Building the next economy will take a movement. Community builders, educators, economists, urbanists, policymakers, business leaders, cooperators, activists, parents, kids, neighbours, and even a few celebrities must unite to build a better normal through societal recovery. Something that we are learning from the novel coronavirus pandemic is that even when the market is shut down community is still there – people rise and work together to make things happen amidst a shuttered global economy. Here are five characteristics of the new economy that emphasize the value of community over capital.
What the pandemic is revealing about our economy is that it is unsustainable, unfair, unstable, and makes us unhappy; about half of peoples’ livelihoods will be disrupted or ended by COVID-19. As people come together to infuse new economic promise in our systems it makes sense to gather around what Economist Kate Raworth calls The Doughnut:
“The Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries combines two concentric radar charts to create a concise visualization of the dual conditions –social and ecological–that together underpin human wellbeing. The social foundation demarks the Doughnut’s inner boundary, below which lies critical human deprivation, while the ecological ceiling demarks its outer boundary, beyond which lies critical planetary degradation in terms of stress on major Earth-system processes. Between the two sets of boundaries lies the ecologically safe and socially just space for humanity.”
We need to highlight the dependence of human wellbeing on planetary health. Consequently, the next economy should be:
Small
“We actually need to re-localize and de-globalize quite a bit of our economies. But on the other hand, we need to globalize our contact, our social organizations, our connections,” project guests on a recent ECOCIV podcast. During the pandemic many of us have become reconnected with locality – our neighbours, friends and local enterprises are reflected the power rooted in our communities.
Economic power can live here, too. According to thinkers and business leaders from the Macarthur Foundation, by making our local food systems exist in smaller, local, circular economies we will also delight consumers: “Consumers judge supermarkets on their fresh products, yet the fresh chain is the most difficult of all to manage. Circular principles that could help retailers master these challenges and meet consumers’ needs would be to shorten the value chain, making local production possible.”
Clean
“The best chance of enabling a life of dignity and opportunity for more than 10 billion people over the coming century therefore depends on sustaining Holocene-like conditions, such as a stable climate, clean air, a protective ozone layer, thriving biodiversity, and healthy oceans,” says Raworth.
The next economy needs to value investments in natural capital, such as replenishing biodiversity, de-acidifying oceans, ensuring drinking water is clean and accessible, protecting the ozone layer, and stabilizing our climate.
Fair
Wealth should become more distributed and more enterprises should be owned by communities, with will enhance stability through equity. Important labour and community assets, such as parenting, neighbourhood exchanges, and trees, should not be counted as externalities, but as valued components of the economic system.
Tim Jackson argues that we should “build institutions that reflect the broad purpose of human beings” and that the point of an economy is to provide us with prosperity. The next economy should be more equitable, inclusive, and reflect the diverse value of humanity as well as the living systems of which we are a part.
Slow
Rather than elevating get-rich-quick-schemes or measuring value by quarterly financial returns, the next economy should focus on what Jackson calls “slow moving capital” that is designed to protect assets that we need for the future, such as clean technologies and ecological systems.
Companies like Patagonia, ASOS, and Uniqlo are slowing down “fast fashion” and hyper-consumption by making clothes more durable and establishing localized and integrated micro-markets for re-distributing well-worn clothes within a circular economy that slows down linear production.
Human
We are “living beings in a living system … we need to recognize that the community is our fundamental unit of measurement,” suggests activist David Korten. As Raworth notes, we can be “the turnaround generation” by de-colonizing our minds, elevating the value of labour, and by making more decisions “around the Doughnut”. By creating more human systems we will create ways for our global financial system based on the wellbeing of people, not money (because, as it turns out, we can’t eat money).