HOW the World Works author Paul Cockshott, with his background in computer science and Marxist economics,  is well placed to put economic computability into historical materialism and he does so through his account of the historical progression from pre-class society through slave, peasant, capitalist and socialist economies to a consideration of what sort of constraints will define the economies of the future.

Throughout, the author uses the abstractions of technology and population to make quantitative assessments of what was necessary and what was possible in a given society. At each point, he asks what technology was available, how much could it achieve, how many people did it require and how many could it feed and house?