industrial technology. In Designing the Green Economy, I explored in more detail how the nature of production and labour in early industrialism (1) permitted markets to actually do a decent job in distributing resources, driving production, and facilitating innovation, and (2) limited what the state could do. In this chapter I will summarize some of those key relationships that are relevant to current issues and development potentials. The main issue is the relationship between politics, economics and culture. They were very separate in early industrialism, with economics being the dominant realm. However, when culture and knowledge become key economic forces, economic development entails greater degrees of conscious direction, and politics must become ever more integrated into everyday economic affairs. The Great Depression of the thirties forced greater integration, since it was ultimately a market system failure resulting from the rise of these new culture-based productive forces. Economically the failure was expressed in a structural crisis of overproduction (or chronic effective demand shortage) that discouraged economic recovery after the great crash of 1929. Greater political intervention was necessary to get the economy going, and to keep it from crashing again. Emerging productive forces not only made production more complex but since consumption (i.e. effective demand) could no longer be taken for granted, it too had to be more planned. The development of new organizational, management and informational tools made this increasingly feasible. In the postwar Fordist era, not only did the state become a major part of the economy, but corporations themselves became planning organizations, ushering in a new stage of