Calories, Capital, and Other Things That Don’t Exist
If we’re running around like headless chickens and don’t understand what has happened to the world over the past 50 years, it’s because the model we use to understand the economy is as false as the co
The original (Spanish) version of this article can be found here.
You might not know this, but calories don’t exist. There aren’t tiny things inside foods that are the same in a radish and in an anchovy. Calories are a unit of measurement invented in physics to calculate how much energy is needed to raise the temperature of water.
Years later, a nutritionist borrowed the term and figured that, since the human body uses energy and produces heat, he could apply the same concept to explain how our body “burns” food — drawing a parallel with a thermal machine. So he took some foods, set them on fire under controlled conditions, and measured how much they heated water as they burned: proteins and carbohydrates produced 4 calories per gram of material burned, and fats produced 8.
That happened around 1890. Since then, we’ve been calculating the “calories” in foods based on how much they would hypothetically heat water if we set them on fire. We still understand the body as if it were a device that literally burns stuff to produce energy — and we apply this logic to food labeling, recipes, school lessons, and weight-loss programs. Even today, 150 years later, everything we are taught about nutrition is still based on that nonsense, which has no relation to human biochemistry.
Because the human body doesn’t actually “burn” anything. Food activates different metabolic pathways — like glycolysis, lipolysis, or ketogenesis — that convert nutrients into energy in different ways depending on what we’ve eaten, when, in what hormonal context, and even whether we’ve had enough sleep. These pathways also determine which parts of the food we process and which we excrete. Hormones — not calories — are the true key that decides how much energy the body uses, how, and when.
And yet, medicine — with the invaluable help of industry — has spent 150 years promoting a theory with no scientific basis, leading people to make poor decisions about their health. How is this possible?
It turns out that to explain the complex mechanisms that govern life, we need models — simplifications. And when reality — like human metabolism — is far more complex than the fiction — “calories in, calories out” — or when vested interests push in the opposite direction, bad science often becomes entrenched and impossible to remove.
The same thing has happened with economics. We’ve arrived in the year 2025 still using a paradigm from 250 years ago that can’t withstand even the most basic scrutiny. And now, the engine that had been producing continuous growth for all that time has stopped. We find ourselves in a colossal deadlock: governments around the world don’t know what to do to restart an economy that offers good jobs and keeps growing, because the theoretical model we use is based — just like calories — on things that don’t exist.
This excerpt from a recent article in El País is a perfect example of the civilizational mess we’ve gotten into:
“Let’s remember once again what TFP (Total Factor Productivity) is. Simply put, TFP is the “secret sauce” of economic growth. It’s everything that lets us produce more without needing more workers or machines. It’s technology, management efficiency, institutional quality, innovation — ultimately, the ‘know-how’ of an economy. It’s calculated as the portion of growth that can’t be explained by increases in the factors of production (capital and labor). It’s the leftover, what remains after everything else is subtracted. And in Spain, the evolution of that leftover has been persistently negative or disappointing.
How do we get TFP? Usually as a residual: what isn’t explained by observable factors must be TFP. However, the traditional method, the so-called ‘Solow residual,’ is highly pro-cyclical, as these authors point out. During recessions, when the economy tanks, TFP collapses; in expansions, it shoots up. And this seemed odd.”
Wait — “secret sauce”? “Know-how”? “Can’t be explained”? “Must be TFP”? How can a discipline considered a science — the very one underpinning the organization of our society — in the year 2025, talk in these terms? How can we understand anything if we don’t even know what the “secret ingredients” of the economy are?
If it’s possible to publish something like this in a serious newspaper in a major country, it’s because similar things are published every day, everywhere. The issue isn’t the writer, but the underlying model — which makes no sense.
You see:
Economic theory — mainstream, alternative, all of it — defines the production process as a combination of several “factors”, which (with some variations across time, schools of thought, and historical interests) are capital and labor.
But this definition has no real relationship to the actual production process. It is — like calories — a political invention, a speculation, a story that confuses productive factors with a representation of the social groups involved: the owners of labor (workers), and the owners of capital (capitalists).
In this definition, capital could be anything from investments in machinery and infrastructure to tools, buildings, technology, accumulated knowledge, or even the investment of advancing one's own work to create inventory.
Labor, on the other hand, could be a pure form of energy (like when workers operate machines), a form of technology (like when programmers write software), or a form of knowledge (like lawyers or consultants).
Following this loose and shifting definition, we could imagine two countries that both export wood. One does it using manual labor; the other has fully mechanized the process. In this case, labor and capital are serving the same function: collecting wood, and the result is the same — a stock of boards. But according to economic theory, the factors of production are completely different.
Now imagine both countries decide to industrialize by manufacturing furniture. One hires local designers (labor), while the other buys industrial designs from a third country (capital). Once again, the function in the production process is the same, but economics treats them differently.
So what differentiates them? Nothing. There’s no intrinsic distinction between labor and capital. The difference isn’t in the role they play in production, but in who provides them. Capital comes from those with accumulated surplus; labor comes from those who must exchange their time each month to participate (and be paid). The line dividing these two factors is not economic, but political. That’s why these categories don’t explain the production process, but rather the social organization behind the system.
Capital and labor are, like calories, units of measurement used to calculate each group’s contribution to the productive system. When we try to use these alien categories to understand how the economy actually works, everything falls apart — just like trying to understand the human body using calories to measure energy consumption. That’s why we’re running around like headless chickens trying to understand what’s happened to the world since the 20th century. Like those people who follow their nutritionist’s advice to the letter and still can’t lose weight despite eating fewer calories than they supposedly “burn,” we’re banging our heads against a theory that doesn’t reflect reality.
This becomes crystal clear if we apply that framework to a non-political context — like that of animals. For example, some ant species practice a form of agriculture in their nests. The process — in which worker ants collect and trim leaves to use as substrate for bacteria that grow fungi to feed larvae — is analogous to any of our industrial processes. As with all human behavior, we exist on a continuum with the rest of the animal kingdom, and the processes we observe in society echo in other species. That’s why biology, medicine, sociology, and psychology all trace continuity between our species and others.
And yet no one would dream of saying that the ants’ productive process is divided between “capital” and “labor.” That would be absurd! Because capital and labor don’t exist in nature — they are symbolic, political constructs, unique to our society. They can only be used to explain political processes in society, not the mechanisms of the economy.
Knowledge and Energy
So how can we understand the production process in its real essence? What model can help us comprehend and address the problems we face?
In essence, modern industry is just the evolutionary peak of the natural processes by which living beings meet their needs. There’s a continuous line from the mechanisms used by the first unicellular organisms to survive and reproduce, through increasingly sophisticated practices of more complex animals — like farming ants — all the way to the methods we humans have perfected over millennia, resulting in today’s industries.
All of these processes are governed by the same principle. From the earliest single-celled organisms to Taiwan’s microchip factories, every productive process — no matter how complex — is a combination of two factors: knowledge and energy.
Knowledge can be organic (genetic or epigenetic), learned (acquired during an individual’s life), or social and shared by a group (like in social animals). It can exist only in consciousness — like culture — or be materialized in tools or technology. It can be simple, like DNA, or complex, like mathematics.
Energy, on the other hand, can come from food, sunlight, water currents, fossil fuels, electricity, or conscious effort — which we call "labor" when it's human or animal in origin.
In this model, raw materials can be understood as the amount of energy needed to extract or transform them.
So ants combine group knowledge to develop their form of agriculture. The energy comes from the workers and the bacteria that grow the fungi. Elephants use the matriarchs’ knowledge to dig wells in droughts, using their own strength. Some birds hunt and hang their prey so that the sun “cures” the meat before they eat it.
We humans use a highly sophisticated mix of knowledge — mathematical, physical, mechanical, chemical, architectural, etc. — to meet our needs. The sheer amount of knowledge is so vast that it also requires vast amounts of energy — which is where capital and labor come in.
The confusion in understanding how the economy works comes from the fact that the two “factors” we’ve traditionally identified — capital and labor — are actually the same: both are ways of contributing energy to production, either as upfront investment or as ongoing effort.
Meanwhile, knowledge, which isn’t measurable, tradable, or marketable — which is produced and maintained in a distributed way and cannot be restricted — has historically gone unnoticed. Not because it’s irrelevant, but because it’s not represented in that political equation of productivity.
Can knowledge be the product of capital or labor? Not really. A specific application of knowledge — a machine, a design — may be produced using those “factors.” But that application is only a tiny tip of a vast iceberg of knowledge (cultural, aesthetic, mechanical, linguistic, mathematical, etc.) that is preexisting and not confined to an industrial logic.
The Productivity Enigma
That “secret sauce” that “can only be measured as a residual” and has economists scratching their heads — that je ne sais quoi that has puzzled us for a decade — is really knowledge. But since no single social group (like workers or capitalists) lays claim to it, it’s like a mist — everywhere, yet ignored. That’s how it became the elephant in the room of the economy, given various names throughout history: “work organization,” the “invisible hand,” or “total factor productivity.”
Yet when we observe the same productive system through the lens of knowledge and energy, the so-called “productivity enigma” becomes obvious.
The more knowledge we inject into the productive equation, the less energy we need. In other words: the more technology and technique advance, the less capital and labor are needed to satisfy a need.
This is what happened over the 250 years following the Industrial Revolution. The progressive intensification of knowledge increased productivity by reducing the energy required for production. But to sustain that system, a specific balance between knowledge and energy had to be maintained. Not only did energy — the only factor measured and rewarded — have to remain necessary, but knowledge had to remain in the hands of a few. A massive increase in knowledge would make energy virtually irrelevant.
And that’s exactly what happened from the late 20th to the early 21st century. Chasing the dream of a “knowledge society,” the world sent entire generations to college, unleashing an unprecedented surge of intelligence. In just a few years, we went from a handful of engineers, mathematicians, and philosophers to billions of educated people, in every country and across nearly every discipline.
The delicate balance between knowledge and energy that had supported the industrial society — where a few countries and companies monopolized all know-how — exploded. The massive intelligence boost of the late 20th century — thousands of times greater than that of the Industrial Revolution — caused a knowledge overdose the world wasn’t prepared for. Instead of stimulating the economy, it dismantled the productive system forever.
Since then, entire sectors — like music, information, and entertainment, but also education, design, photography, marketing, programming, consulting, architecture, translation, cosmetics, vocational training, and even parts of medicine, law, and engineering — have in just a few years gone from requiring huge amounts of work and investment to becoming weightless: distributed across millions of literate people, able to make decisions and meet their own needs.
Disintermediation (removal of middlemen, like travel agencies or bookstores), commoditization (when knowledge spreads, competition rises, and prices fall), and even deglobalization are all consequences of this same phenomenon, clearly traceable from the knowledge–energy paradigm.
When historians in the year 3000 look back at our time, from a bird’s-eye view, they won’t see an “industrial productivity enigma” or a bump in the road. They’ll see the end of an era — and the beginning of a new one.
Because we now live in an unprecedented world: a true knowledge society, nothing like what our parents dreamed of. A society where the exchange of goods and services no longer happens only in the economy, but in a realm still largely unnoticed — one that has become the core of our economic metabolism. This is the era of plutonomy.
It may take economists and political scientists a few more years to admit it — as it did with nutritionists. But reality is stubborn. It won’t bend to fit into the outdated models we keep trying to apply. Only when we finally discard those obsolete frameworks — in both nutrition and economics — can we begin to shed the excess weight we’ve gained from believing in capital… and in calories.
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