The Household as a Small Economy

Abstract

Chapter 2 began its household section with a coat. One family buys a cheaper coat each winter and throws the last one away. Another buys one coat that lasts, has it mended when the seam goes and passes it on when a child outgrows it. Neither family is virtuous by default. The first may be doing the only thing its budget allows. The second is using a different measure of success: not how much passed through the household this year, but what condition its things, and its people, are in at the end of it. This chapter takes the whole of the book down to that scale. It is written for one person or one family deciding how to spend, mend, keep and pass on, and it treats the household as what the economists who coined the word assumed it was: the smallest economy, with its own stocks and flows, its own neighbours and its own seasons. Economics comes from the Greek for the management of a household. The second brief belongs there first.