By Peter Block
We live in a culture where our attention is fixated on what is not working and who is winning and losing. The narrative is filled with polarization, conflict, wrongdoing. This is the major substance of headline news and a good portion of social media, which carries within it a negative bias. We begin to think this is who we are.
Some particular themes hold consistent and endless arguments over whether we should:
In addition, the stock market is headline news and a popular measure of well-being. Inflation, the consumer price index, unemployment and inflation rates are central measures used to evaluate our condition. These conversations occur at every level: city, state, nation, world. The focus on these dimensions of life is sold as essential to preserve our freedom, democracy, well-being, and historical legacy.
Suppose that these versions of who we are and what matters had a purpose other than freedom and democracy. That these storylines were mostly driven by our religious devotion to a market economy. That we have simply internalized the idea that it is the market economy that best serves our progress and well-being. That the typical debates are really about whose point of view can make the market economy work the best. That the market economy, more than the well-being of our collective, benefits from endlessly focusing on the stance of government, the distribution of wealth, who is in charge of the rules. Not that these don’t matter, but are they really decisive?
These debates and objects of our attention do us a great disservice. They actually distract us, by design, from most of the human values which more authentically define us, our lives, our enduring culture, what really matters most. There are places the market economy, how it is funded and regulated, cannot take us: simply put, the collective well-being of us all.
The existing immersion in the market context, no matter whether progressives or liberals run things, has produced way too little reduction in our suffering. Our social and economic isolation grows. The climate crisis has been growing. Wealth disparity grows. Fear grows. Housing and family security are a struggle. Injustice thrives. The number of human beings who struggle each day is too many. The actions by urban or national military forces are growing. Perhaps the only decisive outcome of the current debates within the market context is which ruling class is in charge.
Walking upstream, it is time to more seriously question the impact of all these conversations confined within the context of a market economy. Perhaps they are a very narrow view of reality and are the wrong conversations. Perhaps there is an alternative to the market economy that would better serve us. Engage us in conversations and debates that truly have the capacity to create a more just, enriching quality of life and culture.
The Soul of the Market Economy
The market economy holds that we live in the midst of scarcity. This becomes the rationale that justifies too many of our actions. This recurrent debate is based on the myth that our well-being is best served by being more competitive. Which starts in the first grade with the grading system. It reflects the Adam Smith adoration of self-interest. It sustains the neoliberal belief that global scale and dollar volume are the real measures of success. Both sides of the debate are really concerned with how to make scarcity, competition, and scale work best.
This conversational drumbeat relegates the common good to the sideshows of collateral damage and externalized costs.
The power over our existing culture is described by Ellen Meiskins Wood who, in her classic book “The Origin of Capitalism,” defines the contemporary focus of the market economy quite simply:
“Material life and social production in capitalism are universally mediated by the market. This unique system of market dependence means that the dictates of the capitalist market –– its imperatives of competition, accumulation, profit maximization, and increasing labor productivity –– regulate not only all economic transit actions but social relations in general” (p. 7, emphasis mine).
Wood explores the idea that the market economy has spread beyond commerce to define and shape our way of living. This includes how we school our children, how we value the arts, who manages our health and aging, what stories we highlight, our love of screens, how we manage our judicial system, taxation, and who keeps us safe.
An Alternative in Plain Sight
There is an alternative economy. We have a choice where our attention goes and we might be better served if we shifted our primary attention to what can be called the creative economy. This is an economy based on the conviction that there is enough. It replaces scarcity with imagination and memory and relatedness. If we shift the context from market to creative, it changes our patterns of solutions. We will still argue, but why not over something that cultivates our humanity? This can become the center of our attention. We have the choice to relegate commerce to something that is incidentally interesting. The Dow Jones average becomes a human-interest story.
The creative economy better honors the original definition of “economy”: Economy is “the management of a household, stewardship of a household’s resources.” It also arises from the original definition of “creative”: “to beget, give birth to.” The creative economy rests on a belief in stewardship for all that a household both inherits and produces. A household can be you, your family, your neighbors, your community, a nation, a planet.
“Creative” is not just about what we call art. It encompasses our local ability to innovate, make, and produce. This includes social relations and local memory and culture and preservation rather than commercialization of the land and nature. It incorporates local production. The arts are included, but extend to sustaining a creative culture. The creative economy focuses on the capacity of a neighborhood to give people access to and control of most all they need to survive and prosper. This encourages a career not dependent on schooling or class rank. It means keeping dollars circulating locally. Art becomes a way of bringing people together for the larger purpose of well-being.
The creative economy is dramatically distinct from the market economy. The market economy is where what matters most is surplus and profit. Convenience, cost, self-interest are driving forces. The market economy is used to justify what is sometimes called a command economy. They both call us to give structure and priority to the market-driven way of being. Corporations, central agencies, or government, under the lobby of corporations, control all major aspects of how we function as a society. This includes what goods and services are produced, how they are produced, and how they are distributed. The market economy is used to justify foreign relations strategies and agreements. Essentially, central entities, often monopolies, dictate most economic decisions.
The creative economy reports and puts attention and control of material and social well-being into aggregated local entities: households, streets, or a neighborhood. It exists in co-ops, urban farms, local production. Local enterprise. In rural communities, it means that farmers are connected. Cooperation thrives as a core function of rural communities.
A creative economy does have a place for competition, but competition is not a driver. It has more interest in sustainability than scale. In the quality of work more than its efficiency. It is more interested in restoration than accumulation, local circulation of dollars rather than profit maximization, spreading labor opportunities rather than increasing labor productivity, distributed rather than centralized control of production. Care for the soil.
An Economy Serving the Common Good
Among economists, the term “creative economy” increasingly refers to all economic activity that depends on a person’s individual creativity for its economic value. In this usage, the creative economy occurs wherever local individual and collective effort is the main source of value and the main source of a transaction. John Howkins developed the concept in 2001 to describe economic systems where value is based on novel imaginative qualities rather than central organizational control of the traditional resources of land, labor, and capital. It gives first priority to the question of how we can produce with each other what we were in the habit of seeking from government, institutions, and large global or national enterprises.
The most radical shift towards the creative economy begins with where we place our attention. With what we consider important news. Headline news reports on where we, together, are producing the care required for all that matters most to us. It lets self-interest be present but not as our organizing principle. The neighborhood or community sector –– not the government or private sector –– becomes central and defines our social relations.
Government becomes a convening agent and protects the rules and limits needed for communities to function. We always need institutions like we now have, but their attention shifts away from growing the private sector and growing their services; it shifts towards building community agency. Private enterprise with its market economy remains nearby, but it does not define who we are.
Luckily the creative economy already exists. It is all around us, waiting to be valued and made central to our way of seeing and speaking to and about ourselves. Tune into the next column for proof of concept, evidence, and things practical.
