Futurework FYI, I've added the following as link in my site. Barry http://home.earthlink.net/~durable/ What Kind of Efficiency Do We Want? The "economics" we study is about money and labor. Prices reflect the labor in a product; not the resouces used to make it. Nature has been excluded from economics: it is "external." Nature must be external because economics is only about the money-based aspect of our "economic" activity. The money-cost of goods reflects labor in production; not the resources used. In this context efficiency is measured by labor efficiency. The throw away economy is the logical result of the pursuit of labor/economic efficiency since the resouces used in production can be increased to reduce the labor required. Economics makes resources external and defines efficiency as labor efficiency only. Because money-economics must make free resources external it must define efficiency based on labor and thus tends to ignore many kinds of resouce waste. The kind of efficiency we really need is the efficient use of natrual resources. Trying to make money-economics carry the load of decision making about resouces is one approach. The other, and better method, is to be willing to be less efficient in our use of labor to allow an more efficient use of resources. It's not that recycling and repair are so hard or so time consuming. It's just that services are a cost: not a benefit from the point of view of economics. We don't need to worry about efficiency in the economy since we have a labor surplus. We need to worry about the waste of resources our efficiency in the use of labor causes. Back Herman Daly "... But if we are interested in the relationship of the economy to the environment, which must be the foundation of any meaningful concept of sustainable development, the pre-analytic vision of conventional economics is actively misleading. It has already assumed away the environment and made it external to the analysis. Indeed, economists often refer explicitly to the natural environment as an externality. Having assumed away the environment to begin with, many economists dismiss the possibility that there might be environmental limits to economic growth."
