The Ordinary Business of Life

ANY GIVEN SUNDAY

Delivering the goods: the market economy in action.

IT’S SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN MAY of 2013, and Spring Garden Road in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia, is a busy place. Thousands of people crowd the more than 200 stores as well as the restaurants and coffee shops that line the road, while many more shop in the surrounding nine city blocks that make up the Spring Garden Road area. Most of the shoppers are cheerful—and why not? The stores in this area offer an extraordinary range of choice; you can buy everything from sophisticated electronic equipment to fashionable clothes to organic carrots. There are probably 100 000 distinct items available along that stretch of road and in the surrounding area. And most of these items are not luxury goods that only the rich can afford; they are products that millions of Canadians can and do purchase every day.

The scene along Spring Garden Road on this day is, of course, perfectly ordinary—very much like the scene along hundreds of other stretches of road, all across Canada, that same afternoon. And the discipline of economics is mainly concerned with ordinary things. As the great nineteenth-century economist Alfred Marshall put it, economics is “a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.”

What can economics say about this “ordinary business”? Quite a lot, it turns out. What we’ll see in this book is that even familiar scenes of economic life pose some very important questions—questions that economics can help answer. Among these questions are:

  • How does our economic system work? That is, how does it manage to deliver the goods?

  • When and why does our economic system go astray, leading people into counterproductive behaviour?

  • Why are there ups and downs in the economy? That is, why does the economy sometimes have a “bad year”?

  • Finally, why is the long run mainly a story of ups rather than downs? That is, why has Canada, along with other advanced nations, become so much richer over time?

Let’s take a look at these questions and offer a brief preview of what you will learn in this book.