Sustainable Production System

Postface

The way in which an economic information system is organized, structured and used depends on a mental representation of what value is. In the second half of the 18th Century, physiocrats gave economic value an objective basis, the capacity of the land, at the origin of the agricultural production process that is at the source of all wealth creation. Industry and commerce, which transform the land’s wealth, were only considered as productive activities with the classical economists, who placed a value on the exchange of goods equal to the cost of the labor necessary to produce them. Some of them focused their attention on the usefulness of the good produced. The work, once “spent”, would have disappeared and would be lost forever, no longer having any influence on the future value attributed to the good – which could continue to be exchanged and used and therefore valued. The neoclassicals then took hold of this logic, seeking to optimize the usefulness of the good produced and to factor in the costs of labor through mathematical systematizations, seeking to make economics an exact science.

This shift from an objective and physically anchored foundation to an apparent dematerialization of value, with in particular the abandonment of the gold standard, then the rise of speculative finance and now crypto-currencies, seems to drive the evolution of economic practice. However, the absolute decoupling required by sustainable development implies, if not reversing the trend, ...