Community

In order to create a better community, we need to understand what is going on in our American economy. What is economy? The idea of economy has no definite meaning since it can refer to many different concepts. I think of economy as a network that branches off into different categories. If any category fails or lowers its standards, then the network will eventually collapse or fall temporarily. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau describes his own definitions of economy based on his insight of the mid-nineteenth century American economy. His ideas of economy are relative to the contemporary and the future American economy. Economy can branch into 7 different categories: trading, house living, supply and demand, religion, fashion, environment, and the means of production. Trading is used to exchange ideas and goods to different continents so that one country can benefit from the other. One way that trading was an issue is the exchange of germs where one group of people suffers from another ethnicities’ microorganisms. In the beginning of “discovering of America”, the Columbian Exchange was a disadvantage to the Native Americans since it wiped out a huge number of them from not being prone to European diseases. House living is based on the different class ranks: upper class, middle class, and lower class. The upper class in today’s American society is considered people who work for the government that have high paying occupations and CEO’s of corporations. The middle class can range to many jobs that are classified as the second highest paying jobs. The lower class can be referred to the everyday people with low paying jobs such as a factory worker or working at a sweatshop. The idea of supply and demand greatly influences the economy in terms of trade. For example, if more Americans want corn, then the companies who make or provide corn will lessen the supply of corn and create a higher price for it since there’s a high demand of this crop. Religion is another aspect of the American economy; there are Catholics, Christians, Protestants, Muslims, and etc. Each religion has a different way of worship but the idea of religion remains constant. Fashion ties into economy in such that whatever is the latest design becomes something that everyone must wear. For example, skinny jeans were a top fashion in 2008 and every teenager in America wore skinny jeans as if they had to wear that particular fashion to ensure that they are a part of the “in crowd”. Environment takes another huge part of our economy; a place can have a clean environment or a polluted environment. It just depends on us to create those types of environments. Lastly, an aspect of economy is the means of production. A city, state, or town can be either industrialized (city life) or urbanized (farmland). Depending on the place where you work, an industrialized state will mostly have factories to produce goods while urban states mostly have farmland to make the crops. Either way each type cannot function alone without the other. In conclusion, economy varies between nations, cities, and continents. A nation’s economy is based on their geography or nature. Nature affects how our economy runs and we wonder how a nation becomes more successful than the other. In a weird sense, it’s based on geographic luck. The more resources you have, the greater your economy will flourish. In another sense, economy is used as the structure of human life, where we have to think, act, and dress a certain way in order to become a perfect human race; but again this concept of economy relies on the availability of what nature is able to offer.