No.

If you measure the economy in purely financial terms, such that it looks bigger when you spend more time in the office and less time with the love of your life, you're doing it wrong.

Granted, that's really hard to measure, so lots of big measures (e.g. the GDP) exclude that. It's a well-known limitation of the measure. But any Introduction-to-Economics course you might have taken in your life should have exposed you the notion of utility - the measure not only of bare usefulness but all the goodness and happiness and hope and love and joy of the human experience, the ultimate goal of all human economic activity.

They should have also described "economics" as the study of how people make decisions about what to do with their limited resources - including one of the most-finite resources, our Time here on this world.

Actual money-related matters are just sub-fields of economic study, and if you look at monetary phenomena (like exchange rates and inflation and such) and hope to understand them, you will do so using the underlying actual goods and services and human interactions that comprise the actual economy.

I believe I covered most of your complaint with the "if you have children..." part. I personally spent more time at the office at times so their Mom could be a full time Mom. Then at other times, I didn't.

I don't think economics has any hope of covering anything like joy. Microeconomics can show little sociological vignettes of the ... "Freakonomics" variety.

Utility is a roughly ... shadow variable which is inferred to explain certain things. There's no real agreement on whether or not it's even ordinal. Econ is fascinating, but it's a crippled discipline relative to many other more liberal arts and even sociology proper.

But back to "the sharing economy" - how is this not substituting electronic means to replace (roughly) telephone-based systems like hotels/motels or taxi service?

My personal heresy is that monetary policy has been abused ( towards deflation ) , and that this is what is driving this substitution. In the US, there's been a 2% growth target and we've failed to meet even that.

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3212.html

Nobody seems to actually understand inflation.

You're confusing economic activity with monetary exchange. Economic activity is about exchanging value (of goods or services), money is just the easiest way to track it.

First, there's a fundamental difference between monetary and non-monetary exchange. This is, I believe, related to the idea of "revealed preferences" - that people spend differently than they say. There are people who are apparently deeply concerned with "equality" who live in gated communities.

The "easier to track it" part is more telling, though - most economists will cop to being "drunks looking for their keys under the streetlight because the light is better."

As to the first issue, what is "money"? That's a hole with no bottom. Are stocks money? So when a company buys another with stock, rather than cash, surely that's a monetary exchange right? Is property money? Gold? Oil? What about cows? Where do you draw the line. If I trade someone tickets to a play in exchange for, say, a cast iron skillet is that a monetary exchange or just bartering? If I give someone a box full of old Magic the Gathering cards and that person then selects out all the valuable ones and sells them and gains cash from it was that a monetary transaction? What if I intended for them to do that? What if I didn't?

Economics is complicated, and the desire for economists to simplify it doesn't get rid of the complexity, it just changes what subset of the real economy economists actually talk about.