Steiner's claim that economic entities behave like living ones, so that reading an economy well requires the same faculty as reading a living organism.
Economic and Biological Thinking in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's argument that the economic process is read correctly only when it is read the way a living organism is read, because economic entities behave, in their reality, like biological ones. He set it out on 1 August 1922 in the second seminar discussion of the Political Economy Seminar (GA 341) at the Goetheanum in Dornach, given alongside the fourteen World Economy lectures (GA 340) to students of the seminar. His test case was labour that produces nothing saleable: a vanity volume of poetry set by typesetters and then pulped. Marxist accounting calls that labour productive, then loses it. Steiner instead compared it to the countless herring eggs that perish so that herrings can exist at all, arguing that the tendency in such labour is diverted rather than annulled. The modern application is associative and ecological economics, which treats an economy as metabolism rather than machinery.
Economic and biological thinking names the pairing Steiner drew when a seminar participant asked how the two relate. His answer was not that economics resembles biology by metaphor, but that both fields fail for the same reason: neither has yet learned to think in tendencies. Where a biologist watches a whole herring from egg to fish, an economist has only currents and directions to work with.
In Steiner's Own Words
The economic entities are, in their reality, as they once were, already very much analogous to the biological entities. You can verify this very well if you try to determine the economic value of a job, for example, a printer's job. Let us assume that a poet fancies himself to be an extraordinarily great poet and manages to get his poetry printed, whether through patronage or financial support or something similar. And now the paper workers, the typesetters, a whole range of people are working on the realization of this volume of poetry, who, according to the Marxist concept, are doing decidedly productive work. But let's assume that not a single copy is sold, but that they are all pulped. Then you would have the same real effect as if they had not been made at all. Basically, you have expended labor completely uselessly in this case.
What it Means Today
The economist who came closest to Steiner's question was Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the Romanian mathematician who taught at Vanderbilt University and published The Entropy Law and the Economic Process with Harvard University Press in 1971. His central claim was that the economic process is not a self-renewing mechanical circuit but a continuation of the biological one, subject to the same irreversible degradation that governs every living exchange. He gathered the position under the name bioeconomics, and his student Herman Daly carried it into the steady-state economics that later shaped ecological economics as a field. Georgescu-Roegen and Steiner reached the same door from opposite sides. The economist began with thermodynamics and concluded that production is metabolism. Steiner began with the anthroposophical picture of a living organism and concluded that an economy has to be read like one, in tendencies rather than finished objects.
Thalira synthesis: entropy accounting tells an economy what it has lost, while Steiner's herring test asks where the loss went, and only the second question can treat labour spent on goods nobody buys as a fact about the whole organism instead of an embarrassment in the ledger. Anyone in an association or a purchasing circle can use that directly: before writing off unsold stock, ask which activity those hours were diverted from.
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