Economic
Decision
Making
Standard of Living & Infrastructure
• The central problem of any economic
organization is …
– How to provide a high standard of living for all
members of the society.
• Standard of Living is a measure of the consumption of
goods and services that individuals and groups
privately and/or collectively can achieve
• Standard of living indicators:
– Income levels
– Diets
– Medical care
– Safe water supply
– Education levels
– Choices available to citizens
– Life expectancy
• How high is your standard of living?
– Make a list of 20 fundamental things in your live
you would have difficulty living without?
– Use your list to complete the following chart
Which of these things
are critical for survival
Which make life easier
Which could you actually
live without
Every society has an ideal by which it strives to fulfill
the needs of its members.
– Democratic, industrial societies believe they offer:
• Material well-being
• Social mobility
• Individual autonomy
– Aboriginal societies believe they offer:
• A sacred respect for the land and all living things
• A way of life in which sharing economic wealth is a
benefit for all
• The opportunity to be self-sufficient and contribute to
the groups well being
• Maintaining a high standard of living means
making difficult choices about:
– Deciding what a high standard of living is
– How to organize society so that the necessary
goods and services to support that standard can
be produced efficiently, cheaply, and humanely
– How to distribute those goods and services to all
who want them in a way that is satisfactory to
the majority
• In a small group brainstorm and come to a
consensus on the following …
– What is a satisfactory standard of living?
– How can you produce what is needed?
– How will you distribute what you need?
* Share your group decisions with the other groups *
• Modern, industrial societies are made
possible by an infrastructure that determines
the social system.
– An infrastructure is defined as the complex
system of political, economic, and social
organizations
• The purpose of an infrastructure is to make
possible the production of goods and services
necessary to satisfy human needs and wants.
• Every society develops an infrastructure
which is unique to its environment and needs
as defined by the cultural assumptions which
govern how people in the society view
reality.
• Comparing standards of living within and
between societies is difficult and must be
done with regard to the criteria selected.
Economic Paradigms of North
American and European Societies
• All people choose and/or accept patterns of
ideas, beliefs, and values known as
paradigms.
• Paradigms provide a set of rules and
regulations which can be used as criteria for
deciding what is real, acceptable, and/or
significant.
Iroquoian Economic Paradigm
• Aboriginal peoples over the course of
thousands of years created economic systems
compatible with their values and beliefs.
• Economic life was integrated into the other
aspects of the lifestyle, including the religious
and the political.
• The economic systems of most traditional
societies were heavily dependent upon the
physical environment and the natural
resources obtained from it.
• These societies were guided by communitybased economic development systems in
which men were the natural resource
gatherers and women the natural resource
processors.
Iroquoian economic life:
– Attached a cultural value of sacredness to the
physical environment and everything within it
– Controlled any tendency toward unlimited
and/or unmanaged economic growth
– created economic systems which were grounded
in spirituality
– Acted as the spiritual guardians of the physical
environment
– Governed economic activity by placing a high
priority on the management and conservation of
natural resources
• In summary, the Iroquoian economic
paradigm was based on:
– Collaboration
– Integration
– Sharing
– Conservation
– Matriarchy