Some Notes and Thoughts on Community

While reviewing potential reference links for the February wrap up, I noticed a common theme regarding community which suggested a post of its own. Formal economic activity has been associated with global markets and nations for so long, that many possibilities for renewed economic dynamism in local communities have been neglected. Perhaps this lack of local economic definition, contributes to the fact that men in the U.S. who are out of work, also experience more difficulty in life than would otherwise be the case.

And in an interesting article for the Adam Smith Institute, Ananya Chowdhury highlighted the once stateless nation that was Medieval Iceland. Customary laws may have been part of what encouraged this decentralized society to combine cooperation and competition in their mutual efforts to get things done. Indeed, it could be said the only "King" in their society was the consumer! Among the references listed in "Vikings or Vagabonds?" for ASI, some readers may be particularly interested in Elinor Ostrom's "Governing the Commons."

Raghuram Rajan also has a much anticipated book about community coming out this spring ("The Third Pillar"), and Diane Coyle highlights his arguments for more power at local levels:

Rajan advocates devolution of power "from the international sphere to nations, and within nations to the regional to the community level." The Third Pillar needs to be reinvigorated. There needs to be more scope for people to fill gaps left by formal economic structures, to experiment with structures of political and economic governance, to create meaningful, non market work.

Nevertheless, I would stress that increasing levels of time scarcity have made it difficult for high skill providers to also pursue work which could be productively defined in non market ways. Why should it be "necessary" to task high skill individuals with this responsibility? Fortunately, in most respects, it isn't. But sadly, many imagine those who are not already gainfully employed (or lack college degrees), to lack skills or other abilities which could prove useful for others. Thus far, we lack the structural mechanisms which could meaningfully challenge this perception. Consequently, many unemployed or underemployed individuals end up with "excess" time on their hands, since too few actually welcome them to participate in ongoing voluntary forms of non market activity or workplace activity.

Ultimately it could prove helpful to define many aspects of voluntary time on formal economic terms, so as to bring more individuals back into normal settings who otherwise end up socially excluded - especially when others have few other means to gauge their trustworthiness. I remain convinced that more - not less - market definition is needed for time use potential, to begin filling missing gaps in local community organizational capacity.

One way to frame these missing gaps is via the macroeconomic result, of missing general equilibrium demand as a result of today's supply side requirements. Yet it's difficult to determine what time based services demand is actually missing in the economy, when job creation is mostly framed by the skills institutions seek from individuals, rather than what individuals would otherwise freely seek among themselves.

Given this limited demand setting, societies also up with an inability to coordinate time based product at a general equilibrium level. In other words, individuals lack the ability to personally negotiate their overall preferences, which not only reduces happiness (clearly), it negatively impacts the nature of supply and demand in time based services. Today's prosperous region approach to high skill time based services provision, means millions either end up experiencing excessive time scarcity or else insufficient time demand, more keenly than would otherwise be the case. Further, structural imbalances in time based product demand only make redistribution more difficult, because many assume those left behind would be incapable of negotiating on their own behalf. In all likelihood this is not the case.

Symmetric organization of mutual time priorities for time based product, could make it possible for the consumer to become "King" as noted in the Medieval Iceland article. After all, by combining both cooperation and competition at a time participation level, consumers would contribute to the nature of time based product in ways that make it simpler for producers to construct what others actively seek. Yet this process could be productively tempered by group efforts to particularly focus on mutual activity which supports intellectual challenges. The end result would mean broader market formation for time based services, and more participants would in all likelihood be happier with the results. With a little luck, local market based patterns for community dynamism, may become a more substantial part of social discourse in the near future.