Community Economists: What is the Economy?
This blog from Caroline Tosal-Suprun as part of our ongoing Community Economist project, which you can read more about here.
What is the economy? It’s a question a lot of us shy away from. Economics is exclusive and complicated – by design – and as citizens, a lot of us feel not only that we don’t understand it, but that we’re not supposed to understand it. Only one third of the UK say that they find conversations about economics in the news easy or fairly easy to understand, while media-created misconceptions about how the economy works or what the government spends money on are incredibly common. We’re trying to dispel that by saying change is possible. The economy should work for us, and we should be able to understand how and why it’s working the way it is.
At the end of April we met with our newly recruited community economists for the first time. 11 people from across the UK have bravely embarked on this learning project to figure out how to shift perceptions of the economy. We’re starting by inviting ordinary people across the country to have conversations recorded using a community reporting methodology.
The community economists have trained in this simple storytelling technique to gather insights to help us create change. Alongside learning recording techniques, the ethics and values of responsible storytelling and basic safeguarding principles, we spent a lot of time exploring our own perceptions of what the economy is about, who gets to talk about it and how it impacts our day to day lives.
What started off as an icebreaker became a recurring theme in our sessions. What is the economy?
- “The economy seems to always be about money, but health and wellbeing is important too.”
- “It feels like there’s no voice for the little people when talking about the economy, it’s just fat cats cashing in.”
- ” The economy is all the work, the product that is done by society, and everything we use that is material and immaterial.”
- “The economy can’t just be about work. What about the contributions unpaid carers make?”
- “We need to consider who or what is valued when we talk about the economy; should our definition be aspirational or realistic”?
What is the economy? Quotes from community reporters
Some of our conversations echoed the 2018 Framing The Economy report– people often associate it with money, people have a limited understanding of the mechanics of the economy and how it works and there’s a deep feeling that the system is rigged. From anger about profiteering from resources which should be common good like water, to eroding planetary resources for the benefit of the few, the community economists had lots of examples of how the economy was failing us. Despite all this passion and energy, we had real problems defining the economy in a way that was easy to explain to a smart 10 year old. Did we need a definition, some asked, we’re not the experts and we don’t have to be to have a say.
From freeze frames, to word association and literature reviews we deliberated to create a starting point, so that when someone asked about our project we could at least identify what it is we want to influence. It was easy to slip into jargon, it was easy to show how it made us feel and it was easy to describe how it held control over our lives. It was difficult to strip it back and describe what we meant in a few words. This is our working definition to date:
The economy is how we organise and manage the things we want and need. We are the economy, it’s the sum of everything we create, produce or collect. Some people grow food, some build things like homes or services, some make things like clothes or art, others share ideas or solve problems. Everyone contributes and does different things and we need to organise and manage ourselves to make sure we all get what we need to live good lives.
Not everyone loved this, it didn’t capture all the nuance we wanted and we speculated about some of the language. Was a definition an opportunity to influence what should be valued? We decided we’d come back to it after hearing what people had to say throughout community conversations.
Does this definition resonate with you? How would you define the economy?
