On the frustrations of the arbitrary distinction between economic and social considerations

And so, in reading a document recently, the authors threw up (pun intended) all kinds of unnecessary walls between "economic" and "social" considerations. Their pleas for integrative research were somewhat mired by the discrete research silos, which had all industry concerns under economic, and all community concerns under social. This places economic concerns pretty squarely under a category I'd like to name "motivated by profit" and social concerns under a category I'll call "motivated by employment." That's a better categorization: profit vs. employment. Because they're antagonistic like that.

This reminds me of something my friend L and I were talking about. Both of us are social scientists, and so both of us are frequently subjected to the metaphor of the three-legged sustainability stool. Like sustainability is held up by three parts: economic, ecological, and social. We liked to call it the steaming stool of sustainability, or just "steaming stool" for short. Every time I read something about sustainability or somebody's tell me about it, and they're going on about ecological... social... economic... my eyes glaze over and I picture something really gross and I am, at least internally, giggling uncontrollably.

Because I am a social scientist, which means that I like people.