The above "three-layer cake with icing" diagram was designed by the innovative and iconoclastic economist-futurist Hazel Henderson to give "a systemic view of the total productivity in a society," and demonstrate the insufficiency of most current economic thinking that bases estimates of society's wealth and progress solely on monetary indicators such as the GNP, which fails to include long-term human and environmental values. The inevitable interrelationship of ecology and economy are shown in their common root, the Greek oikos, meaning "house" or "home;" and yet conventional political/economic thinking has completely dis-sociated these two, leading to grossly distorted and illusory conceptions of the real wealth of nations.

"Economists are familiar with the top two layers of the cake, in which money is the major ingredient. The icing (top layer) is the private sector where most of the innovation goes on. But it rests on the public sector . . . and these two layers are all the economists see."

"The Underground Economy is a shady $380 billion annual operation of tax dodging, moon-lighting, and cash-based transactions, much of which is illegal . . . based on the drug-trade, prostitution, pimping, stolen goods, Mafia gambling, loan-sharking, fraud, bribery and pornography."

This cash and greed-based underground economy should not be confused with the next layer down of the cake - the non-monetary "counter economy," "informal economy," "household econ- omy" or "love economy," which includes all the "unpaid sweat equity, caring, sharing, parenting, volunteering, bartering, reciprocity and mutual aid that buttresses the official GNP-measured sectors of all societies. In industrial societies, this cooperative, altruistic economy represents 50% or more of all the productive work performed (and in traditional societies the percentage is much higher). The monetarizing of formerly unpaid caring work will continue to be the fastest growing service sector . . . although this only recognizes formerly unaccounted productivity."

The generally ignored and unac- counted basis of the entire productive system is, of course, Nature, the ecosystem, Gaia. Yet the depletion of natural resources (oil, coal, forests, soil, water, biodiversity), which are Nature's "capital accounts," is not recognized in GNP measures of "economic growth." Even more perversely, the money spent on pollution control or clean-up (such as the Exxon oil-spill) actually adds to the dollar value of the GNP; so does the $40 billion spent annually on health- care incurred as a result of air pollution. Thus the money economy (GNP) can seem to be growing, while the real, natural wealth of the land, and the health and well-being of its citizens is decreasing.

The Country Futures Indicators, advocated by Henderson, include a reformulated GNP that takes the informal economy and environmental costs in- to account; and include indices of education, health, nutrition, basic services, shelter, child development, political participation, status of minorities, resource depletion, biodiversity, et al. "The intrinsic value to devising new types of national wealth indicators is that they spark more discussion in the ongoing and necessary debate about which economic indicators are useful and what definitions of progress valid."

In her introduction to The Politics of the Solar Age, Hazel Henderson writes that the major trend she sees continuing into the 1990's is "toward a world of ever-closer interdependence and greater cooperation,with shifts toward production systems based on renewable resources and managed for long-term sustainability. . . . (This) entails a paradigm shift from fragment-ed "objective"reductionist knowledge and the mechanistic, industrial world- view to a comprehensive awareness of the interdependence of all life on earth - what is now known as the Gaia hypothesis: that our planet is a living organism and we humans are participants (not just observers) in its evolutionary unfolding . . . our human technologies (will be) learning ever more from Gaia's own genius in capturing and utilizing the daily flow of photons from the sun; from Gaia's mighty cycling of all elements, water, atmosphere, soils, plants and animals; and the myriad ways of cooperating with each other and joining the overall symbiosis of these planetary processes."

"Competition and cooperation are both appropriate strategies under certain circumstances and nature employs both equally and in balance. Competition between species, groups, organizations and individuals, as well as ideas, keeps unhealthy overgrowth at bay. Cooperative strategies between all these same players are equally important - creating the "glue" which keeps everyone orchestrated and functioning within the agreed upon rules of interaction . . . As we move beyond the economic view, whether "left" or "right," it is time to give a decent burial to the two European philosophers of industrialism and economics, Karl Marx and Adam Smith, and reintegrate other useful disciplines into a new, multi-cultural view of human and ecologically-sustainable development. A new politics of values and a reordering of priorities is needed to address this larger transition."