The Household Ring

Abstract

The word economy comes from the Greek oikonomia , the management of a household. Before it described nations and markets it described a house: its stores, its fields, its people, the work of keeping them. It is fitting that the most useful scale for the ideas in this book turns out, in the end, to be the oldest one. A household can see the whole of its own ledger. It knows where its water comes from, who in it is tired, what it throws away on a Thursday. No national accountant has that view of anything. This chapter brings the ring home. It is written for one person, or two, or a family, deciding how to live inside the coastline with the money and the work they have. It does not ask anyone to give anything up. It asks them to see the floor and the ceiling of their own household, to find what is already working, and to ask the question that Santa Anna's Ecstatic Economics places at the centre of its practice: what would be enough.