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The weird animacy of "the economy" and worse, "the free market," has led some people to forget that economies are people. https://twitter.com/RepJayapal/status/1336008330280484864
I'm not going to boost Adam Smith, per se, but he saw himself as an ethicist first, and I was surprised on reading Wealth of Nations how much of it was concerned with moral implication.
I do think that more study of language would help people here. Words are abstractions, necessary abstractions, but they change how we are able to conceptualize ideas and real consequences.
Do you guys remember that lady tweeting about how the free market doesn't fail people, people fail the free market?
The free market is an idea! One that is meant to serve people! People cannot fail the free market!
Indeed, if the free market isn't serving people, then the idea has failed. But we've animated it linguistically, and abstracted the abstraction to the point of thinking it possible to "fail the free market."
Where's that Baudrillard meme that's been making the rounds recently?
OK, here's where my ridiculous brain goes, in thinking how to explain this: grades. People do work, and they need feedback on that work. But it would be hard for teachers to give extremely detailed feedback on every single assignment, so we abstract the feedback to letter grades.
It's a simple scale, one that provides a modicum of information, but is not feedback in itself. I've gotten As without knowing why or how to replicate whatever I did right. I've gotten lower grades without knowing why.
In theory, grades are meant to motivate students, to provide some kind of feedback, and to simplify things for teachers. In theory, school is about learning.
But grades quickly become an end goal in themselves. Whether someone is learning matters less than the grade. Grades replace the goal they are meant to supplement.
Then we get further abstraction: rewards for grades, which, in theory, are themselves already a sort of reward. Money for grades. Discounted meals if you bring in a B or higher report card.
I have sometimes learned the most through failure, but once it becomes about grades, learning falls by the wayside, as does a student's ability to take risks and learn through risks that fail.
We get something similar with ideas like the stock market and the economy. Those things replace the human needs that they are meant to supply.
If the stock market is "doing well," "the economy" is good, even if people are living in poverty and hunger and want.
We replace the actual with the abstraction and lose all sense of meaning and purpose. There are tangible results, but the intangible idea has become sacred.
And this country has done an amazing job of training us to defend the wealthy and their wealth, even though we subsidize them and they don't lift a finger for us.
We're living in the Borges map. The economy's only purpose is to sustain human beings, but we've somehow made "the economy" into an animate thing that must be sustained at human cost.
Anyhoo, that's how I see it.
