1. Energy & Money Integrating Social Metabolism into Economic Analysis Blair Fix Canadian Society for Ecological Economics Toronto November 2, 2013

2. Real GDP: A measure of our ignorance?

3. A Quantity Measure of Output

4. Quantity of What?

5. Quantification Requires Units 3 apples + 3 oranges = ?

6. The Seven SI Base Units

7. Defining 1 second: The duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.

8. The Choice of Unity Affects Aggregate Quantity Apple : Orange Mass (kg) 1 : 2 Energy (J) 3 : 4 Price ($) 5 : 7

9. The fundamental problem with using price as a unit... Relative prices change all the time, meaning our unit ($) has no single definition!

10. A Historical Example

15. Measuring Changes in Quality?

16. Hedonic Quality Adjustment “The practice of decomposing an item into its constituent characteristics, obtaining estimates of the value of the utility derived from each characteristic, and using those value estimates to adjust prices when the quality of a good changes.” US Bureau of Labour Statistics

17. A Completely Different Approach to Output

18. Dissipative Structures

19. Society as a Dissipative Structure Social Metabolism

20. Useful Work: A physically meaningful quantity measure of output.

22. A Pecuniary Feedback

23. Most Types of Useful Work Have No Price 1. Mechanical Drive 2. Heat (Low, Mid, High) 3. Light 4. Muscle Work 5. Electricity

24. The Price of Electricity as a Proxy for the Price of Useful Work KWH Deflated GDP

25. Japan

27. United Kingdom

29. United States

31. Conclusions

32. Rethinking Labour Productivity