Michael Blastland
speaker
745 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2011
last heard Aug 2011
Michael Blastland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So this is a story of economics told by a non-economist.
It says little about supply and demand curves, but travels instead through Aristotle's Lyceum, the zoo, a bakery, an engineering lab, a cafe.
And in this first programme, Gods, we start with that morality tale.
Because the first economists weren't really economists.
They were moral philosophers.
Amidst the foundations of the Lyceum, Professor Nikos Theokourakis describes Aristotle's economics.
Some people think Aristotle was aristocratically sniffy about trade.
Not quite, says the professor.
But he did think that trade for trade's sake, to make big profits, was not what things were for.
A shoe, above all, is for wearing.
He makes a very clear distinction between what we would call now value in use and value in exchange.
If I have, say, excess grain and I exchange it for wine, which I lack, then this is a proper exchange.
If you make exchange in order to make money and then another exchange in order to make more money, this, according to Aristotle, is unnatural.
Unnatural.
Unnatural, against nature.
Arguments about morality feel immediate again here in Greece and in other countries too since the crash.
Many feel bitter and pessimistic.
Behind me you can hear a young guy playing blues harmonica on the steps of the Acropolis.
Odd, but maybe apt.
Sobering, isn't it, this cry that there's something fishy about making money from money, a more than 2,000-year suspicion.
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