Fun Research Quotation of the Day

"While economists delude themselves with diagrams depicting circular flows of income and expenditure in which, in defiance of the most basic laws of the biophysical universe, nothing enters or leaves, the economic process really consists of a linear throughput of finite energy and matter to be converted into goods and services. Some of the energy and matter is degraded in the process of production; the products themselves eventually get discarded. Hence, to the somewhat jaundiced eye, what GNP ultimately measures is how fast human beings are able to convert nature into garbage--hardly the kind of thing that a sensible society would make the central measure of its success."

-RT Naylor, economist @ McGill, 2005, "The Rise and Fall of the Underground Economy"