Around four years ago, I said goodbye to the world of academic philosophy and tried my hand at something different, which happened to be management consulting. Where philosophy had been about applying structured thinking in order to understand things better, consulting was more about applying structure in both thought and action in order to act more effectively. So I started to focus less on how the way we think affects our understanding of something, and more on how the way we think affects the way we actually behave and act in the world.
Given this, it’s no surprise that I became fascinated with economics. So much of how our lives play out, both in our day-to-day activities and our broader lifetimes, is governed by the economic situation we find ourselves in. How we spend our time, who we spend it with, what impact we have on the world and other people, how long we live, our quality of life, our degree of freedom, our degree of control; all of this and more is heavily impacted by, if not dictated by, our economic situation. And when I say ‘economic situation’, I’m using it in a broader than usual sense, not just to mean our financial circumstances, but to mean everything that comprises the particular economic system we find ourselves in, including things like the way we trade tokens we call ‘money’, the conventions we uphold concerning ‘property’, and the social norms we have around what is considered ‘work’ and what isn’t.
I was hoping to finish a whole post covering several things that confuse me about economics, but I’ve already missed my own deadline for posting something in February! So this will do for now, and I’ll cover each confusing thing in the posts to follow.
octopus.law.blog 