Rethinking Lifestyle

I recently became aware of an old word that is rarely used these days. The word is “chrematistics”. It refers to the art of getting rich; of accumulating wealth. Apparently the ancient philosophers, Aristotle and Plato carefully distinguished between chrematistics and economics. Economics, in their view referred to the organization of the household – who did what and who got what. In their minds there was a clear difference. Today, at least in common usage, we have lost that distinction – to our determent. We have no word for the “art” of accumulating wealth – at least I don’t think so – even though this art is greatly admired by many people.

We do, however, think we know what economics means. Wherever we live together we need to have some way of distributing, both the work (getting food, creating shelter, preparing food, caring for each other) as well as the resources (food, clothing, beds, electronic devices). That is simply an intrinsic part of living together, and this happens at the family level, the community level, the national level and even at the global level. At the national and global level, capitalism governs distribution of pretty much everything. Capitalism is the dominant economic system at those levels. At the community level, capitalism is also significant, but at the family level capitalism is pretty much absent. At the community and family level, people look after children and after unwell people, unaffected by the capitalist system. People prepare meals and look after yards, volunteer at Back Stage and Southeast Helping Hands with no thought of financial reward.

And here is the problem. I think we will all agree that an evaluation of a family distribution system would look at how effectively it meets the needs of the entire family with the means available. A family that does not do this well would be considered dysfunctional, and this assessment would apply, whether the family is rich or poor. At an intuitive level we all know what we need to do to for the family economics to work well. We do not need a measuring criteria.

That intuitive understanding may also be there when we evaluate the effectiveness of our community, national or global economic system, but, it seems to me, intuitive understanding is largely irrelevant. The only thing we seem to evaluate is chrematistics – the art of accumulating wealth. This applies to Steinbach, to the surrounding municipalities, to Manitoba and to Canada. If there is growth, more wealth, this is seen as good. If government policies result in greater wealth, they are seen as good.

Suppose a person earning $13.00 an hour increases is his income earning ability so that he now is able to earn $20.00. Surely that is more significant, in terms of community well-being, than if someone earning $60,000 annually increases his annual income to $80,000. Yet our common measurements of economic effectiveness would indicate that the income increase of the middle income earner is more significant than that of the low income earner.

Measuring chrematistics is not the only way of measuring economic effectiveness. There are other tools – they exist, but our politicians need to choose to use them. So far they have not.