Why did they uninvent...

...home economics? OK, so it’s not exactly uninvented, but it has fallen out of popularity. Maybe it needed some modernization but it should not have disappeared from the mainstream of education. I’m not sure why it has nearly disappeared, but I assume it is because it was always considered a girl thing. Guy stuff like changing faucet washers and buying lawn mowers was not included in any significant degree. Then, with the feminist movement and more women validating their self worth in the work place instead of in the home, it lost status. I assert that it is, and probably always has been, more than just learning how to bake a delicious and attractive cake or artfully display Christmas decorations. For example, in Hand Jr. High School, Columbia, SC in 1958, it was a conduit for girls’ sex education. I know this because my seat in social studies class was next to a hole in a new wall to accommodate a radiator that predated the remodel that made two small classrooms from one bigger one. I heard all the stuff they taught the girls about the birds and the bees in the home ec class on the other side of the wall. I got a D in Social Studies. But, there I go diverging into sex again. Lets get back on track.

While we’ve forgotten home economics, we have gone ape over global economics. This is the great disaster of everybody on the planet trading with or hiring everybody else, especially on the opposite side of the planet. You can read more about why this only works on a micro scale. This global economy thing is showing itself to be unstable and able to turn some former winners into losers because there is little regulation of global markets and finance. As we all end up unemployed or underemployed, or at least way underpaid from this monster genie being let out of the lamp, we need to do some rethinking. As individuals there is little we can do to stuff the genie back in the lamp or teach him some manners. However, we can reduce the power he has over us if we get smarter on home economics, the economics of our household and the households of our friends and family. This doesn’t necessarily mean baking tastier cakes. The 21st century home ec should be more like what its name says. It might cover stuff like getting the most nutritious greens and beans to feed our loved ones with the meager twenty bucks in our pocket. We need to reinvent home economics for the 21st century and teach it in school. We need to cover diverse things like:
• What to eat and drink because it’s good for us and what not to eat and drink because it will kill us or bankrupt us.
• What we need and don’t need in a house and how to finance the house we need.
• How to shop for and buy stuff to outfit and care for the house and yard that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, break down prematurely, poke our eyes out, or drive us nuts with superfluous features.
• How to make stuff we need instead of buying it.
• How to get the best deal on a credit card and how we should never carry over a balance month to month.
• How to find a mate to share the shelter and expenses, how to bring joy to the mate and keep him/her forever, and (above all) how to have a good time with the mate without making more babies than you can feed.
• How to get an employer and keep him/her happy no matter what our skills are.
• How to create or at least participate constructively in neighborhood and community associations.
• (Last but absolutely not least) Become media literate.

I need to elaborate on this media literacy thing. Defining it properly would take up more than I want to put in this post but you can Google it. Start with the Wikipedia description. Basically it pertains to learning not to be so freakin’ gullible to all the media conduits that the genie uses to turn us into zombie slaves. The “poster child” of media illiteracy is probably the sticker you see on so many products and ads in magazines and catalogs, “As Seen on TV”. Do you know what that means? It means the majority of cabbage brains out there believe the stupid television is actually credible, that it furnishes valid and reliable information. God help us.

Maybe there is some hope. We seem to be figuring out finally that nearly all politicians and people in the finance industry (a.k.a. Wall Street) are lying sorry sacks of slug slime. The problem is (although the Tea Party might disagree) we can’t just get rid of these characters and expect things to gravitate to harmonious prosperity. We do need to select leaders for ourselves. We have to educate ourselves in how to detect their lies, unmask their lies, and hold them painfully accountable for their lies. That’s where media literacy comes in. It’s all about recognizing and rejecting lies that come to us in an overwhelming barrage of mostly electronic media. Let’s reinvent home economics for the 21st century with a good chunk of media literacy education.

Explanation of the Economy

Many people are disturbed by something called "the economy", which is always misunderstood but clearly accepted as being caput at the moment. I shall explain how it works. In a nutshell the economy is an abstraction. It is neither a particle nor a wave. It is the other thing, a system. Right now it is a flawed system.

There are two kinds of economic systems. One is called microeconomics and the other is called macroeconomics. Microeconomics is where you have a maximum of two islands and two products, usually coconuts that grow best on one and clams that grow best on the other. There is a strong and logic-based science that guides the people on these islands toward certain mutually beneficial agreements that make all the islanders better off. These agreements involve the clever practice of trading some of what one island has for some of what the other island has.

The science of microeconomics breaks down when the two products are not both food, but something else such as guns and butter. It also breaks down when a bully owns all the canoes, or when somebody eats the cow that makes the butter. Then it is no longer microeconomics but macroeconomics, sometimes called politics. These aberrations that degrade microeconomics into macroeconomics are accelerated by a special invention, the IOU (pronounced "I owe you") also known as money. Money pretty much drives the nail into the coffin for microeconomics.

Since we are stuck with macroeconomics, here's how it works. It works on greed. Do not be intimidated by the negative connotation this word has in normal parlance; it is a good thing in macroeconomics. If it were not for greed, we would all have starved to death when we finished eating all the clams and coconuts. The greed is that everyone wants the money and performs conniving manipulations to get it, sometimes even resorting to work.

The macroeconomic engine runs on hot air exchanged between two opposing greed driven groups. The first group (called the Haves) worships the earth's first man, Adam Smith, and his only begotten son, Will Rogers, who described the trickle down theory. The second group worships Adam's wife, Eve, who was thrown off the coconut island for eating a coconut from a tree designated by God as his own tree. Eve scraped by on a sandbar with nothing but sand and seaweed to eat. The followers of Eve are called Have-nots and they espouse a theory called the soak-up theory.

The hot air happens when the preaching starts. The Haves start preaching the trickle down theory which reckons that if you designate some money (like in a stimulus package) and give it to them it will trickle down to the Have-nots, creating jobs and income on the way. The Have-nots preach the soak-up theory which reckons if you give all the money to them it will soak up to the Haves, again creating jobs and income on the way. As long as one side has hotter air than the other, the engine will be driven by a law of physics called the Carnot cycle. (Named for Eve's son Sadi Carnot who was half brother to Will.) There is a physical limit to the Carnot cycle's efficiency. Not all of the flowing hot air can create jobs and income. A certain percentage of it turns into entropy which is a lot of hot air floating away in all different directions.

So why has the economy gone caput? Simple! The Haves' aggregate greed slowly caught up to the have-not's aggregate greed even though the Haves were greatly outnumbered by the Have-nots. This destroyed the temperature gradient and the macroeconomic engine ground to a halt. What can you and I do about it? Our best bet is to go back to an island and eat coconuts and clams while something called the market sorts itself out.