Cell phones existed but were not yet a body appendage. You generally tried to phone someone first on his or her (social media had yet to inform us that there were more than two genders) phone. This phone was what we would now call a “landline” (if we ever had occasion to use that word anymore). Only after trying the landline would we say to ourselves, “Maybe they’ve got their mobile phone with them.” Amazing as it may seem today—it would be like leaving your house without one leg—people sometimes left their mobile phones at home. These phones were anything but smart. They often couldn’t figure out how to connect themselves with another phone, or, having made the connection, would silently “drop” it, leaving you to realize that for the past three minutes you’d been talking to a handful of inert plastic with a flip lid. Apple’s iPhone wasn’t introduced until 2007. What was it that we used to raise over our head when something dramatic was taking place? Our hand? “Me, teacher, me! I saw the plane crash!” And trying to “post” our hand would have meant getting it stuck in the slot of a mailbox. (These were large and blue and rounded on the top. They used to stand on most busy street corners. Today we would assume they were some kind of primitive surveillance device—perhaps containing a government informant.) Anyway “social media” didn’t exist yet. There was nothing very social about watching TV, listening to the radio, or reading newspapers. In fact, being antisocial was often the point. Traditional media was the merciful opposite of social media—an excuse not to talk to other people. And hardly anyone used the word “media” in normal conversation. “Media” was a college professor, Marshall McLuhan, highfalutin sort of word. If you said you were “in media,” most people would have thought you meant you were somewhere between “middling” and “mediocre.” And if you were in media, they’d be right. Everything has changed—or looks like it has. For someone old enough to remember such a thing as a downtown department store (or, for that matter, a “downtown” that was more Petula Clark than repurposed-by-millennials), it’s astonishing that the suburban shopping mall now evokes so much nostalgia that we might as well have those that remain painted by Norman Rockwell. What is more economically basic than shopping? Certainly, if the fundamental principles of shopping have changed, then the fundamental principles of economics have changed. There is a classic definition of economics given by Paul Samuelson, the classic (well, anyway, old—he died in 2009 at age ninety-four) economist, in his
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