Ecstatic Economics II/IX: Money, Mycelium, & Insulin (Oh my!)

Money Is a Hormone

From the Ecstatic Economics Series — Grounded in Living Systems Economics, Book 2: Money, Energy, and Information Flow

There is a molecule in your body right now making decisions about your future.

It's not your brain — well, not exactly. It's a signaling molecule, a chemical courier, a tiny biological text message that gets fired into your bloodstream and changes the behavior of every cell it touches. It tells fat cells to store. It tells muscle cells to absorb. It tells your liver to stand down. It coordinates an entire metabolic civilization without holding a single committee meeting.

That molecule is insulin. And before you file this under "health stuff I already don't read," stay with me — because what insulin actually does has more to teach us about money than anything Milton Friedman ever wrote.

Money, it turns out, is a hormone.

Not metaphorically. Not loosely. Not in the way that people say "energy" when they mean "vibe." I mean this with the full weight of endocrinology, mycelial network science, and about a thousand years of confused human relationships with capital. Money is a signaling molecule in the body of an economy. It moves information. It coordinates behavior. It allocates resources. And when it gets stuck — when it pools, when it hoards, when it floods certain tissues while starving others — it produces the exact same pathologies you'd see in a malfunctioning endocrine system.

Diabetes, for the economy. Metabolic syndrome, for your neighborhood. Insulin resistance, for your creative life.

Welcome to Ecstatic Economics. We don't do boring here.

Part One: What the Hell Is a Hormone, Actually?

Let's slow down for a second, because most of us learned about hormones in a context designed to make us feel embarrassed (puberty) or confused (why am I crying at a dog food commercial?). This is a shame, because hormones are genuinely one of the most elegant solutions in the known universe.

Here's the deal: your body is a civilization of about 37 trillion cells. These cells are doing wildly different things at any given moment — some are building bone, some are digesting lunch, some are fighting a bacterial invasion in your left sinus cavity, and some (in the deepest basement of your brainstem) are keeping your heart beating in the background like a janitor who never takes a day off. The coordination problem here is staggering. How does a body that is simultaneously a construction site, a kitchen, an army, a waste management facility, and a jazz club manage to not dissolve into complete chaos?

Hormones.

Hormones are not the things that do the work. They are the things that signal the work. They are messages. They are, to use the language of living systems, information flow encoded as chemistry. [2] A hormone is released from one tissue, travels through the bloodstream, and binds to receptors in distant tissues — and those tissues respond. They ramp up. They stand down. They shift priorities. They change their behavior based on the state of the whole system.

This is the crucial part: hormones don't carry the resources themselves. They carry information about resources.Insulin doesn't contain glucose. It signals cells to accept glucose. Cortisol doesn't contain threat. It signals the body to mobilize for threat. The molecule is a message. The message changes everything.

And this, right here, is where we have been catastrophically wrong about money for about three hundred years.

We have treated money as if it were the resource itself.

It is not.

Money is the signal. The signal that resources exist, that resources are needed, that resources should flow in a particular direction. Strip away the paper, the coins, the blockchain, the spreadsheet entry — what you're left with is information. A claim. A coordination mechanism. A hormone.

When we forget this — when we treat money as the thing rather than the message about the thing — we start making the same mistakes a body would make if it forgot what insulin was for and just started stockpiling it in one organ, doing nothing, building towers of pure signal with no metabolic purpose whatsoever.

Which, incidentally, is a description of a billionaire.

But we'll get there.

Part Two: The Forest Floor Has Been Doing This Longer Than We Have

Before we talk about your savings account, we need to talk about mushrooms.

More specifically, we need to talk about mycelium — the underground network of fungal threads that connects trees in a forest into what scientists now call the "Wood Wide Web." This is not whimsy. This is peer-reviewed mycology, and it is going to reframe everything you think you know about trade, credit, and the hoarding of wealth.

Here's what mycelium does: it extends through soil in filaments thinner than a human hair, threading through root systems, connecting tree to tree across distances that would be invisible to you if you were walking through the forest with a cup of coffee and mildly good intentions. Through this network, trees exchange resources. A large, sunlit tree sends carbon — sugar, essentially, the sweet product of photosynthesis — to a shaded sapling that can't yet produce enough of its own. The sapling, once established, will do the same for others. Dying trees dump their entire accumulated wealth into the network before they go, flooding the system with nutrients that will feed the next generation.

The mycelium facilitates this. It is, in the most literal biological sense, a currency network. It takes resources from where they are abundant and moves them to where they are scarce. It does not hold the resources. It flows them. [3]

Now here's the part that should knock the cup out of your hand: the mycelium charges for this service. The fungi take a cut — roughly 30% of the sugars they move, which they use to run their own operations. They are not altruists. They are not running a charity. They are running infrastructure, and they extract a fee for that infrastructure, and the entire forest flourishes because of it.

This is the economy that predates capitalism by about 450 million years. And it has never once produced a recession.

What it has produced, in every healthy forest system studied, is an emergent phenomenon so beautiful it makes economists weep (or it should, anyway): the network allocates resources toward growth, not toward accumulation.Nutrients don't pile up in one node and stagnate. They flow. They circulate. They become information about need, and the system responds to that information.

The forest doesn't hoard. The forest signals. [4]

Your bank account could learn something.

Part Three: What Your Savings Account Has in Common with Insulin

Let's talk about insulin for real now, because it is the most instructive hormone in the human body when it comes to economic pathology.

When you eat a meal, your blood glucose rises. In response, your pancreas releases insulin. Insulin travels through the bloodstream and essentially rings the doorbell at cells all over your body — hey, there's glucose out here, open up — and the cells, responding to the signal, import the glucose and use it for fuel or store it as glycogen for later.

This is a beautiful, efficient, elegant system. Under normal circumstances, it runs continuously, quietly, and without a single conscious thought from you. You eat, the signal fires, the resources distribute, the cells do their work.

Now here is what goes wrong.

If you chronically flood your system with more glucose than it needs — if you send that insulin signal over and over and over again, far more than the system was designed to handle — your cells begin to stop listening. They become insulin resistant. The signal is still being sent. The pancreas is working overtime, screaming into the metabolic void. But the cells have essentially started ignoring their phones because they are overwhelmed, exhausted, and have learned thatmost of the time the signal means nothing actionable for them personally.

The pancreas, in response, produces more insulin. The signal gets louder to compensate for the resistance. Blood glucose stays high anyway. Tissue that needs fuel goes starved. Tissue that has too much continues to accumulate. The whole system becomes simultaneously flooded and depleted, depending on where you are in the body.

This is Type 2 diabetes. And it is also a description of late-stage financialized capitalism.

The economy has been sending the "here are resources, allocate them" signal so loudly, for so long, in such distorted volumes, that most of the tissues — small businesses, artists, caregivers, farmers, teachers, the people who actually do the metabolic work of civilization — have become signal-resistant. They no longer believe the money signal corresponds to real need. Because it often doesn't. Because the signal has been captured, amplified, and redirected by a relatively small cluster of cells that have figured out how to absorb glucose without ever converting it into actual work.

We have a name for those cells, too. We call them "asset managers."

Part Four: Three Pathologies, Three Economies

Let's get clinical. If money is a hormone, then economic dysfunction is endocrine dysfunction — and the pathologies map with uncomfortable precision.

Pathology One: Insulin Resistance (The Hoarding Economy)

Resources accumulate in a small number of nodes. The signaling mechanism — price, wage, investment — becomes decoupled from actual need. Cells that require glucose (workers, communities, ecosystems) stop receiving it not because it doesn't exist, but because the signal has been distorted. The pancreas (central banks, governments) compensates by producing more signal (quantitative easing, low interest rates). The resistance deepens. Wealth concentrates. Nothing metabolizes.

Somatic signature: The body feels simultaneously exhausted and wired. There is glucose in the blood, but the cells are starving. The tissues are inflamed. Everything is technically "fine" by certain metrics and obviously not fine by every other metric.

Pathology Two: Hypoglycemia (The Austerity Economy)

The signal is cut off. Resources stop flowing. Cells that were barely getting by begin to shut down non-essential functions — which, in human terms, means art, caregiving, contemplation, education, play, and rest. The organism goes into survival mode. Short-term thinking colonizes every decision. The future becomes unimaginable because the present is consuming all available resources.

Somatic signature: Shaky hands. Tunnel vision. The inability to think about anything except immediate need. A particular kind of rage that comes from being asked to be strategic when you cannot pay rent.

Pathology Three: Hormonal Flooding (The Financialized Economy)

Every signal is amplified beyond its natural range. Credit becomes infinite. Leverage multiplies until the numbers detach from anything real. The signaling molecule — money — circulates faster and faster, touching more and more surfaces, while the underlying metabolism it was meant to coordinate struggles to keep pace. Eventually, the system seizes. Not because there was too little signal, but because the signal overwhelmed the receiver.

Somatic signature: Mania. The particular dissociation of extreme wealth. The feeling that numbers on a screen are more real than the forest being clearcut to produce them.

Part Five: What a Healthy Endocrine Economy Looks Like

Here is where we stop diagnosing and start designing.

A healthy endocrine system — and by extension, a healthy economy — has four characteristics that the mycelial network has been demonstrating since before vertebrates existed.

Sensitivity, not loudness. Healthy hormonal signaling operates at vanishingly small concentrations. Hormones are effective not because they are loud but because the receptors are sensitive. A living-systems economy prioritizes the quality of economic signals — their accuracy, their groundedness in real need, their responsiveness to actual conditions — over their volume. This means smaller, more local, more accountable currencies. It means pricing that tells the ecological truth. It means wages that correspond to the actual value of care work, not just the value the market has been trained to assign.

Circulation, not accumulation. The mycelium does not build a warehouse. It builds a network. Healthy economies are designed around the velocity and distribution of resources, not their concentration. This is not anti-wealth. The fungi are not poor. They extract a fair fee for their services and use those resources to extend the network. Wealth that circulates is wealth that generates more life. Wealth that accumulates in a single node is wealth that has stopped being wealth and started being a cyst.

Feedback, not extraction. Every healthy endocrine feedback loop is bidirectional. When glucose is processed and used, the signal changes — insulin levels drop, glucagon rises, the system adjusts. The forest does the same: as trees grow and can produce their own resources, they become net contributors to the network rather than net receivers. A living-systems economy builds feedback loops that allow the system to adjust based on real conditions. This is the opposite of extraction, which is a one-directional flow — always from the ecosystem, never back to it.

Rhythm, not constancy. No healthy hormone operates at a constant level. There are pulses, cycles, daily rhythms, seasonal rhythms. The endocrine system breathes. It has periods of abundance and periods of managed scarcity, and both are necessary. An economy that insists on perpetual growth is asking the endocrine system to produce insulin continuously, without rest, without variation, without the counter-regulatory hormones that balance the signal. It will eventually produce resistance, exhaustion, and collapse.