Revisiting the Image of Limited Good
On Sustainability, Thermodynamics, and the Illusion of Creating Wealth
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2224281 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paul Trawick, A Hornborg (0000-0003-2102-5875) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-27 |
| Publication date | 2015-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Current Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/679593 |
| OpenAlex | W1965557693 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 12 |
| References cited | 78 |
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
Argument (complex analysis · Boom · Commons · Dominance (genetics · Economic system · Economics · Illusion · Microeconomics · Natural resource economics · Neoclassical economics · Peasant · Political science · Sociology · Law · Water Governance and Infrastructure · Water resources management and optimization · Water-Energy-Food Nexus Studies
Soil Knowledge
Las ferias costumbristas y la reinvención de la comunidad en el Wallmapu
Baraka and Thermodynamics
Environmental Sustainability Generated by the Views of the Skolt Sami and Gregory Bateson
Expo 2015 in Milan
Higher Education Estate Data Accountability
The modernity/coloniality of being
The Psychology of Neoliberalism and the Neoliberalism of Psychology
Re-living a Common Future in the Face of Ecological Disaster
Neosubstantivism as Cosmotechnics
The Social Consequences of Climate Change in the Central Mesa Verde Region
Austerity's implications
Native Californians
Conversations in Colombia
Globalization and its Discontents
More Heat than Light
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
What is an institution?
How Long Have We Been in the Anthropocene Era?
Between markets and hierarchies
Revisiting the Commons
Energy and Economic Myths
Geology of mankind
The Great Divergence
The Question of the commons
Making the commons work
The long twentieth century
The capitalist world-economy
Cultures of Energy
Economics for Collaborative Environmental Management
Governing the Commons
The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
The Development of Underdevelopment
The Value Problem in Ecological Economics
Priests and Programmers
Economy's Tension
The Articulated Peasant
Globalization and the Decolonial Option
Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity
Presidential Preface to Volume 30, Issue 1
The Order of Things
Learning from the Tiv
Ecological economics, Marxism, and technological progress
Colombian international trade from a physical perspective
The second law, the fourth law, recycling and limits to growth
Footprints in the cotton fields
Entropy and economic processes — physics perspectives
Ecological Economics
Human Labour and Unity of Force
Economics and energetics of organic and conventional farming
The transnational capitalist class and the discourse of globalisation
Against the Privatization of Water
Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality
Trading with China
Vital Energy
Modernity and Its Malcontents
The Power of the Machine
Physics and the 'marginalist revolution
Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia
Comedy and Tragedy in the Andean Commons
Moral Money? Lets and the Social Construction of Local Economic Geographies in Southeast England
Reformulating the commons
Carrying Capacity's New Guise
Going with the Flow
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange
Encountering Development
Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value
A Second Look at Limited Good
Balancing on an Alp
Occult economies and the violence of abstraction
The Moral Economy of Water
Economic Mediation and the Power of Associations
Emergent Properties of Balinese Water Temple Networks
"Foster's "Image of Limited Good
Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good
The Rise of the Global Left. The World Social Forum and Beyond
Successfully Governing the Commons
| Unique citing works | 12 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,2 |
| Citation span | 2016 - 2026 (11) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 12 |