My most central writing project right now is a book, with the (surely tentative) title Economics Pragmatics. The idea has been stewing in my brain for years and years, making connections between my academic work on the communicative influences on peoples’ beliefs, values, and choices, and my policy work on economic and social justice. Although much of my career has been (perhaps too much) heavy on jargon and technique, now I’m most interested in writing for thoughtful non-specialists who are observant and care about how we got here and where we’re going.
As a professor teaching graduate courses in research methods, I always began each semester with the idea of inquiry, defined broadly, as gaining knowledge by any means necessary. Inquiry could encompass whatever the seeker’s choice–art, literature, film, music, journalism, religion, science, politics and policy. Although I needed to quickly get to the syllabus, the starting point always was with the questioning, and with the search for understanding.
We’re not all grad students, or professors, or policy wonks. Those categories don’t matter. But we all make sense of things through a diverse environment of discourse that surrounds us. Economics Pragmatics is an exploration of the broad social conversation about scarcity and abundance, material and intangible, and what it means to us.
Dayna Finet 