"National Economy" is a term and has a meaning. Depending on what you think that meaning is, the usage of the term "National Economy" may in fact be nonsense in any usage.

This is beginning to sound Alice in Wonderlandish.

national borders are arbitrary geographical limits to the application of a set of laws Lets take this one step further and ask the question - What is an economic unit?

Traditionally, it has been defined as an arbitrary geographical limit. The economic EU shows this well by arbitrarily grouping a set of previous countries with their own currency together into one big country.

An economic unit does not have to be arbitrary. A kilogram exists, why not an economic unit? That it should conveniently be exactly what we want it to be - an arbitrary geographical limit would be surprising.

Consider - when Mexican wetbacks cross the Rio where do they go? One might be tempted to say the United States, but that is incorrect. They have particular destinations in mind - not the "economic unit" of the US. There is a reason that the beware of illegal alien crossing signs exist on the freeways up to LA, and not outside of Detroit.

If "ecotopia": were to exist tomorrow, LA would still need the beware of illegal aliens crossing signs on its freeways.

The brief statements above are provocative, and can not really be explained in a comment, or even a diary. They are pulled from the ideas of Jane Jacobs - author of several books. In particular, the book Cities and the Wealth of Nations.

The final point is about discarding the "Japan" mindset. Generally speaking, national borders are not defined naturally, except for in the case of an island country like Japan. The complementary concept to the idea of globalization is regionalism, in which a "nation" is a confrontational concept. If the natural economic unit is the city, as economist [Jane Jacobs is not an economist] Jane Jacobs claims, a metropolitan economy self-generates itself and, thus, economic policies within the framework of a nation - a unit defined by artificial boundaries - have little effect. Some floated ideas of dividing Japan into several regional blocs would not be an answer as boundaries would still be artificial. Rather, in recognizing a regional economy as a base for a natural economic unit, policies should be devised in a way to support the natural evolution of such economic zones across administrative boundaries by, for instance, facilitating local autonomy and cross border cooperation. There has been much criticism about the current excessive concentration in Tokyo, but it is necessary to more closely examine specifically what is wrong with such concentration. A more positive approach should be taken such as redesigning the urban structure to ensure the safety of the some 40 million people living in the Tokyo metropolitan area.

http://www.rieti.go.jp/en/special/yokoyama-yosinori/systemdesign/index.html

A couple of links about Cities and the Wealth of Nations

http://www.portifex.com/BSPages/Cities&Wealth.htm
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/CitiesAndTheWealthOfNations

What 'system'?

You can't be me, I'm taken

And the new classifications are immediately abused anyway  

Right.  To abuse deliberately is unethical.  

To do it unknowingly is a mistake.  

The Left, especially in the West, not to say Europe--irrespective of the opinion and practice of the international community--really must refrain from conducting discourse in such a dissociated and reified way  ;)  

Haiku version:  

Political thoughts  
sprinkle the screen like flowers
in yesterday's wind.  

The petals are gone.  
The thoughts remain in my head
like mental compost.

Words neatly nailed down
like signs of coming flowers.
Alas! Only weeds.


The Fates are kind.

I must disagree.

You can't be me, I'm taken

practically NEVER including the Orthodox churches and traditions  

I mean, I suppose you think the sacking of Constantinople by the 4th Crusade was a MISTAKE . . . ;)

The Fates are kind.

i remember in the 60's first coming across talk about the E-W duality (polarisation).

it was always in a philosophical context, referring to an intellectualisation of reality into a rational/materialist construct/frame, and this conceptualisation excelling in a vertical way but, just as from the top of a tall tower it's harder to see what's at your feet than when you're standing on the ground, our 'paradigm' (although that didn't become a buzzword till 20 years later) while admirable as an engineering feat perhaps, was paying a huge spiritual price for its specialised, fragmented, blinkered, tunnel vision of the world (as macromanaged everlasting resource pile).

.....because it had to excise huge chunks of ourselves that did not fit on the procrustian bed of newtonian/cartesian thought, and were unmeasurable by any consistently quantifiable yardstick.

....and these chunks (memory, intuition, emotion, dreams, trance, hypnotic states, premonition, autistic memory-bank access, to name the first obvious ones that spring to mind) were dismissed and swept under the rug as we oohed and aahed at moonshots and the soviet dog in space, roomfuls of computers and food that was a travesty of nature.

and disassociated....throwing away the key to the freezer our little inklings something might be seriously awry were casually tossed in

however a few jungians, and similarly aware types like gurdjieffians, theosophists and orientalists had already preceded and preseeded the collective 'western' unconscious with the ideas that were invited into the moral vacuum created by the decline of european church attendance, nihilisme, and the 'god is dead' memes that were the fruit and aftermath of the new depths of inhumanity the second world war had induced.

... along with ravi on the new-fangled stereo, the maharishi hamming it up with the beatles, pot replacing alcohol as drug-of-choice for many, and the rising growth of kebab and curry, the vedas, alan watts...

...we were awash with a 'mystic orient' wave that tsunami'd across the acid-bleached group consciousness of the biggest boom of educated (but terribly ignorant nonetheless) adolescents the newly wired-up planet had ever mediated, deconstructing many an ivory tower built on the shifting sands of 'absolute' anything.

of course einstein et al were busy mining the first floor too, an inside job.

 a lot of us omnisciently launched ouselves into taking on the void mano a mano, doubtless sacrificing swathes of brain cells in the process, but also starting to get a clue what all the fuss was about, under the blather and froth.

and it was about the schism that rational materialism had slashed in our souls, and how awakening the heart was the way to heal that split.

we learned what was wrong and condescending about pity, and right and noble about compassion, and we became aware of how the blind, greedy grabbing of more stuff had a sinister side, how it wasn't all about having fun and not giving a shit who paid, but about interdependance, give-and-take, taking joy in responsibility, connecting dots and learning to pay attention to consequences, looking for patterns, seeing the other sides...horizontal, multi-axial.

critical mass was attained when a guru headcount showed more indian swamis (including the notoriously smarmy swindleyamunya) were living between la jolla and escondido than in the whole of rajasthan, the mao john lennon was howling about was a mass murderer, and that no-one in china was allowed the i ching, though they were still allowed acupuncture, thank the most venerable ancestors, and on nixon's trip to primitive china we all saw on our tv's the chinese lady eating an apple while having brain surgery, with no other anesthesia.

a lot of cognitive wobble as folks took that image on board!

so back then it had meaning, this duality... it was a yang meeting yin, and is still happening, though the exotic novelty factor is diminishing, and we have regurgitated 'eastern' wisdom into global 'new age' belief systems...and now sybarite hedonism finds itself in the new 6-star hotels of dubai.

it's become so actual, that the duality has become a monity, (as in monity python!) oops i mean an unity, and now indeed only useful historically, even misleadingly distracting as a modern epithet.

as many of you know here by now, my beef is with the word 'neoliberal' which is triplespeak quadruple-minus ungood, and as far as i'm concerned as pure a trojan worm that's ever malwared its meaning-sucking way acrost our linguistic desktop-landscape, tunneling and trolling far and wide, deep into our hard drives in its efforts to etymologically demoralise neophyte puzzlers and de-re-coders of this truman show we all quantum leapt into.

even 'neocon' makes me splutter, but it's less subversive...

i guess 'landshark' or 'flesh-chomping destroyer of worlds' ain't pc enough for the noughties!

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

Requesting definitions of what you are interested in, while ignoring sloppiness in what you are uninterested in, is a problem we all face.

It is the essence of communications.

You can't be me, I'm taken

No one could have predicted

Always reward creativity, even when absurd.  

Then correct your own mistake.  "Find the value of x,"  would patch that hole, I would think.  

The Fates are kind.

ROFLOL!!!!

Getting the suspicion I'm just sensitive to funny math, but that's to howl so funny. I fear math teachers are a bit too sour to grade this positive but I wouldn't...

I really don't know what I would have done, but a good laugh is worth something.

Next time, of course, you write "solve for x".

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides

True enough, but the gist (or one of them anyway) from this comment thread seems that collective terms are practically a standard product of box-thinking, a useful concept during human history, yet if you'd start to look at classifications critically, far too many are essentially inadequate. Wrong usage becomes practically a given and abuse becomes an easy side-effect by the phenomeneon. I'm reminded of kcurie and the need for a narrative - it's part of the package. You can fight it, I doubt you can change it.