> What is this primitive thing at the end of the chain? Energy and material. With nuclear fission power, we have a very large amount of energy available for th

> What is this primitive thing at the end of the chain? Energy and material. With nuclear fission power, we have a very large amount of energy available for the future. With nuclear fusion, potentially much more. As for materials, we can recycle most of them. And who's to say in the future we won't be mining asteroids? I'm well aware that economics, in the end, is about raw materials, manpower, etc... After all, the first economic 'transactions' involved people cooperatively gathering food, building shelter, etc... (ie. you build a shelter and make a fire while I find us a rabbit to roast) However there's nothing to say the future won't consist of a world powered by nuclear fusion (or some yet-to-be discovered method of energy production), where all labour is done by robots, where we're all given Star Trek-style 'credits' with which we pay each other to recite bad poetry. Also keep in mind that economics didn't start with Keynes or Smith, or even Ibn Khaldun. The ancient Mesopotamians kept exhaustive records, had commodity-backed banknotes/tokens, units of precious metals (shekels), rules governing finance, and debt, etc... Modern economics isn't any different (fundamentally), we just now have more things to measure, and more abstractions to make sense of the endless complexity of a modern, global economy that has 7+ billion actors in it...