Family Virtues

One of the problems in economics these days is that economists have forgotten, or never learned, the original meaning of economics.  I found out years ago that you can’t really grasp what a science is actually about simply by analyzing its equations.  I got that partly from reading the essays of Einstein, who described equations as merely the shorthand footnotes at the bottom of the page for the flow of the ideas expressed in the main discourse.  Imagine expressing travel, like a leisurely drive through scenic byways followed by a jet flight from Washington to Paris, as d = rt, and thinking that fully described it.  Einstein wrote that forgetting that fact contributes to the practice of teaching a science or mathematics backward, so that its conclusions are reached only by putting together the equations, instead of having the equations flow from the ideas.  It’s easier to teach that backward way, but leads to students unable to understand how science really progresses.  He added that he knew the truths of General Relativity for ten years before he could express them mathematically in equations. 

It was Aristotle who first coined “economics”, meaning the management of a family or a household for the good of the whole.  By that is meant the relationships, productive and otherwise, between all its members. It used to include things we’d likely include under other disciplines, but now it’s limited to things expressible by that big dollar sign.  Some things to remember: households are fluid, not static; babies are born and old folks die; relatives move in and out; proportional compositions change as sometimes it’s mainly adults and other times lots of kids and then grandparents move in. And nowadays, kids move back in.   Garrison Keillor described home as “the place that when you have to go there, they have to accept you.”  Through it all, it has to be managed so that under changing compositions everyone still gets fed and clothed and sheltered.  Sometimes that means times are hard all around, other times that affluence and enjoyment reigns; i.e., just as composition is not static, total household income is fluid also.  In other words, it’s a lot like society at large.  It’s not by accident we call our country our homeland.  In America, the Constitution prohibits exile, which in a way is more home-like than home itself.

Robert Samuelson, writing in the Washington Post, seems to have forgotten, or never learned, that.  He disavows any connection of home with national economics as not fitting the equations of economics.  He unilaterally declares a class war between young and old, stating that care for the elderly deprives the young.  He cites in support of his view the fact that the proportion of elderly has grown significantly, forgetting he's comparing it to the baby-boom era when there were surpluses of children and massive school construction was the norm. He remarks that many elderly are now self-supporting anyway, meaning it’s no longer the case that 50 percent of the elderly live in poverty.  He’s impervious to Michael Gerson’s admonition that responsible capitalism requires virtues that it does not produce, in this case sharing for the common good.  Beyond that, he seems to forget the fluidity of composition that society exhibits.  At times elders dominate; at other times, as during the baby boom era, children do.  Times change.  And he has forgotten that whatever the income currently available, families share it.

Ways of doing so are the government transfer payments he detests.  He begins to rival George Will in his libertarian indifference. I’d like to think Samuelson is an isolated case, but in today’s Post, Charles Lane and Harry Holder, former chief economist in the Labor Department, both beat upon raising the minimum wage to at least the poverty level as unwise.  Holder worries that increasing the minimum wage might cause a loss of jobs among the young, forgetting the responsibility of government to stimulate the economy to create jobs through promoting new technologies.  Lane and Holder further illustrate the dangers of leaving economics to economists.  They become so enamored of the beauty and power of their equations that they forget the dynamism and powers of the society behind them.

We all need to keep in mind that rich and poor, old and young, and all those in between, are in this together.  It’s time to discard the old class warfare chants.  Anyway, as Warren Buffett noted, that war is over and the rich have won.  It’s time to focus again on that virtue of sharing.  That’s how you manage families.