The Tetrad

"The Sun, the Earth, the Biosphere, and human labor: the four sources of everything that matters—and which economics cannot see."

Within capitalism or beyond it, any possible economic system implies a theory of value: What matters? How do we reckon its worth? Is this value best understood as inherent, or as value-for-us?

In The Tetrad: Value in a More-than-Human World, renowned technology and urban design theorist Adam Greenfield argues that we have been asking the wrong questions. The true absurdity of capitalism is not simply that it extracts, exploits, and abstracts value, but that it forgets the meaning of value itself.

This concise book explores the meaning of value that must come before any price or measurement. Drawing on a long tradition of philosophical materialism to assess the discipline of economics from the outside, The Tetrad invites us to remember the four foundations from which all value arises: the Sun, the Earth, the Biosphere, and human labor in its physical, intellectual, and affective manifestations. Taking the reader beyond both economics and its Marxian critique, Greenfield develops a theory of value that is folded within planetary time, soaked in groundwater and carried through mycelium, and metabolized by bees and bacteria long before anything human arrives on the scene.