Secular (Re: [lbo-talk] housing bubble?)

snit snat snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com
Sun Jan 30 08:21:04 PST 2005


At 08:00 AM 1/30/2005, james at communistbanker.com wrote:


>There is a secular trend <...>

oiy. Whenever I used to delve into various economics text, I'd run across this word and it would jar me. Secular was a word used to describe what isn't sacred. So, in econ, it's used to describe a long-term as opposed to seasonal or cyclical trend, right? But, it just didn't make sense to me. How on earth (har har) did they decided to use the word secular. It was one of those thoughts that would buzz around me brain, making it impossible to keep on reading sometimes! (O' course, sometimes with econ texts, I was probably subsconsciously looking for a reason to stop reading. :)

Does anyone know _why_, etymologically-speaking, someone thought it made sense to use the word secular? I'm gonna assume that secular was a word used in many other contexts before it was ever used by economists. Alas, I never had time to track this down, so I'm figuring one of you economists might know.

Thanks!

Kelley

"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."

--Bruce Sterling



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