One thing the super-rich fail to understand, however, is that money is just arithmetic—a transform of the marginal value of commodities based on the investment of net energy in extraction, production, marketing, and mass consumption of largely finite resources. When the population collapses, so will demand for commodities—and investments will quickly become worthless. And as net energy decreases due to the rising energy costs of extracting or generating it, prices will skyrocket, markets will collapse, and money will become worthless. And when the billionaires in their comfy pleasure domes with hydroponic gardens and climate control can no longer pay their workers to sustain this infrastructure because their money is worthless, those workers will turn on them as well… The rich will then discover that they are as vulnerable as all the rest of us. At that point the only survivors will be permaculturists who have learned how to live symbiotically, rather than parasitically, within their biological support system—by restoring topsoil, recycling everything, and reintroducing gift economies that have no need for money…