“Only after the last tree has been cut down, the last river poisoned, and the last fish caught will we realise we cannot eat money.”
-often attributed to a Cree Indian Saying
“Anything we can actually do, we can afford.”
-John Maynard Keynes
Modern civilisation possesses an extraordinary productive power. With the aid of machines, technology and global organisation we are capable of producing more than enough to meet humanity’s basic needs. Yet much of our economic thinking still assumes that scarcity is the defining condition of life.
When money — a symbolic system created to organise exchange — is mistaken for the wealth it represents, rising productivity no longer appears as freedom but as unemployment and pressure for endless growth. The essays on this site explore the consequences of that mistaken identification — and the possibilities that might emerge if we began to see it clearly.
This idea can be illustrated with a simple analogy…
THE BUILDING SITE ANALOGY
– after Alan Watts
Imagine a building site.
There are bricks stacked high. Timber is cut and ready. Steel beams lie in place. Skilled workers stand with tools in their hands. The plans are drawn. The need for shelter is obvious.
But building stops.
The foreman says, “We’ve been using too many inches and there aren’t enough to go around.”
We would immediately see the absurdity there. Inches are a way of measuring materials. They are not the materials themselves. If bricks and timber are present, the house can be built. A shortage of inches would be meaningless.
Yet something very similar happens in our economic life.
Look at our world, overflowing with goods and productive power. One person today, aided by machines and digital systems, can do what once required hundreds. Food is produced in abundance. Knowledge flows instantly across continents. Technology multiplies our capacity beyond anything previous generations could imagine.
The materials are there — labour, land, knowledge, energy. But the conversation stops at the measuring system.
So we often say, “We can’t afford it.”
We say this about housing. About healthcare. About eliminating hunger. About reducing working hours. About giving people time to live rather than merely survive.
Money began as a coordination tool. A way of keeping track. A system of rights and obligations so that complex societies could function fairly and predictably. It was never meant to be the substance of wealth itself.
But gradually the symbol took on weight. The map became more authoritative than the territory. The accounting system became the gatekeeper of reality.
In a world of genuine scarcity, this may have made sense. When survival depends on limited resources, careful accounting is necessary.
But what happens when technology shifts the balance? When the problem is no longer producing enough, but deciding how to distribute and use what we can already produce?
If machines reduce the labour needed for essentials, that could mean more time. Instead, we experience unemployment as crisis. We feel compelled to create new work so that people can earn money to buy what could already be produced without their additional labour. We often expand output not because we need more stuff, but because income must flow.
It is as if we have forgotten that the measuring stick was meant to serve the building — not the other way around.
This is not a call to abandon money. Nor a denial of real constraints. Ecological limits are real. Coordination is complex. Institutions cannot simply be wished away.
But there is a shared illusion at the heart of our economic thinking: we treat monetary limits as if they were natural limits. We speak of “finding the money” even when idle labour and unused capacity sit before us.
The question is simple, though its implications are not.
If the bricks are there, why are we waiting for more inches?
When we stop mistaking the symbol for the substance, new choices become visible — including the choice to convert some of our extraordinary productive power into time, security, and cultural depth.
The house can be built.
The question is whether we are ready to stop mistaking the measuring system for the reality it was meant to describe — and recognise the far-reaching possibilities that this realisation could open.
If this analogy resonates and you would like to explore the ideas further, begin with the essays collected under “Exploring the Idea.”