About the Economy

There is a lot of discussion right now about how to save the economy, or whether certain trade-offs are permissible in order to save the economy, like foreseeable deaths. The animosity in this discussion is partly enabled by the vagueness of the term. People are using the same word, the economy, but thinking very different things. I’m skeptical that this can be fixed by being more precise in defining the economy, which just might be an essentially unwieldy and unhelpful concept. It lumps together too many different things to be a helpful category.

Let’s take the household metaphor implicit in the etymology. Imagine needing to know whether there was enough food in your pantry or whether the kids had clothes that fit, but only talking about whether there was enough stuff in the house overall. The overall mass of stuff in the house is growing at 2% per annum — good news or bad news? The inability of the word stuff to distinguish the food in the pantry from the rare book collection or bags of garbage I forgot to take to the street makes rational deliberation in these terms impossible.

Or let’s take the garden metaphor, as the number of us with gardens on our minds is suddenly multiplied. Should I evaluate how my decisions impact the total biomass produced by the garden? Or should I attempt to distinguish the tomato yield from the poison ivy growth?