Abstract

Every human society is an energy transduction system of converting natural resources via labor and capital technology into human needs and governed by the principal law of energy efficiency for sustainability as well as for further development. Systemic disturbances of the transduction process do mainly stem from certain key monopolies (land, taxes, money) and privileges (extraction of economic value for no performance in return) in production and distribution. There seems to be a cybernetic circuit behind these systemic energy transductions, and measurements can be surely modeled in waves, cycles and most probably spirals (progression vs. retrogression). Real human advancement (empirically and historically) resulted in social developments that introduced energy saving techniques into the human labor process of converting natural resources (land) into capital (technical resources as product of accumulated labor-time). The cyclical (Sisyphean) disappearance of economic surplus value into economic rent is the greatest historical obstacle to earth sharing and a sharing economy. Energy remains the foundational category of human (economic) existence in this physical world and this paper unveils the dynamic chain of the economic circuit, concerning the monetary and energetic translation of land, labor and capital.