To Balance Our Economy, We Must Know Who We Really Are

“The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.”

– E.M. Forster

Say what you will about economics, it is nothing if not idealistic. It is even imagined that there will come a time when the challenges it does pose are all worked out and no one will ever have to suffer from economic inequality or poverty again. The father of modern economics, John Maynard Keynes said, “the day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or preoccupied, by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.”

We may still have a ways to go before we reach Keyes’ ideal, but it may very well be that we are well on our way. And it is my hope that ABC2 Economics can help us to do just that. But to prepare the arena of the heart and head, we need to know what we really want.

“True happiness,” Aristotlewrote almost 2500 years ago, “flows from the possession of wisdom and virtue, and not from the possession of external goods. But a virtuous life must be equipped with external goals as instruments.”

As Aristotle wrote centuries ago, and as pretty much every spiritual teacher and philosopher worth their salt has said since, material possessions are not the goal. Obviously, that wisdom stands in stark contrast to the current message…