Here is an uneven essay arguing that the economy should be family centered instead of individual centered. Uneven, but full of plums. So, little Jack Horner, stick in your thumb. What a good boy you are!

Highlights:

The idea that economics is the study of markets is one of the greatest mistakes of our time. Properly understood, economics is the study of the production of goods and the provision of services. The market is only one realm in which goods production and service provision are found. The others are the family, the state, and civil society (the nonprofit or charity realm). The family is the oldest economic institution, as the very term “economics”—from the Greek word for household management—suggests.

Each of the four interlocking economies that make up the econ­omy as a whole is based on a different set of principles. In the family economy, family relationships govern the pattern of both contributions and entitlements among family members. In the public econ­omy, the state takes in taxes and provides goods or services to citizens according to some conception of the public interest. In the market, goods are produced and services are provided by firms or individuals in return for profits or wages. In the nonprofit or charity economy, people donate gifts of money or labor to organizations which help needy individuals or supply social goods (like higher education or museums or hospitals or symphony orchestras).

And

Arguably, then, the deepest division in modern societies is not be­tween the Left and the Right, but that between familism and individualism. Individualists include most progressives and free market con­servatives, as well as libertarians and socialists.

These four schools of thought did not exist before the industrial era, and indeed would have been incomprehensible in a world of peasants and landlords. They are branches of the same young tree. They share an individual-centered morality inherited from nineteenth?century Euro-American romanticism, which in many ways was a secularized form of Protestant Christianity

And

Given these moral assumptions, it is natural that individualists view the transfer of ever more goods and service provision from the oppressive family realm to the nonfamily realm of freedom and personal fulfilment as progressive. While they agree on the utopian goal—a global society of emancipated individuals, in which the influ­ence of families and nations will be watered down or abolished—the rival socialist, liberal, conservative, and libertarian schools of indi­vidualism disagree about which recently invented nonfamily organizations—state bureaucracies? for-profit firms? nonprofits?—should perform tasks that were performed by human families for a third of a million years.

For example, individualists tend to agree that all parents of young children should be in the workforce full-time, in the service both of ever-growing GDP and personal self-realization by means of careers that they have chosen rather than inherited. But left-individualists want childcare to be provided by public bureaucracies while right-individualists prefer that young children be tended en masse by pri­vate commercial enterprises. When it comes to education, familists are sympathetic to homeschooling, while progressive individualists sup­port monopolistic public schools and libertarians favor school choice.