Wealth & Money Quote by Paul Hawken

Hawken is naming the accounting trick that keeps modern life feeling efficient even as it hemorrhages ecosystems: we’re grading the world with the wrong scoreboard. If “progress” is tallied in dollars, then an oil spill can perversely look like economic activity (cleanup contracts, lawsuits, replacement purchases) while the marsh it poisons becomes, in market terms, a rounding error. The quote works because it treats money not as evil but as limited: a measuring device designed for financial circulation, not for living systems with thresholds, feedback loops, and irreversibility.

The specific intent is to puncture the common defense that markets will “signal” scarcity and fix environmental harm. Hawken’s subtext is that the signal is noisy by design. Prices encode what can be owned, traded, and insured; they routinely ignore what’s communal, long-term, or biologically complex. That’s the “masked inefficiency”: we congratulate ourselves for streamlined supply chains while outsourcing entropy to soil, oceans, and climate. A rainforest becomes “lumber”; the rest of its functions - rainfall generation, carbon storage, biodiversity, cultural life - don’t show up as income unless they’re converted into products.

Contextually, Hawken sits in the late-20th-century wave of environmental economics and “natural capital” thinking, arguing that GDP-era metrics reward extraction and call it growth. His rhetorical move is surgical: he doesn’t ask you to hate money, he asks you to stop mistaking it for a truth-telling language about reality. If the instrument can’t detect ecological loss, it will always report “progress” right up until the system fails.