Pundants, pollsters, and economists appear confused. Why, they ask, don't people feel better about their current economic situation? Why according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment is at a new low (4.7%), payroll employment is up, productivity is up, and we are told in financial news that the market [well, really the Dow] is at a six year high. Why, everyone should be giddly! But you know something, we're not, and it's not just the problem with Iraq and Iran (or for me, the soon to be outlawed fois gras *sob*), there really is something about the economy that is bothering people and it bewilders the big brains for politico-economic think tanks. Well, I am here to shed some light on it for those overeducated folks. You see, what happened is, you followed the path of philosophy... your methods became too far removed from reality to be of any use. Back around the time of Socrates there was an idea that the mind, body, and soul moved in concert. Becaue of this, Socrates thought that people should development their thinking and since thinking (philosophy?) affected the other two areas of man's existence it would help determine how best to live. But somewhere along the way philosophy seems to have gotten off track and began to become detatched from how the "average" person lives. Saddly, there appeared no gadfly to help bring it back down from its lofty heights into the realm of the living, no thinker who was invited to parties by the social and academic elite who after hearing a boring and irrelevant speech would simply say "So what?" This was one of the major points of the existentialist movement (if you can really call it that). We are individuals, leading individual lives, forming relationships with other individuals... somehow mainstream academic philosophy forget that. This same shift from thinking about a person to thinking about people to thinking about thinking in philosophy's case shows the path to irrelevance taken by economics. You see, to tell me that I should feel good that the national unemployment rate is a low 4.7% is an attempt to deindividualize me (is there such a word?). Yet it doesn't make sense to tell me that I should feel economically secure because surgeons, college professors, fry cooks, and even other IT people in aggregate are well employed. You are trying to lump me, Mike, into some amorphous body and try say that I am just like everyone else. Shoot, even if my own company is doing well that is no guarantee that I will be able to report to work tomorrow. Perhaps some low-evel executive somewhere will come up the insane notion that we need one less person doing what I do and by making everyone else in my group work harder the company can save money. The same goes for other macro numbers such as the rise of the Dow. For me, and I would guess for the majority of the people out there, my livelihood does not closely track the Dow Jones Industrial Average, for if it did my pay would be about 70% higher than it was back in 2000. What matters to me isn't that shares of Intel are trading higher, but whether or not my income is sufficient to cover my bills, whether or not I am saving enough for retirement or vacation, whether or not I can cover a sudden economic shock like needing a new set of tires or having to pay $4.00 per gallon for gas over an extended period of time. You see, people in college are taught two braod brances of economics: macroeconomics (say, national or sector level) and microeconomics (say, factory level), but they are not taught what matters to most people, personal economics. So, I propose that we create a new branch for the academics, existential economics, the economics of me (*well, okay, perhaps not me, how about the individual. Unless something like this occurrs, our political leaders, who looks to pollsters and think tanks for advice, will drift only farther away from reality as experienced by the majority of America.
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