provocation # 126.

Lets start from the idea that economics is not the economy. Economics is a more or less adequate description and analysis of what an economy is. The economy is not a concept. It is a reality to be explored.

But is the economics we have the economics we want? Does it discuss capital, what it is and who owns it, Does it deal with property and why we have it? Does it deal with the skewed impact on people of corporations? Does it deal with class and how such divisions are maintained? Does it deal with the health of the land? Does it deal with the soundness of parenting? The happiness of children and their access to the world? Does it deal with incarceration for breaking property rules.

Perhaps there is an economics that we really want but don’t yet have that would better fit our feeling, our intuition, for what economics should be and would also be more objective, closer to reality.

What is clear is that the economics we really want is more objective, more real, than the economics we have, more objective even than the economics we usually think we want.