Threshold of Counterproductivity

= concept of Ivan Illich

Description

Dougald Hine:

"In his pamphlets of the 1970s, Illich analysed what he termed the “threshold of counterproductivity”: the point beyond which increasing the intensity or the amount of a given thing begins to produce the opposite of the intended effect. Returning to the study of history, he wrote of “the war on subsistence” and the destruction of the “vernacular” domain: the capacity of households to meet their own and each other’s needs, outside of the market economy, which had been central to human life in all cultures until quite recently, but whose dismantling was necessary in order that people would submit to the new logic of industrial society. A household is constituted by a threshold, a door which may be opened or shut, which marks a limit and is a precondition for the possibility of hospitality."

(https://dougald.substack.com/p/the-other-shore-of-the-nile)