ABSTRACT
The imports of embodied labor from the South to the North were addressed in the earliest conceptualizations of unequal exchange and calculating the “employment footprints” of nations continues to be a crucial method for assessing asymmetries in world trade. The asymmetric structures of exchange revealed through multiregional input–output analyses are ultimately generated by the design of modern money. Envisaging social reforms that might curb the logic of such money without considering how money itself could be redesigned has proven futile. Various political experiments from Scandinavian social democracy to Chinese communism have finally submitted to the insidious logic of all-purpose money. The conundrum of unequal exchange is that it is an inevitable consequence of the conjunction of all-purpose money and the Entropy Law, which, as we have seen, rewards the dissipation of resources with more resources to dissipate.
