Thinking Differently About Our Economy

We all know that the economy is important. We talk about it every day. But do we ever think about… how we think about it? How we visualize it? How we’ve been conditioned to think about it, perhaps unknowingly?

I. What I’m Proposing

Let me start with a pretty simple and straightforward picture of how I have come to see these things.

A. The Four Stakeholders

All significant economic activity involves exchanges between four different sets of stakeholders:

• Consumers — Those who exchange small sums of money for goods and services.
• Business (aka Capital) — Those who exchange large sums of money for the tools and buildings and land and labor needed to produce goods and services, in hopes of receiving some returns on their investments.
• Labor — Those who exchange their time and effort for wages and benefits paid by business.
• Community — The pool of environmental and societal resources that play an essential supporting role, consisting of natural resources, schools, roads, bridges, power grids, healthcare, child care, etc.

(Now, of course, any one of us, as an individual, can participate as more than one type of stakeholder. However our interests…