CONCEPT
The Economy of Life
Mumford's culminating orientation: an evaluation of civilization by what it preserves of human flourishing rather than what it produces in measurable output — counterposed to the
economy of death, which optimizes a single value at the expense of every organic quality that makes human life worth living.
The economy of life is not a prescription for any particular economic arrangement but an orientation — a set of values that determines how a civilization evaluates its own activity. In the economy of life, the measure of a technology is not what it produces but what it enables: not the quantity of the output but the quality of the experience it creates for the human beings who use it and are affected by it. Mumford counterposed this orientation to what he called the economy of death — the logic that emerges when a single value, efficiency, displaces every other consideration. In the economy of death, every quality that does not contribute to the efficiency ratio — beauty, meaning, the organic
satisfaction of work at human pace, the accumulated character of environments shaped by many hands over many years — is classified as waste. The classification