Traditional farming is often associated with rural life. City dwellers may wonder how much time and effort it would take to make their own vegetable stock from fresh produce. (Image text)
Economics and price formation involve the actions of various actors in a free market. The goals in a free market are incredibly diverse: they have different priorities, evolve in different ways, change, fade away, and are influenced by specific situations and emotions. Furthermore, these goals are often in conflict with both an individual’s own other or previous goals and with the goals of other people. And that is not all. Furthermore, information regarding all these goals is incomplete, changing, increasing, forgotten, one-sided, or even subject to shifting interests.
One powerful example of the diversity of the modern economy is branding—that is, the creation of perceptions about a product. In this process, the product can become completely detached from the buyer’s previously perceived natural and rational real needs. Branding inherently involves rapid change, boredom, enthusiasm, “boom or bust.”
From a Stoic perspective, branding is a fascinating phenomenon: it intrudes into people’s everyday lives and offers them invented emotions or attitudes, and because we humans are social beings, many accept and give permission to the offered emotion or attitude. At the same time, it often happens that, because of this, the appeal of competing products on the market declines, even if they are better products by previous criteria.
Thus, the term “economy,” in the sense of household management (oikos-nomia), is narrow and inadequate. The changing diversity of the economy does not reduce to the common good of the family. The goals, beliefs, and life situations of different communities vary, and individuals’ values vary even more.
Today, the economy is multifaceted, and this multifacetedness must be understood as such. In the past, the economy was significantly simpler, simply because people were poorer.
At its core, however, all economics is about exchange and adaptation to different desires. A fiver for the merchant, a chicken leg for me. The word “catallactics” means precisely this free exchange and adaptation, and as a term, we believe it is better suited to the modern world than “economics.” But we are by no means claiming that economics should be practiced specifically on this basis, or that economics is somehow wrong or mistaken in this regard—no. But in this publication, we attempt to reflect on, think about, and understand everyday economics—and especially price formation—through the lens of modern diversity. Furthermore, given the widespread use of the word “economics,” we must accept its use, so that is what we do ourselves.