Microeconomics, macroeconomics, macro-systemic thinking. Three ways of looking at the economy. Three levels of perspective. And yet one of them is almost entirely absent from the way we typically think about economic reality. Let us start with a metaphor.
The chessboard metaphor
Microeconomics: you are a piece on the chessboard and you see everything from your own point of view, according to the rules of the game.
Each piece on the board has a role, a value, a range of movement. The queen moves freely in all directions — representing multinationals, powerful and agile. The knight leaps unexpectedly: investment funds, disruptive startups. The bishop glides diagonally: specialised industries, innovative entrepreneurs. The rooks are established companies with mature markets. And then there are the pawns — households, workers, small businesses. Indispensable to the game. Often sacrificed in the system's logic.
You see the world from the piece you are. You are inside the game. Microeconomics models economic agents from within — their assumed rationalities, their strategies, their responses to signals. It looks through the narrow end of the telescope. And it does so very well.
Stepping outside the chessboard
Macroeconomics consists of stepping outside the chessboard to observe it from a higher vantage point. Global equilibria. Rules of operation. System-wide dynamics.
Interest rates. Money creation. Fiscal policies. International trade. Inflation. Growth. Unemployment. The game seen as a system.
Macroeconomics tries to organise the pieces' movements to prevent immediate chaos on the board. It monitors imbalances — an inflationary pressure here, a bubble forming there. It is indispensable. And yet, even at this height, something essential remains invisible.
Step back further — see the table
Step back further, until you can see the table. The table on which everything rests: the board, the pieces, the clock, the two glasses, the bottle of brandy. The foundation that nobody talks about because nobody, inside the game, has any reason to look at it — and that we have never factored into our way of thinking about the economy.
This is what I call macro-systemic thinking: reasoning at the foundational level. The level of the conditions that make the very existence of the economic system possible. The whole game rests on the assumption that this table is eternal — that it has no limits, no fragility, no collapse threshold, that it will always supply the pieces with the resources they need to grow.
So the pieces, deprived of guardrails, gnaw at it continuously. Not out of malice, but out of logic. To grow, to exist, to follow the rules of the board — they draw from the table itself. They consume its substance. And the board does not measure this. It has no indicator for it. It even rewards the pieces that devour the table fastest. We call this "performance".
What is this table, exactly?
Concretely, the table is the set of conditions that economics generally takes for granted: a stable climate, functioning oceans, fertile soils, fresh water, accessible energy, ecosystems that regulate and regenerate, biodiversity — millions of invisible interactions maintaining the balance of the living world.
But also: social trust, minimal geopolitical stability, functioning institutions, logistics networks that hold, public health as collective capacity.
In short: everything without which the chessboard does not exist. These elements generally have no market price. They do not appear in balance sheets. They do not count in GDP — except when destroyed. And that is precisely where the system's perversity lies: "what cannot be counted does not count."
The rules reward those who devour the table fastest
The dominant economy measures market flows. It measures activity. It does not measure — or barely measures — systemic sustainability. A destroyed forest increases GDP. So does an oil spill. So does a war. So does a climate disaster.
Why? Because the board counts the activity generated by repairs and reconstructions, without ever integrating the destruction of the underlying ecological, social or civilisational capital. It records the gnawing of the table as performance. It rewards it.
A piece that destroys a forest is a piece that advances. A piece that restores an ecosystem without monetising it is a piece that stagnates, or even regresses.
The question economics dares not ask
The rules we have created in this unconsciousness make us confuse performance with robustness. We measure the growth of the pieces without ever understanding that it rests on the degradation of the table.
Macro-systemic thinking shifts the fundamental question. It no longer asks only: "How do we produce more?" It asks: "What are the conditions that allow the system to continue to exist?"
A civilisation can survive a recession, a financial crash, even a prolonged depression. The pieces fall, the board reorganises, the game resumes. But a civilisation does not survive the collapse of the table itself. The collapse of soil fertility, the destabilisation of hydrological cycles, the rupture of global logistics chains — these have no recovery plan. No central bank rate resolves them.
The true wealth of a society lies in its capacity to preserve the table itself.
NEMO IMS: a monetary system that changes the rules of the game
Money is a system of signals. It orients behaviours, investments, production decisions. It determines, ultimately, what "is worth something" and what has no price.
In the current monetary system, money is created primarily through debt. Every euro or dollar in circulation corresponds to a repayment promise — with interest. This mechanism imposes an inescapable logic: you must grow to repay. Produce more. Extract more. Sell more — and destroy the "table."
The current monetary system does not ask pieces to preserve the table. It economically forbids them from stopping. To stop is to fail to repay. To fail to repay is to disappear. The gnawing is not a deviance. It is an architectural obligation.
If the problem is architectural, the response must be too. This is why I propose NEMO IMS (Negentropic Money International Monetary System).
The founding idea is simple to formulate, even if its implementation is complex: if money is a signal, let us make it send signals aligned with the health of the "table."
In the current system, money creation is backed by debt and economic growth. In NEMO IMS, it is conditioned on the regeneration of living systems. Money is no longer created against a promise of future growth, but against concrete proof of restoration — of ecosystems, soils, commons, planetary equilibria.
NEMO IMS articulates several complementary mechanisms: an exchange standard based on planetary boundaries — the nine Earth system boundaries identified by Johan Rockström and colleagues; a negentropic money creation mechanism anchored in verifiable acts of ecological regeneration; and an international governance body — the GAIA Economic Symposium — overseeing the balance between monetary emission, ecological regeneration, and distributive justice.
What NEMO IMS seeks to achieve: align monetary logic with macro-systemic logic. Make the money-signal stop rewarding gnawing — and start valuing what economics has never known how to count: taking care of what makes everything exist and still have meaning. The table.
Jean-Christophe Duval