  A simple model economy with locally interacting producers and consumers is
introduced. When driven by extremal dynamics, the model self-organizes {\em
not} to an attractor state, but to an asymptote, on which the economy has a
constant rate of deflation, is critical, and exhibits avalanches of activity
with power-law distributed sizes. This example demonstrates that self-organized
critical behavior occurs in a larger class of systems than so far considered:
systems not driven to an attractive fixed point, but, e.g., an asymptote, may
also display self-organized criticality.
