pervasive equity and transparency are certainly difficult
to envision creating on such a scale, through mutually im-
posed limits on the per capita consumption of common-pool
resources such as petroleum, other fossil fuels, and the elec-
tricity that is derived from them. That, of course, is the main
challenge we are faced with today at a global level in order
to stabilize the earth’s climate. The same can be said of the
many other institutional changes that so many people and
organizations are calling for so loudly today, taking to the
streets all over the world in order to demand them: a limit
on the size and structure of banks; the regulation and taxing
of international flows of finance capital; and upper limits on
bonuses and executive pay, not just in the financial sector but
more generally throughout the corporate world. The latter, if
extended to the entire public and private sectors all over the
planet, would amount to a global maximum wage, a limit
that is advocated today by growing numbers of people.
Such steps would merely set a series of upper limits or
ceilings on economic growth, imposed in the name of the
common good, in order to create new channels of redistri-
bution to counter the wealth concentrating and monopolistic
tendencies of an unregulated global market. The same can be
said of a system of fair and progressive taxes, both individual
and corporate, that allows no tax havens and is fully trans-
parent. The call for both of these radical reforms has become
almost deafening throughout the world, both online and off-
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15
line—with Oxfam, the World Economic Forum, the Inter-
national Monetary Fund, and even the Economist now joining
in6—and is now being conveyed through increasingly bold
and massive forms of direct political action. This, according
to a great many activists, critical theorists, and “ordinary”
working people, is what a sustainable world would look like.
All of these various struggles are now underway, and what
is at stake is indeed our mutual survival, as people in the
global South have been insisting for some time. The forces
arrayed against such collective action—economic, political,
and military—are formidable and capable of extreme vio-
lence, a fact of which southerners need no reminder. Current
revelations about the surveillance capacity of countries such
as the United States and the United Kingdom show that we
all must be mindful of the grave threat to democracy that
our digital links with each other have ultimately created.
Nevertheless, popular demand for all of these changes is
increasingly expressed by northerners, too, and is now a truly
global phenomenon. The greatest challenge in any effort to
“scale up” existing cooperative institutions of this type lies in
convincing people that they are all part of a closed system in
which such mutual self-restraint is necessary because of a
prevailing scarcity, as Elinor Ostrom (1990, 2000) showed in
her ground-breaking work on the management of common-
property resources. That theme, consequently, has been the
primary focus of our discussion here: the true nature of the
global system, taken as a whole, and how it is represented in
our worldview. We have no wish to understate the magnitude
of a further step toward a more equitable global commons,
and we cannot propose a plan for political action that would
even begin to accomplish it here.
In order to scale up effectively, states throughout the world
would have to debunk the open-system perspective and pro-
mote in its place the alternative closed-system view, with the
state in each case actually having to reverse completely its
previous historical position in that regard. To expect states to
do so voluntarily would be naive in the extreme, but gov-
ernments today are under a great deal of pressure “from be-
low,” not least from the risk of a repeating financial crisis.
The pressure is to see and think no longer “like a state”—
as James Scott (1998) so compellingly portrays it—but to
think and to act more like “the people,” according to a realistic
model of reality and in the name of the common good (see
Scott 2012). To do this would require solving, on an un-
precedented scale, Ostrom’s (1990:42–45) “assurance prob-
lem,” the second crucial step in any effort by people to co-
operate by limiting their own consumption by (1) coming
up with a set of rules and principles that constitute an agree-
ment for doing so, one endorsed at various sociopolitical
levels by mutual consent, and, more importantly (2) assuring
6. See http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/cost-of-
inequality-oxfam-mb180113.pdf; http://www.weforum.org/issues/global-
risks; http://blog-imfdirect.imf.org/2011/04/08/inequality-and-growth/;
http://www.economist.com/node/21564413.
 16
people that such an agreement would be enforceable and
would work.
In the digital age, information technology makes it possible
to do all this and to create the needed transparency on a scale
never achieved before; that is the great advantage we now
have. Such technology unfortunately also makes it possible
for governments to watch us in unprecedented and all-per-
vasive ways, but the upside is that it has also become possible,
theoretically, for us to watch each other and the government
just as thoroughly, holding each other accountable and reliably
enforcing any agreed-on set of rules at any level of social and
political organization (Hart 2001).
Local economies can obviously be made much more eq-
uitable and transparent at the ground level; that much is
clearly doable. Witness the growing “transition town” move-
ment in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the
European Union; the alternative currency systems that have
sprung up now in so many communities throughout the
world (Greco 2009; Lee 1996); and of course the sustainable
farmer-managed irrigation systems that exist all over the
planet. These kinds of local experiments and alternative com-
munities would have to be nested hierarchically within similar
institutions at higher levels, creating and sustaining polycen-
tric governance in the regulation of economies at local, re-
gional, national, and global scales (Dolšak and Ostrom 2003;
Ostrom 1990, 2000, 2000; Ostrom et. al. 1999, 2002; Marshall
2005). And, as Roy Rappaport’s (e.g., 1979, 1999) work
showed with such great foresight, it would probably all have
to be made meaningful through ritual that promotes the new
worldview and replaces the gaudy and grotesque spectacles
that are emblematic of unregulated global capitalism in the
postmodern era. Stephen Lansing’s (1991, 1993, 2006) ex-
traordinary work on the famous subaks and water temples of
Bali gives us an encouraging glimpse of how such a highly
complex and ritualized system of production can work on an
impressive scale.
This will not be easy, of course, for the global economy is
not just a big irrigation system. Yet there is no reason, the-
oretically, why the world cannot be made to work more like
one. The political will to do this on a massive scale is growing
rapidly today, and necessity will only add to the mounting
pressure as time goes on. But the current groundswell of
support, of popular resistance and revolt against business as
usual, will only become truly global if people widely come to
see the world in a more accurate and realistic way.
Conclusion: Acknowledging a World of
Limited Good
The argument presented throughout this essay is that if people
come to realize that economic “growth” is a physically de-
structive process rather than a creative one, based on the
consumption of limited stocks of natural resources that are
being rapidly drawn down and made more scarce every day
at a planetary level—both for contemporary Others and for
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Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 1, February 2015
the members of future generations—they may become more
willing to take action to restrain that growth by mutually
limiting their own consumption. The political challenges in-
volved in moving humankind toward sustainability in this
way are of course daunting, and any effort to scale up existing
cooperative institutions to the highest levels of organization
will be fraught with great difficulty. But we have argued here
that they are fundamentally cultural challenges too, posing if
nothing else an enormous task of mutual education, com-
munication, and deliberation. What is ultimately most needed
for such constraints on accumulation to finally be imposed
is the adoption of a view of the world, and of a global economy
now fully coextensive with it, that acknowledges the kinds of
material constraints and the zero-sum logic that mainstream
economists have for many years now systematically denied.
It requires people to finally see that, for human beings, there
is no such thing as “the creation of wealth.”
This kind of worldview accurately depicts physical and so-
cial reality. That may explain why it first emerged in many
peasant societies throughout the world, and why it appears
to be prevalent today among exploited and displaced peoples,
especially the former peasants and indigenous people of the
global South. We believe that the limited-good perspective lies
at the heart of “the light at the edge of the world,” the vast
and rich body of indigenous knowledge about which Wade
Davis (2009) writes so movingly, and that this light is now
spreading from the earth’s margins to its political and cultural
center or core.
The “image of limited good” also emerged and flourished
briefly within academia, having been promoted initially by
nineteenth-century theory in economics and then adopted by
dependency and world-system theorists and other radical crit-
ics whose work is still highly influential in Latin America and
other parts of the Southern Hemisphere today. It is consistent
with the views expressed by a wide array of participants in
the World Social Forum and more widely within the subaltern
and marginalized groups that form the core of the growing
alternative globalization and “decolonial” movements. It
seems equally consistent with the demands that were implied
by the extraordinary Occupy Wall Street movement. Finally,
that worldview is firmly vindicated by contemporary knowl-
edge in the natural and social sciences, especially the relatively
new field of ecological economics, based on a renewed un-
derstanding of how the laws of thermodynamics express
themselves as fundamental constraints in human affairs.
The magical worldview long promoted by neoclassical
economists and finance capitalists must now be replaced with
a more realistic one built on the axiom that the “good” in
human affairs is always limited. The former worldview could
only prevail within the narrow historical space between the
initial outsourcing of land and labor (i.e., energy) require-
ments represented by the industrial revolution—including
our dependence on subterranean fossil fuels (Hornborg 2006;
Pomeranz 2000; Sieferle 1982)—and the contemporary ac-
knowledging of global limits to growth. Today the closed-
Trawick and Hornborg Revisiting the Image of Limited Good
system worldview, which focuses the mind on everything we
have in common as the inhabitants of a biosphere that is
steadily deteriorating, seems destined finally to prevail.
It would be naive to claim that this vision of reality has
the capacity to unite people all over the world, producing a
great “aha!” moment that suddenly changes everything based
on a new awareness of our shared relationship to forms of
property that ultimately belong to us all. Yet we are all now
deeply immersed in crises from which none of us can escape,
not even those who are fortunate enough to be wealthy. Con-
ventional politics appears utterly unable to save us, but new
forms of political struggle are now breaking out everywhere.
The time would seem to be ripe for a change, a global con-
vergence on a scale never seen before. We may soon find out
just how important worldview really is.
Acknowledgments
We wish to express our gratitude to the John D. and Catherine
T. MacArthur Foundation for supporting the irrigation re-
search discussed in the latter part of this paper and to ac-
knowledge support from the European Commission’s Seventh
Framework Programme for the projects “Environmental Jus-
tice Organizations, Liabilities, and Trade” and “Financialis-
ation, Economy, Society, and Sustainable Development.” Sev-
eral people deserve thanks for their critical comments on
earlier versions of this article: Jim Harris, Ben Orlove, June
Nash, Stephen Gudeman, and David Graeber. This article is
dedicated to the memory of Elinor Ostrom, an inspiring men-
tor and generous benefactor who is sorely missed.
Comments
Lisa Cliggett
Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky, 211 Lafferty
Hall, Lexington, Kentucky 40506-0024, U.S.A. (lisa.cliggett@uky
.edu). 23 VI 14
Trawick and Hornborg call for a fundamental shift in how
(the global) “we” think about our economies and resources
with resulting transformations in behavior toward more sus-
tainable living. The authors examine what they identify as two
opposing worldviews driving contemporary exchange systems
and resource use. The first they call “the image of the unlim-
ited good,” with players in global capitalism the biggest pro-
ponents. In this “open-system” experience of the world,
wealth and value are (mysteriously) created, and proponents
claim all can benefit and have a share of “the good.” The
second worldview, “the image of the limited good,” which
the authors adopt from George Foster’s (1965) American An-
thropologist article, frames resources, wealth, and “good
things” as coming at a cost—particularly ecological.
According to the authors, in communities where the lim-
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17
ited-good/fixed-pie model drives behavior and relationships,
people cooperate to manage resources, building political order
and institutions to help manage the system. What the authors
argue for, drawing from the “fixed-pie” model, is nothing less
than a profound reversal of the contemporary global eco-
nomic system: “if people come to realize that economic
‘growth’ is a physically destructive process rather than a cre-
ative one . . . they may become more willing to take action
to restrain that growth by mutually limiting their own con-
sumption.” Like other recent debates on these issues, Trawick
and Hornborg’s idea is exciting. Solid analysis of social science
(and physics!) theory (historical and contemporary) under-
pins their argument, and it certainly intersects with much
post-2008 economic downturn activism (the Occupy Move-
ment, “99%,” antiglobalization, etc.).
There is, indeed, a growing clamor for a rebalancing of the
world political-ecological and economic order. Shifting our
collective worldviews to recognize and understand the phan-
tom of “invisible hand” economics, the finite materiality of
our daily lives, and the real (and dire) social and ecological
costs of excessive wealth and consumption, must be integral
in this rebalancing. However, like ideas of carrying capacity—
which must be examined and employed with caution and
clear intention (Cliggett 2001), “the image of the limited
good” worldview may be more a metaphor to motivate change
than a grounded reality with scalable lessons.
While I appreciate the depth of theoretical framing in this
article—from classical economics to the first and second laws
of thermodynamics to contemporary political-economy cri-
tiques of finance capital—as an ethnographer seeking ground-
ing in real people’s lives, I miss clear examples of diverse
communities living successfully within the bounds of the
fixed-pie model. The authors offer examples of irrigation sys-
tems in Latin America that have stood the test of time for
managing scarce water in specific communities. Steven Lan-
sing’s work on water temples in Bali also exemplifies the idea.
However, working with agropastoralists in postcolonial
Zambia’s increasingly dry and climatically volatile Southern
Province, where annual hunger seasons have increased in se-
verity and duration, I have trouble reconciling the authors’
optimistic take on “the limited-good” worldview. They do
acknowledge that Foster focused his attention on envy and
jealousy—calling this emphasis “unfortunate”—and suggest
that there could have been equal attention to cases of the
opposite.
It is indeed “unfortunate” to see envy and jealousy in ac-
tion—in Zambia these sentiments have been linked to the
pesticide poisoning (and murder) of an ambitious man pe-
rusing education as a path to a better life and to the burning
of another man’s chicken coop just as his efforts to start a
small-scale business began to show a return on his hard work,
to say nothing of numerous cases of witchcraft accusations.
I suspect that my examples are not unique among anthro-
pologists working in impoverished places.
This is not to say that there are not instances where co-
 18
operation and solidarity may come about through the same
viewpoint or that the misfortune I mention relates solely to
the limited-good worldview. However, without Trawick and
Hornborg offering more examples other than the very unique
cases of irrigation as proof that a “fixed-pie” system can pro-
mote cooperation, it is difficult to envision the scaling up
they call for.
The real question is, under what conditions do we see “a
fixed-pie” worldview intersecting with cooperation and strong
leadership? What are the factors that promote positive social
and management relations when resources are scarce and peo-
ple know it? What makes the balance tip one way or another?
How do people and communities without previous experience
of cooperative institutions learn new ways of doing things?
And how do communities with heterogeneous worldviews
negotiate those differences? I suspect many of the answers
relate to the diversity of resource types and uses, ownership
systems, and community socioeconomic dynamics, as Netting
(1981) taught us long ago.
As it is, this article is a provocative think piece with an
underlying optimism that change for the better is possible. It
is a call to act (or at least think) differently. But I, for one,
would benefit from more evidence of the way such worldviews
play out in a broader range of ecosystems and communities.
Jonathan Friedman
Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego,
9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 2093-0532, U.S.A.
(jafriedman@ucsd.edu) and École des hautes études en sciences
sociales, 96 boulevard Raspail, Paris 75006, France. 21 VII 14
This is a welcome article and much more than a mere reaction
to the crisis that has shocked so many since 2008, one that
has been moralized and anguished about by economists and
other social scientists including anthropologists. It is difficult
to take on the total richness of the arguments proposed in a
short comment, so I restrict myself to a few themes.
The article builds on a well-known dichotomization of the
world, as of world history, into “closed” and “open” systems
characterized as stability/steady-state reproduction versus un-
limited growth. This is the model that has deep roots in the
history of anthropology. From Sahlins’s critique of the Ne-
olithic revolution as a universal disaster to the Whole Earth
Catalog, this is a powerful way of talking about the runaway
nature of the contemporary world. It has been taken up in a
plethora of different discourses, from Marx’s simple versus
expanded reproduction, to Bateson and Rapport’s steady-state
negative feedback versus civilizational-expansionism positive
feedback. There is then a second dichotomization, charac-
teristic of commercial economies, opposing the real (pro-
ductive) and the virtual (financial) economy, the latter which
has become increasingly savage in recent years with the emer-
gence of a large array of derivative instruments that enable
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Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 1, February 2015
what can simply be called speculation where the volume of
credit/debt is expanded without anything occurring in the
real economy. So there are two dichotomies involved here.
The first harks back to the thermodynamic paradox of life as
detailed by Schrödinger in which the latter is dependent on
its ability to consume its surroundings, turning the rest of
the world into a source of its negentropy. And this of course
implies increasing entropy in the larger environment, whether
local or global (thus the link to imperialism). The more con-
temporary work of Prigogine on the nature of living and even
nonliving crystalline structures as rendered possible by the
appropriation of energy to maintain states that are far from
thermodynamic equilibrium clearly delineates both the dy-
namics and fragility of evolutionary processes. But if all of
life is negentropic and therefore exploitative/imperialistic ac-
tivity, then one should not be surprised if the human species
followed suit.
As much as one might be appalled by it, the archaeological
record does not reveal stable zero-sum societies but, from the
very start, dynamic and expansive societies. Competitive ac-
cumulation seems such a commonplace that it is difficult to
deny its pervasiveness in world history. This might be ques-
tioned, and it goes back to my debate with ecologists in the
70s. From a time in which hunter-gatherers of the contem-
porary world were assumed to represent the lost world of
ecological equilibrium, a great number of studies have shown
that such steady-state populations are most often the products
of collapsed larger systems and/or marginalization within such
systems. This does not mean that they are not good to “think”
with, but as a model of world history they might represent a
false dichotomization. Of course there are examples of co-
operative sharing and division of labor, but the latter need to
be historically contextualized.
The second dichotomy is one that finds its best exempli-
fication in Marx’s dynamic understanding of the relation be-
tween fictitious and real accumulation. Here again, while
agreeing with the authors suggestions, I would propose a
slightly different interpretation. Thus fictitious accumulation
occurs periodically when real accumulation falters and is, as
is often the case, exported to other geographical areas. This
has been going on, but certainly not for the first time, since
the 1980s, and the bubble economy that exploded in 2007–
8 is a result of that process, but one that is linked to declining
real profits and the export of capital where the wealth “left
behind,” so to say, is invested where it can most easily make
money, in the financial markets.
Finally, the authors suggest that the difference between
closed and open systems is determined by closed and open
worldviews. I have difficulty in accepting such cultural de-
terminism. Competition and the accumulation of anything
from prestige to capital is not a cosmological imposition.
Rather, the cosmology and even its ontologies emerge in a
complex interaction of social strategies and conditions of re-
production. This was the weakness of Rappaport’s model of
the Maring of Papua New Guinea because they exemplify the
Trawick and Hornborg Revisiting the Image of Limited Good
competitive accumulation that is dominant in the area. Con-
versely it would be difficult to argue that Chinese or Indian
cosmologies, which are all about universal equilibrium, could
generate such expansive and destructive socioeconomic pro-
cesses that characterize the dynamic histories of these im-
perialist social formations.
So if we do find steady-state cosmologies and even relatively
stable social orders in the world, it is not evident to me that
such models can be used to imagine a different global order.
On the contrary, I would suggest that it is the imagining of
such an order from within our own expansionist system that
seeks its own opposite in the past or in the margins of our
own world. The authors have done a splendid job in imag-
ining that order, but we do not necessarily need the “other”
as a source of inspiration because it is we who created the
latter as category.
Stephen Gudeman
Anthropology Department, University of Minnesota, 301 19th Av-
enue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403, U.S.A. (gudeman@
umn.edu). 30 V 14
Trawick and Hornborg present a strong case for paying at-
tention to the second law of thermodynamics or entropy.
Standard economics, as Georgescu-Roegen (1971a) made
clear, does not incorporate this continual movement toward
“chaos” or degradation of usable energy in our physical world.
This reality undermines the idea that material wealth is an
“unlimited good” and that the gross national product can be
endlessly expanded. The solution, they argue, is to think of
the earth’s resources as a commons whose use must be reg-
ulated. Anthropologists have accumulated cases in which the
image of “limited good” is the primary worldview and in
which a commons is shared according to one or another social
principle. Adoption of this alternative worldview can lead us
toward sustainability. I agree with many of the authors’ ar-
guments, although the problem of scaling up from the local
view and ways of doing to the national and international
stages remains.
I have other puzzlements. The authors draw a division
between physical or real capital and virtual or financial capital.
But if one starts with the idea of entropy, then the idea of
creating any wealth, whether real or virtual, is surely a cultural
mystification. Any economic “good” is achieved at some phys-
ical expenditure, that is, entropy. One might even argue that
virtual wealth—in the extreme, trading one money sum for
another over time—is less entropic than growing crops (with-
out additives) for sustenance. Something more is needed to
make their model work.
I prefer to think of economies, especially capitalist ones,
in terms of spheres (an assertion with which I am certain
Hornborg agrees). I see modern economies as made up of
five spheres: the house (using the term broadly), community
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19
(in which a commons may be found), commerce (the ex-
change of goods and services for money), finance (commercial
banks, insurance companies, and the like that trade money),
and metafinance (derivatives, structured investment vehicles,
and other instruments that center on making and taking risk
for money). The spheres overlap and are linked through rents
that flow upward. Rents, broadly, are returns received over
and above productive efforts. The house and community re-
ceive “rents” (if the term is used here) from the earth and
other natural elements. In myriad ways, money and labor
rents—through tribute, tithes, monopolies, patents, bank
charges, high interest rates, and obfuscation (as in the Paul-
son/Goldman Sachs example in which Paulson bet against a
vehicle he helped design for Goldman Sachs to sell)—flow
upward through the spheres. As one illustration, in 2013 the
top hedge fund managers received 25 billion dollars. If this
sum had been redistributed to the house and community
realms, it could have been used to improve children’s lunches
and health and help pay mortgages. Or, with reference to
entropy, placing a cap on these top-end gains and on the
competitive expansion of markets into the natural world
would lead to less pressure to secure rents and less pressure
on the material environment. As Thomas Piketty (2014) has
recently argued, the rate of growth of capital over long periods
of time and across many countries exceeds the rate of growth
of the economy. This fascinating finding means that someone
is losing (as the increase of inequality suggests) and something
is being despoiled (as the loss of butterflies and arctic ice
suggests).
Here I am in tangential agreement with Trawick and Horn-
borg. As a community we must strengthen regulations on and
limits to market expansion, impose progressive taxes in dif-
ferent forms, and use like measures. Markets have many ben-
efits, but they promote invidious competition that leads to
their continual expansion and overflow into the community,
house, and environmental spheres. Markets are a social in-
vention, however, and the social commons surrounding,
structuring, and enabling them is a higher or more general
one than a physical commons consisting of a pasture or water
rights. Actions such as Occupy Wall Street or the use of com-
munity no-interest currencies are helpful in bringing the crises
of inequality, uncontrolled markets, and despoliation of the
environment to the consciousness of people. But we also need
to reawaken our moral sensibilities and commitments—about
which Durkheim had much to say—and reinvigorate the idea
of economy as serving social and not only individual ends,
as economists and most people seem to think. Perhaps the
environmental crisis will help us to do so. As I sometimes
express it, we need to see economy as a tension between self-
interested calculation and social relationships by which, for
which, and through which it flows (Gudeman 2008, 2012).
Social relationships and commitments to others are not lim-
ited goods. The economy must be brought into better balance
between its two sides.
 20
Karim-Aly Saleh Kassam
Department of Natural Resources and American Indian Program,
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University, 122
Fernow Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853-3001, U.S.A. (karim-aly
.kassam@cornell.edu). 15 IX 14
The central argument made by Trawick and Hornborg is that
contemporary economic dogma of “wealth creation” contra-
venes the laws of thermodynamics. What they call the “image
of unlimited good” (emphasis added) is just that, a mirage
that violates the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. “Real
wealth,” they maintain, requires physical inputs of matter and
energy. The authors contrast the notion of “real wealth” with
that of “virtual wealth.” Virtual wealth is debt generation akin
to legalized usury resulting in a contemporary form of serf-
dom. In this sense, virtual wealth is economically unproduc-
tive, as it shifts the burden of debt onto future generations.
What Trawick and Hornborg are asserting is not new. Adam
Smith, especially, was cognizant of the “idle” or “unproduc-
tive” elements in eighteenth century society. “There is one
sort of labour which adds to the value of the subject upon
which it is bestowed; there is another which has no such effect.
The former is ‘productive’ and the latter is ‘unproductive’”
(Smith 1976:351). He elaborates: “The rent of land and the
profits of stock are everywhere, therefore, the principal sources
from which unproductive hands derive their subsistence”
(Smith 1976:354). “But there is no country in which the whole
annual produce is employed in maintaining the industrious.
The idle everywhere consume a great part of it” (Smith 1976:
61), he explains. Adam Smith is specifically referring to the
virtual wealth creators of his generation such as the aristoc-
racy, courtiers, land and property owners, and bankers (Saul
1995).
If what Trawick and Hornborg have to say is not new and
was recognized over 200 years ago by one of the founding
fathers of the market economy, why does it still need to be
repeated? Herein is the malady of the political economy in
which humanity is currently ensnared. It is not unlike Alz-
heimer’s disease befalling populations of entire societies—
namely, cultures that cannot recall the essential relationships
that sustain life and livelihoods. Society seems to be struck
by a collective dementia where both long- and short-term
memory is affected. The simile to Alzheimer’s is not com-
pletely accurate because human beings besot by this painful
disease and their families did not have a choice, whereas
pursuit of the illusory notion of wealth creation is religiously
propagated by our sociocultural institutions with an obsession
characteristic of addicts.
The language of wealth creation through financial or stock
management is conflated with the actual act of making. How-
ever, the euphemism of growing stock portfolios is not equiv-
alent to making wealth. Creation involves destruction. The
cliché one needs to break eggs to make an omelet is apropos.
The laws of thermodynamics are applicable to all biophysical
processes, including economic development. Furthermore,
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Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 1, February 2015
despite the seductive rhetoric of wealth creation, these laws
are inviolable. The open-system paradigm at the heart of
global capitalism does not exist in the physical universe. Ad-
herence to its tenets has measurable and widespread conse-
quences. Humanity in the twenty-first century is a sociocul-
tural, ecological, and geophysical force. The Nobel laureate
Paul Crutzen (2002) has coined this epoch the Anthropocene
because of the massive environmental change induced on the
planet. The current simultaneously occurring economic, en-
ergy, and environmental crises are unparalleled in human
history and put all life on this planet in peril.
The finite system we call the earth is a “commons” gov-
erned by the laws of thermodynamics. However, is the tragedy
of the commons (Hardin 1968), while pervasive, necessarily
inevitable? Here Trawick and Hornborg draw on their own
and the work of others to show how human communities
are able to engage in wise use of scarce resources. Drawing
on literature from indigenous communities and peasant so-
cieties, they illustrate the tragedy is not an inevitability. Hu-
man communities are capable of sustainably using limited
common pool resources. This ecological consciousness, while
not easy to measure empirically in contemporary indigenous
communities, is present. However, the no-analogue (Crutzen
and Steffen 2003) character of the Anthropocene is at a speed,
scale, frequency, and intensity that defies the specific examples
scholars are able to furnish. The predicament ushered in by
the Anthropocene requires a mindfulness that is not easily
articulated and practiced.
What is needed is a methodology of hope that outlines a
strategic way forward without engaging in facile platitudes of
sustainable development. For indigenous communities and
peasant societies, neither environmental degradation nor
structural poverty is an option in the twenty-first century.
This is a challenge the community of scholars who contribute
to this journal and other applied journals in the biophysical
and social sciences as well as the humanities have failed to
effectively meet. Regrettably, Trawick and Hornborg will con-
tinue to have to repeat what is already known but ignored
by the myopia of global capitalism. It seems there is no cure
to self-imposed dementia.
Susan Paulson and Chuck Paulson
Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida, P.O. Box
115530, Gainesville, Florida 32611-5530, U.S.A. (spaulson@latam
.ufl.edu)/Division of Math and Science, Minneapolis Community
and Technical College, 1501 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, Min-
nesota 55403, U.S.A. 23 VI 14
Does Limited Material Mean Limited Good?
By asking how worldviews interact with thermodynamic pro-
cesses, Trawick and Hornborg push us to think systemically
about the relations between meaning and material that con-
Trawick and Hornborg Revisiting the Image of Limited Good
stitute all human life. They focus on one sociocultural insti-
tution—economy—arguing that recent developments in sym-
bolic dimensions of economy have catalyzed dangerous
expansion in the biophysical processes of economic produc-
tion. In solidarity with the desire to disrupt worldviews that
propel limitless material production, we seek to strengthen
alternative visions for progress.
Human meaning interacts with the transformation of mat-
ter and energy in remarkably varied ways. For participants in
today’s complex economies, symbolic phenomena of finance
capital associated with what the authors call “virtual wealth”
obscure relations with the physical world, boosting the illusion
of infinitely expandable wealth. In contrast, people who par-
ticipate directly in physical processes that create “real wealth”
can see more easily how their work transforming raw materials
(low-entropy forms of matter and energy) will reach envi-
ronmental limits.
Trawick and Hornborg make a comparison, and demand
a choice, between two generalized worldviews. We hope their
article motivates empirical study of manifestations of each
and dynamics between them. The authors rightly locate the
“image of unlimited good” in a specific historical moment.
Emerging from the experience of privileged Europeans, it de-
veloped parallel with their ability to draw productive resources
(including land, labor, and energy) from distant sources, fa-
cilitated by colonialism, the industrial revolution, and glob-
alization. A concept of expandable wealth became instru-
mental in framing Europeans—and later global elites—as
creators rather than plunderers. Over two centuries, views
have changed in important ways. As Trawick and Hornborg
point out, classical economics was founded on a general equi-
librium model depicting the economy as a closed system; it
was eventually called “the science of scarcity.” Smith, Malthus,
Jevons, and Marx analyzed interactions among diverse forms
of financial and physical capital (including land, labor, coal)
in changing technological and politico-legal contexts. It is no
surprise that so many anthropologists have engaged with this
classic body of thought. Nor is it surprising that so many
anthropologists have censured the neoclassical turn that nar-
rowed the scope of economics to market activity and, in the
second half of the twentieth century, worked to institution-
alize and disseminate the “image of unlimited good” via ac-
counting systems such as gross domestic product and the
United Nations System of National Accounts that exclude
natural and human capital from the measure of each country’s
wealth.
The term “closed system” helps to interpret evidence that
human activity is pushing environmental limits, including
measures of ocean acidification, nitrogen and phosphorous
inputs in the biosphere, and changes in climate and strato-
spheric ozone (Royal Society 2012). It also draws necessary
attention to the distribution of environmental costs and ben-
efits across space and time. However, the term “limited good”
needs more precision. The real constraint lies in the bio-
physical throughput of economic production, which might
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21
be described as “limited material good” to distinguish from
the sociocultural meanings that make economic goods good
(e.g., satisfaction, usefulness, beauty, prestige, pleasure, self-
esteem). In a context where the only path to those subjective
gains is through increased material consumption, the quantity
of socially meaningful good is indeed limited.
Our challenge is to learn from sociocultural systems that
generate meaningful good in greater proportion to material
throughput. As the authors recognize, the ethnographic rec-
ord shows that cooperation reaps rewards in “limited-good”
contexts. Obviously participants in commons management
are rewarded with sustainable access to physical goods such
as irrigation water and healthy watersheds. Yet ethnographers
observe that these are intertwined with other kinds of good:
community solidarity, identity, ritual exhilaration, and—im-
portantly—a sense of equity and fairness (Wagner 2013). Cer-
tainly elements of what Trawick (2001b) calls “the moral econ-
omy of water” feel good in themselves; they also help generate
other kinds of good. As Wilkinson and Pickett (2011) argue
for contemporary societies, greater equity is key to a range
of social goods including longer lives, higher literacy and
numeracy, less incarceration, and better mental health.
Trawick and Hornborg conclude that “if people come to
realize that economic ‘growth’ is a physically destructive pro-
cess . . . they may become more willing to take action to
restrain that growth by mutually limiting their own con-
sumption.” Together with degrowth thinkers (D’Alisa, De-
maria, and Kallis 2014), we propose moving beyond individ-
ual restraint to push for collaborative creativity. This move is
facilitated by an anthropological conceptualization of “pro-
duction” in which humans produce not only food, shelter,
and clothing but also biophysical landscapes, financial sys-
tems, traditions of resource governance, and, most amazingly,
people socialized with skills, values, and worldviews. Critical
analysis of worldviews, calculation of thermodynamic pro-
cesses, and ethnography of commons management are all
useful resources in the collaborative construction of socio-
cultural systems that distribute and employ the same amount
of material good in ways that bring about more social good.
Laura Rival
School of Anthropology, University of Oxford, 51 Banbury Road,
Oxford OX2 6PE, United Kingdom (laura.rival@anthro.ox.ac.uk).
20 VII 14
Trawick and Hornborg are to be commended for addressing
the ecological crisis and sustainability as core issues on which
anthropological thinking can be brought to bear. They chal-
lenge the profoundly flawed ontology on which orthodox
economics is based. In their view, mythical understandings
of wealth creation used to justify unending increases in ma-
terial and energy throughput on a finite planet must give way
to cultural worldviews that accurately depict physical and so-
 22
cial reality. Anthropology has a role to play in showing that
the world is ecologically constrained and in identifying the
true nature of real wealth.
The authors are right to invite anthropologists to use their
rich heritage to ask how new worldviews conducive to prin-
ciples of social organization consonant with sustainable re-
source use in the longue durée may be fostered. I also welcome
their proposition that one fruitful way for the discipline to
participate in the current interdisciplinary dialogue is to focus
on models and their underlying values and principles. Better
political-economy theories embedded in system complexity
are needed.
However, the dual opposition of images of limited versus
unlimited good, or of open- versus closed-system model, is
far too simplistic, as the controversy caused by Foster’s (1965)
article plainly illustrates (e.g., Foster 1972). Rediscovering
world systems theory and cybernetics without revisiting the
anthropological literature on culture and cognition will not
illuminate the myths humans live by, nor will it convince
sceptics that modeling peasant behavior has any relevance for
modeling human social behavior in the twenty-first century.
Moreover, anthropologists must address the fact that as they
describe and model the world, social scientists too enact
worldviews and base themselves on values, some of which are
of a normative nature; scientific objectivity depends on mak-
ing these values explicit.
As Princen (2005) shows, hegemonic representations of
how humans perceive the environment and should live their
lives cannot be confronted without attending to norms and
values. Not unlike the authors, Princen distinguishes ecolog-
ical and nonecological rationality as two fundamentally op-
posed worldviews guiding behavior and the organization of
society—especially its economy. Given that “maximisation
makes sense for machines but not for organisms and eco-
systems” (Princen 2005:9), humans are perfectly capable of
confronting limits and of choosing sufficiency over efficiency.
For Princen, such preference is guided not only by knowledge
of the world’s biophysical properties but also by ethical con-
siderations. It is through moral reasoning that sufficiency
comes to make perfect good sense in contemporary industrial
societies, as it has done throughout human history. His anal-
ysis comes remarkably close to Gudeman’s, for whom the
core values of the “mutual realm” (means-to-ends forms of
reasoning such as thrift, sufficiency, or economizing) are
bound to limit the expansion of competitive trade and cal-
culative reasoning (Gudeman 2008:45). Any long-term field-
worker will know that the dialectics of trade and mutuality
that keep all economies in tension are far from symmetrical.
Their dynamic tension often results in the former engulfing
the latter. If economy is a hierarchy of value spheres, as Gu-
deman proposes, why does sufficiency exist as a subordinate
principle, and how can it be restored to an ordinate one?
In addressing this question, we may start, as Trawick and
Hornborg do, by looking at economy as an open subsystem
of a larger, finite, and nongrowing ecosystem (e.g., Hall et al.
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Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 1, February 2015
2001) and by reconsidering property rights in this new light.
We should not forget, however, that the institutional facts
with which the discipline of economics concerns itself are
rooted in the symbolic power of language (Searle 2005). Un-
like physics and chemistry, economic theory is dependent on
human beliefs. Foucault, of course, would claim that deontic
powers permeate the natural sciences every bit as much as
they do constitute the social sciences. Modeling human be-
havior has thus profound implications for cultural evolution
and the ways in which social actors consider themselves ca-
pable or not of changing the course of their actions (Muradian
and Rival 2012). This is also true of our descriptions of world-
views. No one has discussed the role of words in liberating
the moral imagination better than James Fernandez (e.g.,
1998). In his search for a new formulation of environmental
choices, Princen (2005) notes that “saying enough, indeed
practicing enough, is not just a means of surviving, it is a
means of thriving” (5). Perhaps the authors will consider
replacing “limited” with “thriving,” a word more amenable
to worldviews based on abundance rather than on deficit.
Reply
We are grateful to the commentators for their thoughtful
considerations of our argument. Although the specific im-
plications they draw from it differ, all seem to share our
fundamental conviction that the conventional economic
worldview is deeply flawed and needs to be aligned with basic
facts of natural science as well as insights expressed in some
nonmodern cosmologies elucidated by anthropologists. What
difference this alignment might make on people’s consump-
tion and their attitude toward wealth is disputed, as is the
relative novelty of our proposal.
In response to Cliggett, we consider the closed-system
model and the corollary image of limited good to be much
more than a metaphor. It corresponds to a physical reality, a
set of incontrovertible facts. Those facts about the constraints
on economic life have been widely acknowledged, especially
in the field of ecological economics, but remain little discussed
in a discipline like anthropology, which has tended to em-
phasize relativism and constructivist critique at the expense
of objectivity and science. But the first and second laws of
thermodynamics are not merely historical and social construc-
tions. They govern global society, circumscribing its future
development; and they are part of the foundation on which
an ecological ethics and a politics of sustainability can be
based.
Cliggett’s point that acknowledgment of such constraints
is not tantamount to cooperation and social harmony is, how-
ever, right on the mark. In fact, it can be argued, as we note
in the article, that tightening material constraints may be more
conducive to conflict than to cooperation. Thus it is com-
Trawick and Hornborg Revisiting the Image of Limited Good
pletely justifiable to ask us to clarify our vision of how rec-
ognizing such limits could lead to better arrangements of
socioecological relations. Cliggett would also like to see more
examples of diverse communities living sustainably within the
fixed-pie model. The community-managed irrigation systems
we point to number in the hundreds, however; they are quite
diverse in scale and social complexity and are found today in
nearly all parts of the globe.
As for the factors and conditions that sustain them, the
most critical one was identified by Ostrom (2000). The scar-
city of the common-pool resource must be significant, with
far less than enough to go around during a substantial part
of the year, yet not so severe and enduring as to jeopardize
people’s livelihoods. The situation must be one of shared
hardship or challenge, not of a life-threatening shortage,
which would lead instead to tragedy, the outcome that Cliggett
dreads and has observed so often in Africa. This is a sobering
realization, for it indicates that as the human population con-
tinues to grow and capitalist extraction of resources inten-
sifies, the conventional economic worldview will provide little
guidance on how to avert such tragedies.
Gudeman raises the crucial issue of spheres of exchange.
Although we have only briefly mentioned alternative currency
systems, visions of better socioecological relations might well
focus on traditional monetary systems as well as on traditional
technologies for resource distribution such as water manage-
ment. The fundamental problem with the world economy
may not be the market principle itself as much as the im-
plications of general-purpose money and the globalized scale
of the market. General-purpose money makes all values com-
mensurable regardless of whether they pertain to the repro-
duction of human organisms, of communities, of ecosystems,
or of the world system itself. It was the exploitation of glob-
alized price differences (i.e., arbitrage) that provided the con-
ditions for the turn to fossil fuels in eighteenth-century Brit-
ain, which inaugurated anthropogenic climate change and the
so-called Anthropocene. A way of curbing the destructive
consequences of economic globalization might be to redis-
cover the virtues of distinguishing local values (such as those
concerned with food, shelter, energy, community, place) from
the values pertaining to global trade and communication
(Hornborg 2007, 2013b). Such a distinction would need to
be acknowledged by our monetary system as well as in our
worldview. It may suffice, however, to have only two major
spheres of exchange rather than Gudeman’s five.
The very idea of money is to economists like water is to
fish. The standard textbooks that have shaped the minds of
generations of economists devote not a word to reflecting on
this strangest of human inventions without which economics
as a discipline would not exist (cf. Heilbroner 1995 [1953]).
The logic of market exchange explored by Alfred Mar-
shall—whether identified in rates negotiated by Andean peas-
ants at a rural vegetable market or in those used by Wall Street
stock brokers—is an issue quite distinct from questions of
the biophysical substance of commodity flows, material asym-
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23
metries in trade, accumulation, and inequalities. The weighing
of cost against demand is conditioned by factors (such as
supply and purchasing power) that are distinct from the ma-
terial content of exchange. The former is mainstream “eco-
nomics” (Heilbroner 1995[1953]:210). The latter are concerns
of classical political economy raised today by “heterodox”
schools such as Marxism and ecological economics. What the
world desperately needs is a return to political economy. The
intricate mathematics of market equilibrium that is the stuff
of neoclassical economics will not deliver us from the
alarming prospects of the Anthropocene.
Friedman perfectly captures the connections we wish to
illuminate between thermodynamics and imperialism. We
agree that this connection goes much farther back in human
history than the industrial revolution, and we admit that the
“others” to whom we look for more realistic cosmologies are
often the marginalized products of our own expansion. It is
also valid to propose that cosmologies are generated by eco-
nomic processes rather than vice versa. This could in fact be
exemplified by the economic rethinking that we assert is being
prompted by current financial and ecological crises. The sev-
eral failures of neoclassical economic theory are a consequence
of its incapacity to account for the material limits being en-
countered by the society it has encouraged. Rather than “cul-
tural determinism,” we are suggesting that a change in world-
view is now widely underway that is the result of real
socioecological processes.
We cannot agree with Gudeman’s suggestion that virtual
wealth may be less entropic than growing crops. As ecological
economists ever since Sergei Podolinsky (2008 [1883]) have
argued, human augmentation of biomass on Earth is a way
of accumulating negative entropy ultimately deriving from the
sun, whereas the kinds of processes stimulated by the pursuit
of capitalist profits generally imply destruction of finite nat-
ural resources and increasing entropy. The alleged demater-
ialization of the economy now underway in core areas of the
world system is an illusion produced by environmental load
displacement to the periphery, especially China and India but
increasingly also Africa and Latin America. This zero-sum
logic of the world economy is well acknowledged in Gude-
man’s conclusion that “someone is losing . . . and something
is being despoiled.”
Virtual wealth originates in the creation of debt, and it is
used mainly as a catalyst to increase investment and/or con-
sumption. Such debt involves the creation of nothing material,
basically just allowing people to spend tomorrow’s income
today by diverting their own future flows of that income. The
most unfortunate aspect of this sleight of hand of “wealth
creation,” however, is that it causes people to overlook all the
energy and materials that will have to be consumed in order
to generate those future income flows. These are real material
effects or costs of lending, but bankers do not have to pay
for any of them, and such costs are widely and very delib-
erately ignored. This is what the vaunted “creation of wealth”
 24
does; it speeds up the ongoing process of thermodynamic
decline and is destructive of order.
The distinction between “productive” and “unproductive”
elements of the economy that Saleh Kassam traces back to
Adam Smith is not equivalent to our distinction between real
and virtual wealth. The adding of exchange value by labor,
which so preoccupied Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, is not pro-
ductive either from the perspective of thermodynamics (Geor-
gescu-Roegen 1971b) or from that of peasants in Colombia
(Gudeman and Rivera 1990). This means that much of what
is conventionally considered “real wealth” is actually an index
of entropy. Even Marx recognized that all human labor was
ultimately tributary to farming (Burkett 2003:150). If some-
one has indeed said all of this before, as Kassam suggests, it
certainly needed to be said again. Considering how well aware
traditional peasant populations once were of the limited na-
ture of the good, “collective dementia” is an apposite diag-
nosis.
A “strategic way forward” in the Anthropocene, which Kas-
sam calls for, requires radical insights about the entropy-ac-
celerating logic of general-purpose money. As we have shown,
mainstream economists are utterly unconcerned with ther-
modynamics. The uniquely human sign system we know as
“money,” which economists take for granted, needs to be
redesigned so as to distinguish between local values related
to physical metabolism and survival on the one hand and
values related to global trade and communication on the
other. The idea of complementary or community currencies
is thus far more significant than just bringing crises to people’s
consciousness, as suggested by Gudeman.
The Paulsons propose that the challenge is to generate more
meaningful good in proportion to material throughput, but
this is difficult to distinguish from the conventional aspira-
tions of sustainability discourse. The proposal demands that
we assess the outputs of production as being more or less
meaningful, which seems anthropologically unfeasible. Con-
sumption is inherently meaningful for consumers. Rather
than pass judgment on specific kinds of consumption, we
need to realize that the economic processes stimulated by
consumption—and thus by human meaning-making—are
destructive of the biosphere and disproportionately cater to
the purchasing power of a global elite. To disconnect human
meaning making from environmental degradation and capital
accumulation requires redesigning the monetary system that
now connects them. That would entail a truly massive cultural
and political shift consonant with the shift in worldview we
are advocating.
Rival disagrees that the premises underlying peasant be-
havior may be relevant for human social behavior in the
twenty-first century. She suggests that moral reasoning rather
than recognition of physical limits may suffice for sufficiency
to “make perfect good sense” in the contemporary world. We
believe that the failure of sustainability discourse over the past
half century shows that moral reasoning is not enough. The
fact that notions of sufficiency continue to be subordinate to
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Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 1, February 2015
the logic of economic accumulation calls for more than moral
appeals to a rearrangement of priorities. In order for suffi-
ciency to become a pervasive principle of human social life,
the beliefs underlying economic theory need to be revised.
For humans to thrive in the long run, the open-system model
underlying the image of unlimited good will have to be aban-
doned.
A decade ago the culture theorist Fredric Jameson observed
that most people find it easier to imagine the end of the world
than to imagine the end of capitalism. But globalized capi-
talism is increasingly a zero-sum game of winners and losers.
If it is not substantially reorganized, most people on the planet
will ultimately be losers. We believe that anthropology ought
to engage much more actively in imagining in this way,
through a critical exploration of worldview, what Cliggett calls
“change for the better.”
—Paul Trawick and Alf Hornborg
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