Local Economy: Cooperation, Sharing, Ingenuity
Community Economics
What is an economy, and what is it for?
To our friends in the economics profession, an economy is a machine for the output of stuff, and stuff equivalents called “services.” The more, it turns out, the better, regardless what the stuff actually is.
The only things that count, moreover, are those sold for money. Driving counts, because it burns gas; walking is free, and so doesn’t count. Medical treatment counts. Health doesn’t.
It is insanity that operates under cover of professional expertise. What the economist calls “the economy,” is actually a dis-economy that is dependent upon the ills it produces for its own growth.
It should not be surprising then, that the conventional model ignores totally the question of place. It imagines a placeless world, like that of physics, in which the supposed forces of supply and demand play out in a dance of frictionless perfection, everywhere and forever.
The disconnect from reality is stunning, not least regarding the role of locality in the economy of well-being. A local main street, for example, provides a host of benefits that are off the monetary grid: spontaneous sociability, for example, and a cross-fertilizing between the commercial, social and civic.
People run into neighbors and catch up on local news. They do business with people they know. Civic causes flourish.
None of this shows up in the conventional economic reckonings. By contrast, move the commerce to a big box mall, decimate the main street, and you might get cheaper prices and more sales. But you also get loneliness and isolation, and a depletion of civic life.
Consumption of Prozac might increase, which is a boost to “the economy.” But the real economy of well being has suffered a decline.
More broadly, the de-localizing of economic life has played a major role in ecological breakdown as well. People burn fossil fuels when they must drive long distances to work and shop. The shipping of products hither and yon consumes vast amounts of oil too.
To put this another way, the nation’s ecological and social crises are related. In large part, they are really economic crises by other names. They arise from a myopic and money-centric view of resources and wealth, and from a failure to grasp what an economy is and what it is for – including the central role of locality in economic life.
And local economy begins with a commons, which is the shared spaces and resources that precede monetized exchange. Historically, the commons was physical — the pasture lands, forests, ponds and the like that for centuries provided sustenance for ordinary people.
Today, the concept is larger. It includes all the shared resources of the community, such as the main street culture that sustains our local merchants. It includes also the informal networks that enable us to combine our communal energies and to share our resources to meet daily needs.
That’s on top of more obvious things, such as our common spaces, benches, and civic organizations that help meet local needs.
West Marin Commons is working to invigorate and extend the commons economy of mutual aid and local self-help. We are helping to create social infrastructure for the sharing of rides, food, tools, know-how – whatever is useful. We create physical spaces that encourage the interaction that leads to such sharing; and we are undertaking an inventory of our common wealth here in West Marin.
An economic revival worthy of the name is going to include a large measure of locality. Local economies are inherently conserving of land and resources. They feed and enrich in ways a global market can’t; and they activate a sense of responsibility to one another and to the natural setting they inhabit.