More subtle is the point, particularly in early economic thought, that land is a proxy for the master economic input: energy.
With sufficient energy, you can provide other inputs (raw materials, labor, capital). Without it, you're sunk.
In a preindustrial society, energy == land (and sea), in the form of food and fuel production (agriculture, grazing, fuelwood, wild herds, fish, all by way of direct or indirect sunlight conversion), as well as in the form of wind and water power resources which can be tapped through mechanisms. Ricardo's "law of rent" was in part a lament that all the good ones -- that is, most productive acres -- are taken. He was complaining about asset allocation in his day (he also saw economic surpluses accruing to landowners and labor rather than hard working capitalists and bankers, which is a tad curious).
With an industrialized society, energy's become something we extract from the land (coal, oil, gas, uranium), rather than which is produced or converted by it. But the fundamental truth remains.
In a future sustainable world, we'll again either be at the point where what we take from the land matches the rate at which it's created, or we'll have found some entropy gradient so abundant (fusion? thorium?) that it can be used extractively for tens to hundreds of thousands of years or more without exhaustion, despite the very formidable technical challenges to its utilization.
My leaning is more toward the former than the latter.
I've been exposed to the idea of an energy-backed currency since reading Arthur Clarke's Imperial Earth as a kid (it's actually got a lot to do with energy economics in general, among other themes).
More recently I've been looking at some of the principles of dissipative systems and wondering if one of the fundamental inequality equations of that field isn't applicable as a general concept of capital accumulation. Let's see if I can't find that ... OK: the storage function here:
I've also been kicking around the ideas of, variously, an organism (say, a human), or a herd, or an ecosystem, as an economic analog, and trying to figure out what the equivalent systems within them are. For the body analog, there's the long-standing metaphor within economic literature of the banking system and money as the heart and blood. My read is that these are mistaken -- those correspond to physical constructs within the economy (transportation systems and energy), not the control and signaling systems of the economy. There I think you'd want to map something more on the lines of Ca+ ion exchange or endocrine signaling, though honestly my understanding of biology and systems is pretty loose. I've been meaning to look at how biological and ecological systems signal for resource utilization.
With sufficient energy, you can provide other inputs (raw materials, labor, capital). Without it, you're sunk.
In a preindustrial society, energy == land (and sea), in the form of food and fuel production (agriculture, grazing, fuelwood, wild herds, fish, all by way of direct or indirect sunlight conversion), as well as in the form of wind and water power resources which can be tapped through mechanisms. Ricardo's "law of rent" was in part a lament that all the good ones -- that is, most productive acres -- are taken. He was complaining about asset allocation in his day (he also saw economic surpluses accruing to landowners and labor rather than hard working capitalists and bankers, which is a tad curious).
With an industrialized society, energy's become something we extract from the land (coal, oil, gas, uranium), rather than which is produced or converted by it. But the fundamental truth remains.
In a future sustainable world, we'll again either be at the point where what we take from the land matches the rate at which it's created, or we'll have found some entropy gradient so abundant (fusion? thorium?) that it can be used extractively for tens to hundreds of thousands of years or more without exhaustion, despite the very formidable technical challenges to its utilization.
My leaning is more toward the former than the latter.