There are two powerful mechanisms that work to entrench the dominance of hierarchical corporations. Chapter 6 will explain how our current financial system reinforces corporate dominance and helps to keep people from exercising control over their habitation. This chapter explains how the categories of mainstream economics produce a systematic mismeasurement of the amount of investment in the economy. This mismeasurement, in turn, reinforces the idea that public policy should be oriented towards incentivizing business investment. This leads directly to limitations on both public spending and wage gains for workers since both of these come at the expense of corporation profitability. The consequence is a systematic underinvestment in the expenditures that would improve our habitation.

Even though we have a habitation economy, we are using the economic tools that were developed to understand an industrial economy. Among the most important of these tools are the definition of investment and the accounting methods for measuring it. Investment is generally defined by economists as the production of goods that will be used to make other goods. Whether or not an outlay is defined as an investment has important consequences for measuring total output.

Investment outlays are contrasted with spending on intermediate goods that are used up in the process of production, such as the steel and glass used to make automobiles or a company's use of bookkeeping services. These intermediate goods are not included in GDP since their cost is incorporated in the price of final products. Investment is also distinguished from consumption activity that simply uses up the supply of goods and services produced in a given year. It follows that when an expense that was previously defined as either an intermediate good or a consumption good is redefined as an investment, it increases gross domestic product (GDP). GDP is the sum of investment plus the total amount of goods and services that are consumed by final users plus government spending plus the balance of international trade. In short, investment expenditures are productive whereas consumption simply uses up what has been produced elsewhere; intermediate goods are necessary but do not have the generative power of investments.