Practising the Socially Useful Economy

Abstract

Experiences shape us, chronic lack of money diminishes us, those with some money fear losing it, those with a lot of money use it. Problems of starvation affecting between a quarter and a fifth of the world’s population are portrayed and seen and understood as primarily social and humanitarian issues, whilst charities collect pennies from people in the streets. The commonly-perceived standard of living in Britain seems to inexorably decline against that of many other countries, and the cause of this is supposedly recalcitrant trade unions, all of us being too greedy, or pricing ourselves out of jobs. The ‘poor’ are portrayed as either irrational, egotistical people who demand more money than they have ‘a right’ to get, or are portrayed as a social problem, ‘those people’ who are feckless, who cannot stop their children from taking drugs and so forth. We are all exhorted to be more ‘open to change’, to learn new skills, to get on our bikes and find work, to be mobile, flexible and agreeable — yet are given little indication of how we are supposed to do this. The supreme difference between what G.K. Chesterton described as ‘cash and lolly’, i.e. the money that we have each week and what we do with it, compared with ‘the economy’ has become a mystery of almost metaphysical proportions.