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No. If you measure the economy in purely financial terms, such that it looks bigger when you spend more time in the office and less time with the love of your

No. If you measure the economy in purely financial terms, such that it looks bigger when you spend more time in the office and less time with the love of your life, you're doing it wrong. Granted, that's really hard to measure, so lots of big measures (e.g. the GDP) exclude that. It's a well-known limitation of the measure. But any Introduction-to-Economics course you might have taken in your life should have exposed you the notion of utility - the measure not only of bare usefulness but all the goodness and happiness and hope and love and joy of the human experience, the ultimate goal of all human economic activity. They should have also described "economics" as the study of how people make decisions about what to do with their limited resources - including one of the most-finite resources, our Time here on this world. Actual money-related matters are just sub-fields of economic study, and if you look at monetary phenomena (like exchange rates and inflation and such) and hope to understand them, you will do so using the underlying actual goods and services and human interactions that comprise the actual economy.

ArkyBeagle 13y ago
I believe I covered most of your complaint with the "if you have children..." part. I personally spent more time at the office at times so their Mom could be a full time Mom. Then at other times, I didn't. I don't think economics has any hope of covering anything like joy. Microeconomics can show little sociological vignettes of the ... "Freakonomics" variety. Utility is a roughly ... shadow variable which is inferred to explain certain things. There's no real agreement on whether or not it's even ordinal. Econ is fascinating, but it's a crippled discipline relative to many other more liberal arts and even sociology proper. But back to "the sharing economy" - how is this not substituting electronic means to replace (roughly) telephone-based systems like hotels/motels or taxi service? My personal heresy is that monetary policy has been abused ( towards deflation ) , and that this is what is driving this substitution. In the US, there's been a 2% growth target and we've failed to meet even that. http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3212.html http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3212.html Nobody seems to actually understand inflation.

ArkyBeagle 13y ago

I believe I covered most of your complaint with the "if you have children..." part. I personally spent more time at the office at times so their Mom could be a full time Mom. Then at other times, I didn't. I don't think economics has any hope of covering anything like joy. Microeconomics can show little sociological vignettes of the ... "Freakonomics" variety. Utility is a roughly ... shadow variable which is inferred to explain certain things. There's no real agreement on whether or not it's even ordinal. Econ is fascinating, but it's a crippled discipline relative to many other more liberal arts and even sociology proper. But back to "the sharing economy" - how is this not substituting electronic means to replace (roughly) telephone-based systems like hotels/motels or taxi service? My personal heresy is that monetary policy has been abused ( towards deflation ) , and that this is what is driving this substitution. In the US, there's been a 2% growth target and we've failed to meet even that. http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3212.html http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3212.html Nobody seems to actually understand inflation.