Throughput Accounting

Biological Parallel

Metabolic throughput—the rate at which organisms convert nutrients to usable energy—is biology's accounting system. A cheetah doesn't measure calories consumed but calories delivered to muscles per second during a hunt. Trees don't count photons absorbed but glucose molecules synthesized per hour. Throughput accounting mirrors this biological reality: what matters isn't raw input or local efficiency, but flow through the entire system to the constraint.