Economic activity means the creation of value. As is the case with all the technical terms of modern economics, the customary understanding of this widely used concept in business administration and (political) economics is now restricted to systemic functional relationships. Accordingly we are dealing with a purely quantitative factor, namely a monetarily evaluated net economic performance, i.e. value added, achieved in the market by means of work or service offered in return for payment, which effectively remains to a corporation, a branch or an entire national economy (in exchange with other national economies) after the deduction of costs which are also determined by the market. But the calculatory concept betrays its original ethical-qualitative meaning in the human life-context: the question of the value of economic activity in regard to the quality of life. In the final phase of the pre-modern (and that means here pre-systemic) cameralistic economy the relationship of economic activity to life values was still a matter of course. In 1835, for example, the ‘Kameralistische Encyclopädie’ offers the following definition: