Artificial Constructs and Their Impact

Introduction

What is an artificial construct? “Artificial Constructs, within a sustainability discourse, denotes human-designed systems or entities - ranging from engineered materials to complex socio-technical arrangements - that intentionally alter natural processes or replace natural functions. These creations are evaluated based on their lifecycle impacts, resource dependencies, and contributions to ecological and social well-being, representing a departure from purely natural systems. Understanding their implications is crucial for assessing long-term viability” (Sustainability Directory, 2024). I was simply going to define it as ‘something created by humans, that is not natural.’

So what are some artificial constructs? Money, perfect markets, race, qualification, gross domestic product, profit, ... . You might be getting the idea that there are many things that are artificial constructs that we treat as natural phenomenon so why do we allow these phenomenon to rule our lives. If we constructed them or allowed them to be constructed then we can change them.

Impact

Richard J. Murphy (18 Mar 2026) discusses GDP as an artificial construct and what is included in calculating it. What is excluded in the calculations includes voluntary work and unpaid caring for family members while included is an estimate of what a home owner might pay for rent on the property that they live in. Murphy then asks the question of whether GDP is an acceptable measure for accessing progress. The GDP measure puts pressure on people to monetorise all transactions and work since transactions and work that are not monetorised do not contribute to GDP.

The core of the problem is how we measure transactions. Money is an artificial construct. Money does not occur naturally and nothing has a natural monetary value. In fact, money has no value. Maybe the term value is also artificial since the best definition is simply that something is considered desirable or important. There is no clear definition of how to assign value to anything. We account for so many things in terms of monetary value but the construct is actually meaningless. Murphy (15 Mar 2026) illustrates this when he argues that no money is destroyed in a stock market crash or when a supermarket decides to lower the price of products on its shelves. The monetary value of something is only defined when someone pays for the item. Any accounting of value before or after the transaction is an arbitrary guess of what it might be sold for in a transaction. An asset in accounting terms is depreciated in accordance with agreed rules. There is no natural phenomenon that actually defines a rate of depreciation for any asset.

Using monetary values as a measure forces us to see things as having no value until a transaction is done using them. A forest has no value unless it is logged and the timber sold. What is in the sea or air is only of value if we can extract something from them to be sold. Ecology has no value in its own right if everything is measured in monetary terms. The consequences of this is that a politics of care (Murphy, YouTube) is not seen as of value since caring for others has no monetary value.

If money is an artificial construct then who decides how much is available? How is it created or destroyed? How is it decided that there is not enough money or too much money? Some of these questions are attempted to be answered by Modern Monetary Theory (Wray, 2012) and Professor Steve Keen (YouTube) both try to describe how our monetary system works.

Maybe the crucial measure of what can be achieved is resource availability and our human ability to achieve the desired outcomes. Money should be secondary or irrelevant.

Measurements

In order to measure things, we create ways to count or account for those things. We measure distance in metric systems using an agreed definition of a metre. For economic systems, we have chosen to measure in terms of a poorly defined means of accounting called money.

What we measure determines what we focus on and what we give priority to. As someone who follows cycling and motor racing, I am conscious that we measure performance in terms of speed (km/hour) or maybe power output (watts) but are there other measures that might deliver better outcomes (i.e efficiency (energy consumed / km)). For my own driving, I have become more focused on energy usage efficiency rather than how quickly I get somewhere or finding ways of using less to achieve the same outcomes.

For an economy or a community are there better ways of defining outcomes other than economic performance (profit or wealth accumulation). Referring back to my previous blog (Thompson, 9 Mar 2026), if we want the outcome defined in the principles then we need to decide how we will measure those results. I would contend that accumulated wealth or profit achieved is not appropriate. We may not get a precise measure of equality but we can tell when a group of people has access too more resources than another group of people or whether everyone has access to a similar size space to live in/on. For education, we are not interested in achievement in fixed subject areas of interest to wealth extractors but we are interested in the person’s engagement with learning, their sense of satisfaction, their sense of enjoyment, and their driving of their own learning. We can define a minimum standard of living. We can define measures for involvement in decision making or whether our decision making processes are engaging everyone impacted by the decision. We already have measures that tell us whether we are depleting our natural resources (i.e hectares in forest, fish counts, land quality, ...). Some of these we could possibly define in monetary terms but monetary measures are not necessary and may cause the wrong focus.

Summary

I would contend that a society forms based on how it measures what it does. When these measures are purely economic (i.e. profit, wealth accumulation, inflation) then other important aspects of value are ignored. If we want a society that serves the interests of everyone and our environment then we need to implement measures that drive the development of society that give us the outcomes that we desire. To define those measures, we need engagement in the decision making processes and a willingness to see what obstructs others from achieving the desired outcomes.

One of the issues with any set of principles or measurements is that it can engender conformity and ignore the diverse nature of humanity. Maybe that is a failing in the principles defined in my previous post (Thompson, 9 Mar 2026). Maybe that is an issue to explore in a future post.

References

Location: Onerahi, Whangārei, New Zealand

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