Wendy Cockcroft · @wendycockcroft
13th Apr 2015 from TwitLonger
Answer to your question on Middle-out 4. Can an economy be self-sustaining...
@spuncho 4. Can you think of an economy that would meet one or two of the three criteria you've laid out, but not all three? What would that look like? For example, could you have an economy that rewards work but is not self-sustaining or vice versa?
I can actually think of several. One economy that rewarded work but was not self-sustaining was in Detroit. Then the car manufacturers pulled out and... game over. Why? Because they had become so huge and so disconnected to the communities in which they employed people that when their bottom line began to suffer as a result of competition from foreign manufacturers, it didn't occur to them to do anything else but pull out. They were all about the money, not about being a part of Detroit. Centralisation is a big part of the story of economic failure. Companies become huge to compete with other economic behemoths. Result: power becomes centralised and they develop a corporate culture that excludes their workers. While unions got much of the blame for Detroit's demise you might find that the well-padded middle-managers bear their share of the blame. But being more affluent made them more mobile and they found it easier to adapt than the factory floor workers did.
At the moment, Alaska provides a basic income for its citizens, so therefore you can argue that it doesn't reward work, at least for the amount provided. This is self-sustaining till the oil runs out.
In indigenous communities where money is not used among the members of the community, everyone is expected to do their share of the work, e.g. help with the hunting or fishing or repairing huts. While there is no former reward system as such, barter is the usual way to do business, either in terms of goods or services. This is market forces at work in the raw; if you want that fish and your neighbour wants his roof repaired you'd better either bargain him down to helping you to do it, just get on with it, or get your own fish. So while it's possible to distort the market via subsidies or artificial constraints, there is no community I know of in which they are absent. So what I'm saying is, communities' economies tend to do better when their members are engaged in some economic activity whether this involves the exchange of money for goods and services or not.