Many variations on the story exist: there's a really neat piece of furniture (or two) just stashed and wasting away in a great uncle's barn or attic, and one or two of the grandkids would like to be able to take the piece, strip it down and make it beautiful again. Surely, uncle wouldn't mind, let's ask. No no comes back the answer, I've got some definite plans for that...Or, there's the determined shopper who doesn't have a spare inch of room left in the house and yet "keeps the economy humming" by going back for more, as in "shop till you drop".
Oddly enough these individuals are trying their best to remain dynamic or relevant in their own way, even if the results don't really make sense to anyone else - which occasionally makes observers want to pull their hair out. But in both circumstance, it helps to remember what represented economic dynamism - until recently - to these older folks in the first place: how people were able to interact with physical product was what mattered, whether the product held value in its (still unmet) potential as in the furniture piece, or value in its "unexpected" affordability (i.e. bargain), which is why it might still be considered a "treasure" long after it is actually needed for anything.
For this earlier version of capitalism (albeit the one we're still caught in), one's home turf ultimately became the primary staging area for much of what mattered in life, even if people in general weren't really able to show up on this particular stage all that often. In a sense, all that square footage served as a sort of museum, for those previous hours of production and dynamic activity in the factories themselves. Those efforts were finally symbolized in the prize which a fortunate consumer could turn to, as the remaining representative of their own economic participation.
In previous centuries, much of our experiential economic dynamism was tied up in physical product that represented these earlier circumstance. Even though our experiential realities are gradually moving towards the product of the mind, we don't yet know how to express that socially, politically, or monetarily...let alone locally. And in some important ways, our ideas of family unit are taking the hardest hit. In earlier capitalism, dynamism was loosed from the producers who held the definition of physical product tightly in their workshops. Today, we seek to loose the experiential definition of product from the knowledge workshops of our cities, and yet we've not even started the "heavy lifting" in this regard in health based terms, before product in other experiential realities even has a chance to flower.
In the meantime, family is expected to somehow carry on in the world (Get married! Have kids! Umm...job, living quarters?) as though it never experienced such a stab through the heart of economic dynamism in the first place. Just like the first decade of the 21st century, we're supposed to be able to consume and pay taxes. We're still trying to live as though nothing has changed, even if the flow of the monetary spigot was interrupted without so much as a question re...why has the loss in dynamism not been probed in understandable ways across disciplines? Why has no one tried to take apart the parts of the engine to see why the vehicle doesn't run? Today I sound like a bratty kid. Why indeed!
Some of what follows was written first (yesterday), so I hope that "patching" it with the above does not appear too arbitrary. Recently I have described families as value in use environments. While value in use skills sets are helpful in limited circumstance between family and friends, they should not be stretched to a point where everyone's patience understandably wears thin, something that has happened since the Great Recession. Consider the advantage that value in exchange provides by way of greater choice. The more economic choices we have in life, the easier it becomes to interact within our more personal environments in spite of the limitations they might suggest.
When familial relations include real economic choice instead of mostly expected sacrifices, everyone has a better chance of keeping their integrity, dignity and self respect. This principle also holds true for the arbitrary limitations of building structure, a holdover from the past which often forces family members to interact exclusively with one another under one roof. What everyone really needs is greater autonomy (smaller dwellings if necessary) alongside a much greater variety of regular societal interaction and options (than one's family), to so as to preserve one's sense of sanity. What's more, no one should have to be demeaned for such a basic and human need - problems come mostly when such separation impedes social and economic reciprocity.
Even though value in use skills sets have limitations in familial terms (i.e. your mom is really tired of that soup you love to prepare), there are still ways to create value in use skills arbitrage at community or local levels which approximate true economic choice, because of the greater number of individuals involved. What's more, it can be done so as to have the same positive effects of value in exchange which especially assists family relationships. The idea of monetary compensation for personal work at home matters for similar reasons, in that our primary choices of personal (as opposed to business related) work need to be our own, or we end up sacrificing our own identity otherwise. The minute we accept some form of economic compensation for the work we freely choose to maintain personal environment (if that were even societally possible), the idea of ultimate choice in our personal space is destroyed.
While our personal environment work choices often (fortuitously) line up with those of other family member preferences, they no longer carry the economic connotations they once did in many instances. Indeed, family law still reflects a time when expectations were far greater in that regard, as to such coordination being less about choice and more about necessity. In many ways, greater economic choice for people of all ages, as well as the "modern conveniences" of the 20th century, allowed each family member to pursue more individual paths for personal time. Indeed, if we were to draw a line for monetary compensation, how would anyone possible know where to actually place it? The expectations of every individual and household are unique and different.
Value in use services can be made to approximate free markets for value in exchange, by the recognition of choice as it becomes coordinated with other economic and social activities. That's an important distinguishing factor about services that are willingly sought by various parties in an open free market: no one needs to disentangle personal priorities or desires as they would in home environments, as all parties consciously agree to the definitive transaction. What's more, the experiential product that so many seek, has a chance to happen when local economies once again become real through skills capacity.
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