by Peter Block
“The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.”
––William Gibson
We are surrounded by an economy that we rarely hear about, called the creative economy. It is not an economy for creatives, it is about the ways people create a life for themselves and others around them which cannot be measured by its commercial appeal. It arises from the original meaning of the word “economy,” which was household management. The creative economy is an alternative to the market economy, and it is all around us, though essentially unrecognized as news. Some examples of this invisible economy:
These stories are vivid examples of what is widely occurring in every community. They are about health, education, crime, and youth. Popular topics. The outcomes are dramatically different from those we hear most about. And they happen all around us: in parks, libraries, coffee shops, churches, kitchens, arts venues, and front yards.
What is puzzling is why outcomes like these remain invisible. In the current culture they are not considered news. They do not align with the commercial essence of another economy: the market economy. The market economy wants to know what is not working, where are the deficiencies, where are the commercial opportunities for scale, efficiency, cost, speed, revenue volume, profit to take advantage of conflict, wrongdoing, crisis, crime, litigation, competition, self-doubt, and fear. These are themes in the dominant narrative which are all drivers of the market economy and capture most of our attention and energy.
The invitation here is to consider centering our attention on people creating a culture where the primary conversation is not driven by the modern market economy. It begins by seeking a name for the alternative that does not use the existing narrative in its title. Postmodern, late-stage capitalism, neoclassical. The term “creative economy” is in use and captures the primacy of citizen agency, connection, localness, and affection that frames the essence of what best serves us and the common good.
We can more fully choose to shift our primary attention away from the market economy and its effects. We can acknowledge that the creative economy better serves us and is waiting for us to make it central. The stories in this economy are mostly alive in their own disciplines like health, education, public safety, and art. Something shifts when we consider these stories of interest to all of us, all the time. All that is required is to amplify our attention to them. We live in an attention world. Suppose we decided to shrink the discussion of the market economy to a side show, a human-interest story?
Economic Mindfulness
Shifting attention as the methodology of transformation is an extremely well-developed practice in many domains. It is the essence of eastern practices like Buddhism and its variants including mindfulness and meditation. The interconnection of body, mind, and spirit in yoga practice is all about attention. In the religious domain, devotion takes the form of contemplation, liturgy, prayer, communion, immersion, kneeling. All are practices to shift and reinforce where to focus our attention. Same for therapy, counseling, communities of practice. All are built on the idea that how and where we put our attention is instrumental in creating a life that best serves what matters most to us.
In most of these movements, the focus is on the individual and how they navigate themselves and the world. While each advocates compassion for all, the individual is the center of attention. The creative economy is about communal efforts. It manifests the idea that cooperatively, through powerful, small-scale encounters and programs in a particular place, we create a world that best serves us.
Participating in the creative economy, we shift our relationship with time. We believe there is enough time for what matters. We set convenience aside as the major selling point for goods and services. We consider the number of neighbors we learn to trust to be more important than likes, followers, or finding the right occupant of the corner office. We decide to keep our dollars very local.
On a bigger scale, there have been historical efforts to shift the economy to what we value most. Mennonites. Quakers. Co-housing neighborhoods. Utopian communities. Each designed to reshape our way of participating in the material world. These groups are sometimes called intentional communities. Our current effort might be to create attentional communities, whose purpose is to normalize paying primary attention to the economy that primarily values slow, small, local, inconvenient, relational, kind to the earth and the other.
Citizens as Agents
The creative economy is a shift in who is accountable for what we consider essential to our well-being. We become citizens, not consumers. It encourages us to reclaim the ability to shape our culture and how we build what is called social capital.
Social capital is a term that captures the cultural force that produces our individual and collective common good. Social capital has two components: How much we trust each other and how much we work together to make a place better. Robert Putnam, in “Bowling Alone,” showed that communities with high social capital were more successful in domains such as livelihood, education, and health than communities with low social capital.
One way social capital is produced is when we plan an event together. Street fairs, sharing food, arts, library, workshops, park events, anything neighborhood or street. It is not just the event that creates trust and makes a place better; what really creates social capital is how we connect to each other in the planning and production and hosting of the event. The event itself is a reason for a relational activism that creates a future we want.
The four opening stories show how social capital is built with a shift in the role of expert –– namely surgeon, teacher, chief, executive director. These people are important and vital, but it is the ways they build agency and connection among citizens, students, and peers that are decisive in the learning and healing process. These experts spend as much thought and time building relational connection as they do on pedagogy, instruction, and policies. Plus the primary focus is on the gifts of offenders, urban and school youth, and patients.
In addition to the role of professional experts, the function of leadership comes from neighborhood connectors –– people who thrive on invitation, caring for the common good, bringing strangers in touch with one another. If you are still reading this column, you are likely one of them.
The creative economy places in the hands of citizens and the neighborhood the agency to produce our well-being. Not to purchase it. Not to expect elected officials or social service or educational institutions, commercial organizations, or public programs to raise a child, care for the earth, provide livelihood, keep us safe and happy.
Measuring What Matters
What we measure is a direct expression of what we deem important. In the market economy we evaluate an event by the number of people who showed up and how they rated the experience. We measure scale, likes, money spent or produced. In the broader look, we measure average annual income, GDP, sales, efficiency.
One reason the creative economy has not been valued is that it is not monetized, nor should it be. If we hold to the belief that our measure of well-being is first and foremost our dollars, our wealth, our upward mobility, our global scale, and our convenience, then our humanity and the condition of the earth will remain an afterthought.
This calls us to measure the creative economy in a unique way. In valuing the creative economy our attention goes to efforts and outcomes created by citizens producing something together. Our attention goes to a qualitative assessment of local efforts: How were neighbors engaged? What gifts were made visible? In what ways did people become less socially and economically isolated?
We would measure people’s trust in each other and how much they belong to the place where they reside. We would be interested in their general well-being and happiness, how their children are doing, their involvement in the arts and local government. The tools for these measures are available. Canadian economist Mark Anielski has spent a career designing and applying a Well-Being Index. Used by countries, provinces, and First Nations, it focuses the conversation on how citizens are doing together.
Broadcasting the Creative Economy
Our collective task is to imagine ways for the creative economy to become prime time, headline news –– the center of our attention –– in ways that are aligned with its nature. The traditional attention channels will remain committed to the market economy. Let them be. We need to find ways to publicize and report a version of news that draws attention away from our current habits. There are already islands of this.
David Bornstein is a strong national voice for the community-serving possibility of journalism. He started Solutions Journalism as an alternative to the prevailing focus on what is wrong and who is at fault.
Peter Pula has created Axiom News. He trains people in generative journalism designed to build and serve community.
Next City in Detroit gives constructive attention to neighborhoods and works to support the strengths and struggles of Blacks to find full equity and participation in the life of the city.
Perhaps we create The Connecting Times as a regular publication that is a container for the news we choose to value. It can focus on efforts where the future exists in the present. This is technically possible. We just have to decide together if we have the will to create some communal instrument that ties all our efforts together. Local newspapers are everywhere, so let’s have a regular column on the creative economy.
Citizens are the source of the stories for creative journalism to support the creative economy. Suppose we treat as primary news those instances where local people are already telling their stories to each other. There are storytelling organizers everywhere. Suppose we treated these stories, currently collected for connecting people, as central to our economy. In the connector networks that exist now, we can document the stories of where the creative economy is operating.
An Invitation
Attention on the creative economy focuses on where social capital, rather than traditional financial capital, is at work. These are situations where three or more people trust each other and decide to make things better. Central to each effort is how it builds local relationships and affection. Wendell Berry has written about this elegantly.
Again, the stories we are interested in start small and are slow, underfunded, and inconvenient. There are innovations all around us involving land use, youth, safety, urban farming, small community and cooperative enterprises, health, housing, the arts. There are already structures for innovative community capital investment and jubilee-minded debt treatment. These are all practices that allow every city and rural town to thrive.
This is an invitation to see if framing what so many are creating as an economy might be a thread that is useful. Let us know if you are interested. Or have a story.
