Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

It was a good winter. He learned a lot about areobotany and bioengineering, and in many of the evenings, after dinner, he would ask the Archeon people, both individually and severally what they thought the eventual Martian society should be like, and how it should be run. At Archeon this usually led directly to considerations of ecology, and its deformed offshoot economics; these were to them much more critical than politics, or what Marina called "the supposed decision-making apparatus."

p. 269

(note: Archeon is a research center doing terra forming of Mars)

I love the idea that economics as the deformed offspring of ecology. Money is a measure of the energy in a system. That is all. However, the drive for wealth perverts it into something of importance all out of proportion to the reality. and it just gets it wrong so often.