Issued by Ronald Reagan after he became President in 1980, it mandated that "regulatatory action shall not be undertaken unless the potential benefits to society from the regulation outweigh the potential costs to society." Philip Shabecoff, writing for the New York Times, said that Reagan had "transformed with a stroke of his pen what had been a useful economic tool into an imperative of Federal decision making." In 2017, *Time Magazine* rated Executive Order 12291 as one of the "9 Executive Orders that Changed History." It is a good illustration of economism, which is the primacy of economic causes or factors. This reached a peak on May 15, 1997 when *Nature* published a paper authored by University of Maryland ecologist Robert Costanza and a multidisciplinary team of economists, geographers and environmental scientists. They calculated the economic value of the entire biosphere and came to the figure of 33 trillion US dollars. > X marked the spot at the intersection of the limited means of the entire planet and the unlimited wants of one all-powerful resident. --- Source: [[Reference Notes/The Progress Illusion|The Progress Illusion]]