Leo D.M.J. Aurini - July 18, 2015


Unlikely Economics： The Etymology of the Term

Topics
economics etymology
Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
Adam Smith Greeks
Bioshock & Objectivism Unlikely Economics： Destroy the Corporations

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

127.33

Word count

1,167

Sentence count

111

Harmful content

Misogyny

8

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Unlikely Economics, I talk about what Economics actually means and how it can be applied to the modern household. I also talk about the differences between a modern household and a traditional one, and the benefits of having a wife and kids in the household.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 We'll be right back.
00:00:30.200 Hey, folks. Welcome to this new series of videos that I'm going to be doing, whenever the fancy catches me, titled Unlikely Economics.
00:00:42.820 For the first one, I want to talk about what the term economics actually means.
00:00:48.660 Now, you've probably read at some point in a textbook that it comes from, I believe, the Greek word for the household economy.
00:00:57.640 And it's only in the past couple centuries that we've started to use it to describe the nation as a whole.
00:01:05.240 It was originally termed political economy. Economy meant the household 200 years ago.
00:01:11.940 But if you're going to be a weirdo like Adam Smith and talk about the nation as a whole, you would call it political economy.
00:01:20.600 But nowadays, most people, aside from hearing that, don't really think about it.
00:01:25.240 They don't think about the etymology or what that means.
00:01:29.900 And now we're cursed with a state that sees everything as these numbers that they can tweak and pull.
00:01:37.460 And, you know, don't watch what the left hand is doing while the right hand pulls a rabbit out of the hat.
00:01:43.600 We're left with this economic voodoo.
00:01:46.140 And a lot of that gets corrected when you think about what a household economy actually is.
00:01:56.500 Now, one of the more autistic things that you hear from the feminist circles is this very angry argument 1.00
00:02:03.820 about how women do unpaid work in the household. 1.00
00:02:09.140 In fact, a wife is worth $120,000 a year, you know? 0.98
00:02:14.240 Good luck selling those skills on the free market.
00:02:16.500 But we're supposed to believe this juggling act that the feminists do by using cherry-picked numbers for all of this. 1.00
00:02:25.920 And this is your typical modern materialist, autist-type argument.
00:02:31.400 You know, it's missing the forest for the trees.
00:02:37.400 So let's talk about a traditional household.
00:02:40.880 Particularly, not even a, like, not a modern household because there's so many conveniences now.
00:02:44.760 Let's go back in time and imagine a fictitious household from one or two hundred years ago.
00:02:50.560 Now, back then, we didn't have fast food all over the place.
00:02:56.980 Food required cooking.
00:02:59.920 There was a lot of work to be done in a household.
00:03:03.320 Not just if you were living on a farm, but for any household.
00:03:06.500 Cooking the food, preserving the food, mending clothing, looking after the children.
00:03:13.720 All of these different activities are required.
00:03:16.040 And so the household was this partnership between the husband and the wife. 0.54
00:03:22.460 Part of the economy was financial.
00:03:25.660 Part of the economy was the husband going out to work or the wife doing some arts and crafts.
00:03:32.760 Maybe she's weaving baskets. 0.98
00:03:34.420 Maybe she's selling preserved pickles to the neighbors, etc. 0.54
00:03:39.560 But that was not the entire economy.
00:03:42.980 The economy was not mistaken for just the money coming in.
00:03:47.360 The economy of the household was how the division of labor occurred between the man and the woman. 0.89
00:03:52.940 It was the investment being put into the children.
00:03:57.940 And not just the we're saving up for the college fund investment,
00:04:02.440 but that the children were expected eventually to be contributing members to the household.
00:04:10.160 And this would vary from child to child.
00:04:13.540 You'd have, you know, maybe one son would go into the military.
00:04:16.280 One would go into trade.
00:04:20.580 Another might be a really good musician.
00:04:23.520 You know, be really talented there.
00:04:25.260 And so, you know, maybe that kid becomes a musician and hopefully can make some connections for the family.
00:04:30.100 Anyway, these were not hard-nosed business decisions like we think of nowadays.
00:04:39.440 Because at the core of the family, you know, from a purely self-interested standpoint, the family doesn't make any sense.
00:04:47.740 Sacrificing your life to save your children doesn't make any sense when you could always survive and have more children.
00:04:53.820 You know, going to a prostitute makes more sense than getting a wife from a purely economic standpoint, using the modern term of economics. 0.86
00:05:02.940 The original term, the home economy that the Greeks talked about, took all of this into account.
00:05:08.860 It understood that the household was more than just a financial unit.
00:05:14.340 It understood that it was more than just an engine of production.
00:05:17.920 That humanity is more than just a machine that uses vegetables and meat instead of gasoline.
00:05:26.480 It understood more was going on to this.
00:05:28.160 And the vast majority of the activity is not something that you measure in dollars or shekels.
00:05:34.340 It's only with the modern perversion of the term and this materialist, this pseudo-scientific modernity where we pretend that we can measure everything.
00:05:48.620 If we can measure it, we'll include it.
00:05:50.640 If we can't measure it, oh, it doesn't matter.
00:05:53.640 So if we can measure a woman's labor in the household and say she's worth $150,000 a year, well, ladies, you should divorce your husband. 1.00
00:06:01.720 But we can't measure the emotional support, like having a wife.
00:06:08.060 In your 20s, having a supportive wife that helps the man in his career, we can't measure the effects that that has.
00:06:16.460 The joy of having children.
00:06:18.980 The stability and the long-term effects.
00:06:22.120 I mean, sure, you can come up with stats on, you know, the criminality amongst those that grow up in single-mother households. 1.00
00:06:27.840 But all of these unmeasurables, we completely ignore them, but we look at the numbers.
00:06:37.260 And so when we discuss political economy, the exact same issue happens.
00:06:42.940 We look at numbers.
00:06:44.340 We look at tax rates.
00:06:45.800 We look at all of that while ignoring things like infrastructure.
00:06:51.620 Ignoring things like culture.
00:06:56.240 Because you can't measure culture.
00:06:58.260 Now, you can feel culture.
00:07:00.660 You can look at something abhorrent like piss Christ, and it's obvious that's not art.
00:07:07.440 But because we measure everything by materialist standards now, by, you know, by financial standards, 0.75
00:07:13.240 well, piss Christ is definitely art.
00:07:14.840 It's worth millions of dollars.
00:07:16.000 So it's important to remember that when we're talking about economics,
00:07:25.340 it originally meant something far deeper, far more complex.
00:07:31.520 It is art and science.
00:07:34.420 And these people, especially the Keynesians, who pretend to be able to measure everything, 0.67
00:07:41.980 are absolutely blind.
00:07:44.380 They see a bunch of trees, and they're like, well, I've never seen a forest.
00:07:48.960 There's some trees here, but what's a forest?
00:07:51.920 You know?
00:07:53.260 And so they play games with the numbers, and they completely destroy the very essence
00:07:59.380 of what a political economy is supposed to be.
00:08:03.060 Political economy is supposed to be about taking the country and making it grow,
00:08:08.860 caring about the country and making wise decisions for the country in the same manner
00:08:14.920 that a husband and wife, even without having a spreadsheet for every single thing that they
00:08:20.880 do in the household, can get together and discuss and benefit one another to create a whole
00:08:29.020 that's greater than the sum of its parts.
00:08:31.400 So, it's been the first episode of Unlikely Economics.
00:08:37.100 Hope you enjoyed it, folks.
00:08:39.360 Parini out.
00:08:39.940 Bye.
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