WHAT IS AN ECONOMY FOR?:

We're sometimes told that consumerism is what creates jobs and livelihoods. If we didn't buy meaningless trinkets, what would all the people who have jobs building and selling them do? This sort of reasoning exposes the fundamental clash in worldviews at the heart of most visions of economic life. I call them the "productivist view" and the "creative view."

What is an economy for?

The productivist view says that an economy is for producing stuff. Its endless cycle of buying and selling provides both jobs and the stuff we need. In this view, it doesn't matter if we buy iPhones or punch-button dumbphones -- the former might be better, but so long as there are enough factories and offices humming to give everyone a job and the means to buy the necessities of life, it means the economy is going well.

The creative view says that an economy is what happens when people cooperate to solve problems. The cycle of buying and selling just happens to be the most productive process to enable that cooperation.

In this scheme, almost all progressives are productivists. But a lot of people who identify with the right, or who support capitalism, are also productivists.

The liberal economist John Maynard Keynes was a productivist. His most famous idea -- which says recessions can be overcome by pumping more money into the economy to kick-start the buying-selling cycle -- is classic productivism. But the right-wing alternative -- the idea that cutting taxes also promotes more buying and selling -- is also productivist.

My belief is that the productivists are right in the short term, because some form of stimulus really is a good idea during a recession. But in the long run, the productivists are wrong and the creativists are right. The reason why billions of people no longer even have a concept of the hardscrabble, food-insecure life their forebears led is not because people started buying and selling more, but because people invented technologies -- engineering technologies, like the steam engine, and social technologies, like modern finance and the limited liability corporation -- that enabled people to cooperate more to solve more problems.

And here's where the anti-consumerists have a point: If we all suddenly and collectively decided to stop buying pointless junk, the economy wouldn't grind to a halt forever. People would just start working on more interesting, more valuable things.

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