The term economy gets thrown around very easily as you get older. When talking about this concept, it can be related back to money, jobs, status, expectations or even a personal matter. During this assignment, I decided to interview my friends not on a specific idea of the economy but on one major concept of it. Doing this, let me see if my friends understood the idea of the economy first, and if they did we went more into detail on the ideas we spoke about.

I first thought of the question, “What makes the economy the way it is”. At first, my interviewees had to take a few seconds to think about this. One of them came back with the idea that “I have never actually thought of the term economy like that.” Others knew right away how to respond to my question. My friend, Jake, said, “The economy is the way it is due to a set of principles that construct how we look at it”. I then went on to talk to Jake about what principles he believes makes the economy the way it is. He then went back to think of different principles. “Lexi, the principles I think that make up our economic system are status (financially), career pathway, and just money in general.” We started to then talk about each principle, the first one being status. 

Jake and I both agreed on what the status means in the sense of economy. “Status is how much of an income or money one person has. That determines where they fall economically”, as Jake said.  However, we both came to talk about this idea in such that society truly decides your status with income and wealth. It does not matter how much you make, as long as you live a happy life and you are content with everything going on. The idea of status then leads to what people’s careers are.  “Some people make more money than others, but do not enjoy their jobs. I believe it is more important to enjoy your job instead of making extremely large amounts of money. Your happiness in life is important too.” That was all taken directly from Jake and he makes a great point. Money does not define your happiness. A few wise words that mean so much, according to what Jake and I discussed. Overall, we came to conclude that the economic factor of people’s lives can be defined by the principles discussed but also more.

I decided for this blog post to focus more on the ideas Jake presented to me when I brought to him the overall question. I did, however, interview four other people. Their answers were not as detailed and could not bring me onto more topics due to the fact they are uneducated in the idea of economy. That’s the problem with our generation. We do not know enough about the economy so we can talk about it, everything that we know is either from our families or the idea of social media embedding an idea into our heads. 

The picture that I published with this has to describe how people look at the status of the economy with relations to money. As you go up in the social class system, of our society, the status of having money and being wealthy means more. The woman with the microphone shows that since she is higher up than the man, she has more power and freedom with ideas and concepts such as money. However, just because you are higher than someone with the concept of money does not mean you are connected to other types of people in different ways. The dotted line represents the idea that everyone is connected no matter the status with money or how much of an income you make, everyone can be connected back to each other in some way, more than others even.