Returning to First Principles in an Age of Economic Crisis

We live in an era of profound economic paradox. Global wealth has reached unprecedented levels, yet inequality yawns wider than ever. Technological advancement promises abundance, yet ecological collapse looms. Financial markets soar while farmers despair. We produce more than any civilization in history, yet millions lack basic sustenance, and even the prosperous suffer from a gnawing sense of insecurity and meaninglessness in their economic lives.

This paradox signals not merely a crisis of distribution or policy, but something more fundamental—a crisis of conception. The very idea of wealth, as understood and pursued in contemporary economic discourse, appears increasingly disconnected from human flourishing and planetary survival. Wealth has become abstract, financialized, divorced from productive activity and ecological limits. Its accumulation has become an end in itself, severed from considerations of sufficiency, purpose, or virtue. The result is an economic order that generates statistical growth while eroding the actual foundations of prosperity: healthy ecosystems, cohesive communities, meaningful work,...