Economic Contemplations
By David McCarthy
This is my 26th monthly column on the New Economics, and I’m
very grateful for the opportunity and the challenge it has presented. This
month I’d like to invite you, the reader, to participate by doing some
conscious contemplations in the realm of economics. It is actually one of the
features of the New Economics that ordinary people—not just specialists—are
“allowed” to think about economics and join the conversation. Sometimes they
have better ideas than the professionals.
Contemplation is sometimes understood as being similar to
meditation, perhaps with mystical implications, but what I mean here is
different than that. What I’m asking you to do is to use your thinking mind,
your powers of reflection and analysis, to address certain economic matters in
a conscious and focused way. The topics could be of your own choosing, or based
on some suggestions I’ll make below. In simplest terms, what I mean by
contemplation is “thinking things over.” If we allow ourselves the space to do
this, we will have a chance to go deeper, beyond surface judgments and into a
place of greater clarity and understanding. In many ways it is more important how we undertake this practice than
exactly what topic we take on, because once we get experienced at it, we can
take on anything. The basic point is to take a bit of time specifically for
this, perhaps just a few minutes, or as long as you like.
The contemplations I will suggest are general categories,
from which you could get more specific. Or, you could start fresh on your own. Some
of these ideas involve switching points of view from what you normally would
take. Here goes:
Reversal
of fortunes
If you are financially comfortable, try thinking about what
it would be like to be one of the billion people or so poorest people worldwide—those whose income is something like a dollar or two a day.
If you are poor, try thinking about being one of the “one percent.” (The most
recent figures I could find defined the top 1% in the US as households with
incomes over $370,000 per year.) If you are “in the middle,” try either one, or
both. The main point is to think about people with radically different
circumstances than your own. How might they see things? How might they think
about you?
Detached
contemplation
In this type of exercise, try to think about economic
behavior absolutely without any bias, judgment, or personal “spin”. Just think
about what people do, what companies do, what nations do. I am not suggesting
we abandon our values. But sometimes the judgments that are based on those
values prevent us from really seeing the way things happen. I know that I can
tend to be very opinionated about things, and that sometimes it holds me back.
Big picture
Ordinarily, we look at things from our own point of view.
Interestingly, if we develop a degree of detachment, we can consider things
from a radically big-picture point of view: 7 billion human beings, countless
beings in the animal realm, the natural world, and all interacting in patterns
of deep interconnection and interdependence. When I think about things in this
way, I need to hold back from some sort of generalization and just see it as a
vast panorama—beautiful, tragic, complex. Somehow I find it both unimaginable
and, well, imaginable. How about you?
Causes
and effects
When we think about the interdependent world, we inevitably start
to think about causes and effects. Perhaps you could consider the whole causal
sequence of, say, how a piece of fruit comes to be on your table. Or take a
complex manufactured item, such as an automobile. Thinking through the entire
life cycle of things like this, with all the materials, processes, and human
dimensions is a very complex subject. And what about the psychological causes involved
with products that are more intangible, such as entertainment? Why do we want
the things we want, and what do we do to get them? And of course, what are the
effects of all these things? How do the effects themselves become causes?
If you don’t have the inclination to actually do these
contemplations, this might have been a fairly boring column! But if you do, you
may find yourself in a rich world of imagination.
If you have any interesting ideas that come out of these
contemplations, and would like to write them up, I’ll put some of them in next
month’s paper. Email them to me at neweconomics@countrywisdomnews.com.
Posted by Chris Hewitt
on 11:03 AM.
Filed under
Feature,
New Economics
.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0
