Definitional issues

It was Farmer Nicholas Snowe in Lorna Doone who said, with the insight given to simple rustics in Victorian novels, ‘virst zettle the pralimbinaries; and then us knows what be drivin’ at'. In an enterprise such as the present one, settling the preliminaries inevitably comprises definitional matters, and this means the two principal objects of our concern: economics and culture.

It might appear that the first of these could be dispensed with quickly. There is apparently so little disagreement among contemporary economists as to the scope and content of their discipline that the introductory chapters of most modern textbooks of economics are virtually identical. The outline of the ‘economic problem’ always emphasises scarcity, such that the decision facing actors in the economic drama is one of how to allocate limited means among competing ends. Individual consumers have wants to be satisfied, productive enterprises have the technologies to provide the goods and services to satisfy those wants and processes of exchange link the one side of the market with the other. Much of the economics that is taught to students at universities and colleges throughout the western world nowadays is concerned with the efficiency of these processes of production, consumption and exchange, much less is concerned with questions of equity or fairness within the operation of economic systems.