[KoolKat23]

This is a great point, further to your point on AI. Another perhaps worse offender is our focus on "the economy", at times the focus is always on "what about the economy?!" Forgetting "the economy" is merely a tool intended to improve the human condition. Sometimes I feel people lose sight of this original intention, be it unintentional or otherwise.

[ryandrake]

When Media Talking Heads say “the economy,” what they are really talking about is just rich people’s investments and old people’s retirement. Basically, for reporters, the economy = only stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.

[acdha]

I think you’re being unfairly down-voted. While a lot of people here seek out more news, what I see normal people exposed to on TV is basically that – stocks, and if gas prices are high, that and quarterly jobs reports discussed in relation to stocks. To a first approximation, “did your retirement find gain or lose?” really sums it up for all but my father-in-law and the two of us. This is why it’s such a common trope not to think politicians talk about the real economy because your lived experience really varies based on how much stocks affect your life.

[erikerikson]

You might consider whether this is a little too reductive. After all the values of the stock, bonds, and mutual funds are directly related to the profits and capital flows through and health of the economy.

The economy is complicated and those high-level indexes are gross simplifications of a mass of complexity, but they're not entirely unrelated to whether people have money to spend and whether our liberalized economy is functioning. In fact, I'd suggest that our economy is increasingly suffering from the population's inability to participate and drive the maximal capital flows and prosperity that are possible. There is an additional distributive and concentration problem which we have been solving even more poorly lately.

[tharmas]

Precisely.

[Muromec]

/Forgetting "the economy" is merely a tool intended to improve the human condition

Paraphrasing and old soviet joke -- and I also saw the human whose condition it improves

[lo_zamoyski]

> Sometimes I feel people lose sight of this original intention, be it unintentional or otherwise.

It's more than a matter of losing sight. This is endemic to liberal hyperindividualism which places the individual and "consumer utility" at the center of economic activity. This ideological presupposition actively works against human flourishing - and even the viability of an economy at all - as a precondition for successful economies is so-called "normal social reproduction". Our consumerist economic order is actively hostile to stable family formation and fecundity (as evidenced by precipitous demographic decline) and thus to the health of society in general.

The economy is indeed supposed to be in the service of human flourishing. Modern economics instead optimizes for "utility maximization".

[dfxm12]

People are coerced into losing sight of this via capitalist-backed mass media, think tanks and politicians. In the context of popes in recent years as OP says, Pope Francis was particularly an opponent of trickle down economics and consumerism. Leo doesn't seem to be much different, based on his continuation of Francis' critique of modern capitalism as an economy of exclusion.