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What is the economy?


 In a television commercial for an insurance company, a child (9 ish?) causes some consternation. After the adults around him start bemoaning "the economy," the child asks, "what's the economy?"  They can't answer, and he ends up deciding to 'Google it.' 

Let's try to answer. It is a question from a child [actor], but not a childish question.  Even a 9 year old is probably familiar with the catch-all term "society".  How about telling him that "the economy" and "society" are the same fact, looked at from two different points of view. Or, if he doesn't know either word so this doesn't help, speak to him in single-syllable bits, and tell him they are "two names for the fact that folks all have to find ways to work and live with folks." 

When we refer to society as "the economy," we're thinking about this living-together thing in terms of limits, and choices made in awareness of limits.  Or, for a 9 year old, we're thinking of "things we'd like more of, and numbers that we would like to be higher".  Like jobs, income, and the value of that income.  The economy is all of those things and older folks talk about it in terms of such numbers. 

Ten years later when the kid is an undergraduate, he will realize the lesson was the right one, and that his college's sociology course is distinguished from the economics course NOT by subject, but by method.   

Goggling the phrase "the economy" I get pretty quickly to this definition: it is "the wealth and resources of a country or region, especially in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services." 

That is: things we'd like more of and numbers we'd like to be higher.

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