Here's a strange thought experiment: try explaining to a medieval peasant that "the economy" is struggling. They'd look at you like you'd grown a second head. The what? They understood taxes, harvests, debts, and the local lord's greed—but the economy as a thing with its own moods and demands? That concept simply didn't exist.

What we casually call "the economy" is one of the most successful inventions in human history—so successful that we've forgotten it was invented. Like fish who can't see water, we swim in economic thinking without realizing it's a relatively recent creation that fundamentally changed how humans understand themselves. Let's trace how this invisible architecture was built.

For most of human history, what we'd call "economic" activity was tangled up with everything else—religion, family obligations, political loyalty, and cosmic order. In medieval Europe, charging interest on loans wasn't just illegal; it was a sin that could land your soul in hell. The "just price" for goods wasn't determined by supply and demand but by moral theology about fair dealing between Christian neighbors.

Anthropologist Karl Polanyi called this "embeddedness"—the market was embedded within society, not the other way around. Trade happened, absolutely. People got rich, went broke, and squabbled over money. But these activities were subordinate to other concerns: maintaining community relationships, fulfilling religious duties, preserving social hierarchy. The idea that exchange should be governed by its own separate logic would have seemed as bizarre as suggesting that marriage should operate purely on efficiency principles.

This wasn't unique to Europe. Chinese Confucian scholars ranked merchants at the bottom of the social hierarchy—below farmers, artisans, and scholars—precisely because profit-seeking was seen as socially corrosive. Aristotle distinguished between household management (acceptable) and profit-making (suspicious). Across vastly different cultures, the pattern held: economic life was subordinate to broader human purposes, not the master of them.

Takeaway

When someone claims that free markets are "natural" and regulation is "artificial interference," remember that the opposite view—markets requiring constant social control—was the default assumption for most of human civilization.

Something remarkable happened in 18th-century Europe. Thinkers like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and François Quesnay began treating economic activity as if it operated according to its own internal laws—laws that could be discovered, studied, and harnessed like physics or chemistry. This was a genuine intellectual revolution, and it didn't happen by accident.

The key move was abstraction. Real people with complex motivations became "rational economic actors" pursuing "utility." Messy social relationships became "market transactions." Religious prohibitions on usury became inefficient obstacles to capital allocation. By stripping away context, economists could identify patterns invisible to previous observers. They could model how prices form, how trade creates mutual benefit, how labor and capital combine. The power of this approach was undeniable—it generated genuine insights about specialization, comparative advantage, and growth.

But abstraction always involves choices about what to include and exclude. Early economists chose to exclude most of what their predecessors considered essential: morality, community bonds, environmental limits, care work, and power relationships. These weren't oversights but deliberate simplifications that made mathematical modeling possible. The economy became a separate sphere precisely by defining away everything that connected it to the rest of human life.

Takeaway

Economic models are maps, not territory. They gain predictive power by simplifying reality, but those simplifications reflect choices—often invisible—about what aspects of human life deserve attention and which can be safely ignored.

Here's where invention becomes ideology. Once "the economy" was conceived as an autonomous system with natural laws, a seductive conclusion followed: don't interfere. If markets naturally tend toward equilibrium and efficiency, then government regulation, labor unions, and social programs aren't just ineffective—they're violations of natural order, like trying to repeal gravity.

This logic reached its peak in the late 20th century with figures like Margaret Thatcher declaring "There Is No Alternative" to market liberalization. Notice the move: what began as a useful analytical framework for understanding certain patterns became a claim about reality itself. The economy wasn't just a lens for viewing one aspect of human activity; it was the fundamental truth about how societies must work. Other considerations—environmental sustainability, community cohesion, meaningful work—became "externalities" or "market distortions."

The irony is profound. An intellectual creation—literally a set of concepts invented by human minds—became treated as more real than the human relationships it was designed to describe. When economic models conflict with lived experience, we're now trained to doubt our experience rather than question the models. The invention conquered its inventors, and we forgot we had any other options.

Takeaway

Recognizing "the economy" as a human invention rather than a natural fact reopens questions that market fundamentalism forecloses: Who benefits from this arrangement? What values does it prioritize? What alternative designs might serve human flourishing better?

Understanding that "the economy" is an invention doesn't mean rejecting economic thinking—it means holding it more lightly. Economic models remain powerful tools for certain purposes, just as hammers are excellent for nails but terrible for screws.

The real freedom comes from remembering that we built this. And what humans build, humans can rebuild. The question isn't whether to have markets but what purposes they should serve—and who gets to decide.