For virus it is.  It subsists because the alternative - the reality - is too tenuous for most of us to grasp - namely, that "the economy" is simply the totality of all the useful things that human beings find to do for each other.  Mankind is an intelligent, essentially social species, adept at specialisation, at communicating the implications of that specialisation, and at exchanging its products, whether "goods" or "services" in a conventional sense.  The problem is that no intellectual has yet come up with any accessible way of describing the complex total of this labyrinthine network of activity.  National Governments try to find ways of describing their "national economies", ostensible reporting upon each national Gross Domestic Product (without export/import elements) or Gross National Product (including external trade).  But these figures (which have to be calculated in three different ways, before some judgmental compromise is made between the three different results) are notoriously inaccurate.  They suffer the most crippling theoretical faultlines, as well as untold difficulties in tracing the necessary evidence for proper judgments to be made. 

It was my Cambridge studies of The Principles of Economics, which first introduced me to this hazy, unsatisfactory, conceptually floating world - and I was good enough to get a First, in those distant days before the complexities of reality dawned. Subsequently, while recognising all the shortcomings of quantification (indeed the fallacious character of the model itself), I have never found any alternative.  No theoretical economist has, in forty years, come to my aid.  All that I can do, when faced with an orgy of statistical quantification (as with Gordon Brown's recent re-forecasts of "the UK economy" for the next three-years) is to protest lamely - "..but it's not like that.."

Fixed cakery therefore continues  to rule the public mind.  There is considered to be only a given amount of money "to go round".  The intellectuals have found no way of displacing this fallacy, of proving the world to be round.  If the firemen get an increase, whose wages will be cut to fund that increase?  If immigrants arrive in this country and find paid work, are they not "taking work away" from our people?  If the proportion of pensioners rises, does that not mean that fewer younger people must support them?    Trade unions must "protect jobs" because they constitute some kind of proprietary security, for the job-holders, in a floating economy. 

The truth is far more complex, and well-nigh impossible to describe.  Every changes dynamically, with one changing factor impacting other dynamic factors, every week, every month. Yet I have never been able to find a way of talking about these things in a way which makes sense to ordinary people.  Politicians indeed foster these fallacies, because fixed-cakes are far easier to manage, easier to talk about, seemingly generating their own coercive logic, reinforcing political legitimacies which are becoming increasingly fragile.  "The Honourable Gentleman, in supporting these increases, must tell us where he will get the money from..."

• My only recourse has been to promote, in other ways, the alternative dynamic model of economic activity which I know to be true. 
• People of all abilities can find ways of making themselves useful to their fellow-citizens, fostering the very "busy-ness" which is at the heart of every successful society.
• Every person should be educated, not to "be a good employee", but to initiate new forms of trading activity, reflecting the changing kaleidoscope of human requirements - the paraphernalia of "entrepreneurship" is profoundly unhelpful, obscuring the scale and importance of real innovation.
• All communities - local, municipal, regional, provincial, national - are capable of raising their own activity levels thereby raising their own standards of living (I think this is what Gordon Brown and Ed Balls meant by "neo-classical endogenous growth theory", but I have never inquired...)
• Governments, and their respective societies, should develop institutions which honour all innovation, wherever it arises - a successful and wealthy society is one in which all the processes of innovation, and the necessary resulting processes of organisation and management, are very widely understood - just as the disciplines of agriculture are widely understood in farming communities, and the ways of war in warrior communities.

But that's all a bit ponderous. 

There must be a better way of talking about all this.

555   9 December 2002