Economics, Journalism and Politics

   At first glance, the three areas of economics, politics and journalism don't mix. Yet they do, although not always amicably, and it would seem that the academic discipline of economics has no place in the mix of politics and journalism.
   But it does, whether politicians and journalists are aware of it or not. Unfortunately, many are not.
   At its core, economics deals with what people do with what's available to them. The study began in ancient Greece, and focused initially on household management, then expanded to cover the doings of a city, or polis. By the 20th Century, schools were teaching home economics in high schools and political economics at the college level, with one focusing on the home and the other on the larger population in cities, states and nations.
   Eventually, practitioners forgot about the practical aspects of what they were studying, and academic economics became arcane and mysterious as scholars resorted to mathematical expressions of trends.
   Yet reality has a way of sticking its nose into the most arcane of studies, reminding scholars that they are, indeed, dealing with the real world and what people do in it.
   So it is with economics, both household and political, which is, after all, an extension of the first.
   Politicians, by definition, deal with the activities of the polis -- the government. It's related to the similar Greek term poly -- the many. A city, then, is no more than a group of many households.
   Journalism, by definition, is a daily report (from the French jour, or day) on the activities of an individual or group.
   In modern practice, journalists are neutral reporters of what the people in a polis say and what they do with what's available to them, whether on an individual, a household or a city (political) level.
   So whether they know it or not, journalists write about economics as they cover what's happening in political units.
   The odd thing is that many journalists don't know that, they are not aware of that or they believe economics to be boring. This even as they go about multi-tasking in all three fields -- economics, politics and journalism.