I want to reframe how we think about the economy.
We think of the economy as an abstract mess of numbers, equations, graphs, and constants. But what is it really?
The economy, plain and simple, is how we gather and distribute resources. It’s how we provide for ourselves as a society. If we scale things back to the level of the village (a very useful tool for testing ideas), the economy refers to the production of food, water, shelter, etc., and then the allocation of those resources amongst the villagers.
That is a far cry from what most people think of when confronted with ‘the economy’.
Gathering resources is one of our most important biological drives. Only the drive to procreate is more potent, but is in itself dependent on having adequate resources — we can’t reproduce if we have no food. We live in societies mainly so we can gather, produce, and share resources more efficiently. In other words, the economy is one of the most important and pervasive parts of our lives.
Accordingly, we can not consider economic activity to be separate from society. The process of provisioning ourselves is not discrete from our other actions and interactions with others. What does this mean? It means that our economic choices shape our society. They have an impact on us, on others, and on the way we relate to one another.
Your personal economy is not just how you provision yourself — it is an expression of you in relation to society: morals, aesthetics, identity, whatever.
Buying from Amazon over a local business affects your bottom line, but also community cohesion, sustainability (environmental or otherwise), alienation from labour, general economic liberty, the demographics of labour markets, and many more variables.
This weaves a complex web of entanglements and interrelationships, and nuance is very much required in order to dissect the net positives and negatives.
Again, the economy is not a set of technical abstractions and sums, it is simply how we live.
To reform society, we need to reform how we live. And we can do that by reforming our economy — or more specifically, our individual economies.
Our economic life is our voice. It’s our way of expressing ourselves to the world. It’s attractive to see this as a moral burden, according to the self-flagellating doom politics of contemporary culture, but I choose to go a little easier on myself. I’m just trying to live over here. It’s OK to compromise on your ideals when you’re just trying to get by. If you’re a vegetarian lost in the jungle, starving to death, nobody’s going to be mad if you barbecue a snake.
