What Matters? by Wendell Berry

When I first read Wendell Berry's 1985 essay "What Are People For?" 12 years ago, I was in college preparing to do exactly what Berry says that colleges prepare people to do—move to someplace that is not home and serve the economy. I read with academic disinterest his lament for the fate of the many "country people" who moved to cities and became unemployed.

Now I am a pastor, and after the economic collapse of 2008 many in my congregation are unemployed. So it was with renewed interest that I reread this essay, along with the 14 others (five new and nine previously published) that make up What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth. However, my un­employed congregants aren't farmers who moved to the city; rather, they became victims of the economy we all serve. Writing with his usual clarity but with a less-hopeful-than-usual tone, Berry lays bare this economy's dehumanizing power.

The main theme of the new essays will not surprise anyone familiar with Berry's work. In his view, there are two econ­omies. One we know as "the economy." The fundamental purpose of this economy is to make products as cheaply as possible and to sell them as expensively as possible. "The economy" destroys what Berry calls the real economy—that of the household that is situated in the economy of the local community. It does so by exploiting the local community and the rest of creation in the quest for cheap labor and raw materials. The relationship between the two economies is the book's leitmotif.