The economic framework organized around keeping productive capacity, capital, skills, and value within a defined community or nation. Value is measured by what stays. Core mechanisms include protective tariffs, state investment in domestic manufacturing and infrastructure, publicly funded education oriented toward productive capacity, and nationally directed credit.
The theoretical lineage runs through Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures (1791), Henry C. Carey’s Harmony of Interests (1851), and Friedrich List’s National System of Political Economy (1841). The tradition was implemented at scale by Lincoln in the United States, by Bismarck in Germany, and later by post-war East Asian developmental states. Peer-reviewed economic history (Chang, Reinert) documents that every country that industrialized did so behind retention mechanisms, then advocated free trade once dominant.
Retention Economics is a growth-phase framework with a critical distinction from Throughput Economics: it treats value as something to be built and held within a system rather than something to be extracted and moved through one. Its historical practitioners were nationalists with no ecological framework and no commons governance theory. They measured retention in terms of national industrial capacity. The structural principle they articulated (value measured by what stays) is the precursor logic that BioConomy inherits and extends.
Related terms
Sources
- Hamilton, A. (1791). Report on the Subject of Manufactures
- List, F. (1841). The National System of Political Economy
- Carey, H. C. (1851). The Harmony of Interests
- Chang, H. J. (2002). Kicking Away the Ladder
- Reinert, E. (2007). How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor
Provenance
Extracted from the BioHub Glossary CSV export (Notion, August 2026). Source cell classified as Term. First-pass entry: the extended definition, contrast with adjacent terms, and usage-in-context sections require enrichment from the underlying project documents on a subsequent pass.