The Values Economy
Monday, December 31, 2012
Daniel Greenfield

"There are two types of things that we put money into; the things that we need and the things that we don't. The former represent our physical needs and the latter our spiritual needs. Food for the body and food for the mind.
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Culture isn't a luxury, even the poorest of the poor have it. It doesn't mean a night at the opera, it can just as easily mean sitting under a tree while the village elder explains where fire came from. But it is optional in the sense that we choose where to put our money or pine cones and those choices are our values economy.

The values economy consists of the culture you support. It's the books you buy and the movies you see, it's the paintings on your wall and the house of worship you attend. It's the concerts and games you buy tickets to and it's the colleges you attend. It's all the intangible investments in the intangible things of aesthetics, faith and cultural knowledge
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When you put money into the values economy, you are subsidizing a particular set of values and regardless of where your real tastes and beliefs lie, you will get more of what you buy. If you buy a set of lead pencils every month, the company will go on making more lead pencils. If you buy cultural products at odds with your values, then more of the same will keep on being made.
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Culture is the difference between making things of worth and making worthless things. It is the glue that brings together bold ideas and makes them possible. It is what explains the universe and tells us how to make the impossible, possible. And it's the most fragile of all these things because it dies easily.
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most people don't think of their learning, their religion or their entertainment as an investment, a seed planted in the earth to produce more of its kind. And the failure to think that way leads them to make bad investments in a bad culture.

The culture that we are stuck with now has mostly been one bad investment after another, tracts of smelly swampland where nothing can grow pawned off by sleazy weasels wearing too much polyester and more gold chains than the pharaohs, who haven't even had to work very hard to pull off their malignant scam. Good has been traded for bad and then for worse.

The values economy is tanking and the economic indicators are just one sign of how awry things have gone. The social indicators are another.
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our cultural investments have given us broken families who are willing to sell their rights to the government in exchange for being taken care of from cradle to grave. And the government is willing to make the deal so long as it can bring in more foreign laborers to balance out the gap in the birth rate and then increase the police forces and the military to deal with the fallout from that immigration, leading to a police state.
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Reversing that will not be easy, but it is possible. Cultures have dramatically changed, particularly after traumatic events. The culture that we are living in bears the scars of such turnarounds. And that can be done again, which isn't to say that it will be easy. The first step is to think of culture as a values economy, not just as education, enlightenment or entertainment. An investment that we are making for the future.
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. It means, first and foremost, caring about what you consume, instead of consuming culture as junk food, by being enthusiastic about its merits. That experience can be solitary, but it should also be undertaken with an awareness that culture is an investment
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The values economy is the calculus of our culture. It determines who we are and who our children will be. If our borders and our buildings, our roads and our technologies are our structure, then our culture is our soul. It is the spirit that lurks within the concrete and steel, it is the soul of the plastic, and if it is lost, then all that remains is structure no different from the pyramids and the countless fossilized relics of dead civilizations; empty stone with no spirit.

The economy decides if our bodies have a future. The values economy decides whether it will have a soul."

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