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.

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog