Goods

Abstract

Even if our times are increasingly dominated by invisible technology and finance that have no human face, persons and goods are still the agents of the economy. Every step in the economy — from consumption to work, from saving to investing — is an intertwining of persons and goods. When people act in the framework of complex institutions, rules, and contracts, and even when the goods lose their materiality and seem to vanish, at the beginning and end of every economic move we always find goods and persons. Therefore, to be able to write a new vocabulary of economics and of the economy — in parallel with the reflections on persons as citizens, consumers, entrepreneurs, and workers — it is urgently necessary to create a new way of thinking about goods, about the objects of economics, and thus about consumption and other practices of life.