Everyday Life Economics
Channel: LIVING SOCIOLOGY
Date: 2019-11-28

First Person, Plural on CFUV-fm, Victoria, BC
Originally aired May 23, 2002

The weekly hunt for bargains at other people's houses is a ritual carried on throughout Canada and the United States.  Like planting in the Spring and harvesting in the Fall, garage sale season has become a part of culture and commerce.  What better way to understand markets than the most basic understandings of demand and supply that goes on between neighbors.  We spent a Saturday morning in Victoria talking to people holding garage sales and getting an idea of their expertise in marketplace economics and the social context to buying and selling material goods.

E-Bay was going to be America's Garage Sale.  Cyberspace was the new frontier of the weekly consumer ritual.  But E-Bay has grown into a complex market with much higher stakes than the front yard and it has developed a culture of its own.  This culture is becoming increasingly suspicious and hostile as more players figure out ways to break the trust needed to make such a market work.  We examine the place of social trust in commerce and how the breakdown of trust means the breakdown of commerce. 

Finally, we discuss economics of everyday life.  We make this distinction from macro-economics and micro-economics.  The rational-actor theory of economics that dominates academic and professional economics often forgets the social contexts to economic decisions.  By concentrating on the street-level decision-making and meaning-making activities in marketplaces, the ways in which the social world gives context to market decisions emerges.

copyright: Carl Wilkerson and Pattie Thomas
http://sociologylegacy.pbworks.com/w/page/93413165/Episode%2003%20Everyday%20Life%20Economics