British institutional economist Shaun Hargreaves Heap once wrote: "... that orthodox welfare economics runs into problems generating public policy prescriptions because it works with a picture of individuals as solely a bunch of well-behaved preferences, which they are motivated in their actions...

The paper is embedded in the multiplicity of discourses concerned with a viable, sustainable development of society and its economy. It makes a case for a mode of economic activity geared to systematically integrating production and reproduction processes. Its starting hypothesis is that the...