How “place” subverts two false narratives of the economy
Within our widening economic gap of rich and poor, there are two major voices that tend to clash, here’s how to avoid them both
Story 1: Get your act together
In one corner is the myth of the individual hero:
There are plenty of people out there who will tell you quite sincerely that the key to rising above the masses, the key to success, and the key to “making it” is by grabbing yourself up by the bootstraps, working hard, and eventually you’ll rise to the top. The trajectory of this story is that regardless of who you are and where you come from, economic success can be yours if you’ll just reach out and grab it. The key word here is agency. Individuals have agency and if you want to succeed, it’s up to you to make it happen. Of course, there are deep truths located within this myth, but assumes that at least in the United States we all start from an equal play field for success.
Story 2: Wait for Systemic Change
In the other corner is the myth of the institutional hero.
There are also plenty of folks who will look at the widening gap of incomes and claim: it’s up to the government to fix this situation. We are looking at a massive system that has its deck stacked for those who already have power and privilege. What’s needed is to change the system to equal the playing field. The chief actors in this drama are usually federally elected officials who are tasked with creating access, even if this comes via bureaucratic mandates from on high. Again, much truth resides here, and crucial, necessary work. But without taking into consideration personal agency, we are left with a tool that doesn’t actually work.
This of course begs a response. Are we always destined to oscillate between individuals and systems, between agency and access? Will our cultural future begin to look even more like Congress, who is so stuck in ideology that we are living with a historic low of 8% of the population that approves of their work?
We Need a New Story
The buffer between extreme individualism and bureaucracy is found in community, and more importantly local community. This is the case for economies as well. At the local level we can actually know and see and discern the individual agency of individuals and consequently discern if there are issues with access. We can do this at the local level because we can know them. The missing link between these entrenched polarities is that both lack meaningful relationship. Neighborhood economics doesn’t solve this issue, but it becomes a platform where it can be solved.
Likewise, it’s at the local level that we can see, in real life, and through actual circumstances how policy, especially federal policy, plays out in the nuanced and highly contextualized realities which obviously differ from neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city, and region to region. It’s in local relationship where we can see thing far more for what they really are, which is always more complex than any ideology. The difference is relationship, the difference is locality, ultimately the difference is community.
Neighborhood economics wants to peer into this growing possibility by inviting leading practitioners and thinkers to tell a different story that refuses to side with the false choice that we either pick agency or access, to not give into siding with either side with the individual or the system. To do this, we must build into the beginning what we hope to achieve at the end. Namely, growing relationships that have the capcacity to be locally responsive, but connected across places. Together let’s build a resilient and equitable economy that leads towards the flourishing of all of us, neighborhood by neighborhood, place by place.
