An economics of value beyond wealth
Examining the relationship between wealth, self-esteem, and community value might help us unlock new paths to transforming our economy and reclaiming our civic life.
In response to my last essay on the way forward after this election cycle, one of my subscribers (h/t to
for the feedback) suggested that given the dysfunctional state of our economy and civic life that focusing on community and bridging felt fantastical and/or privileged. And I wholeheartedly agree that we must evolve beyond neolibealism, not just because it is a rampant engine of inequality and exploitation, but also expressly because it undermines that fabric of community in ways that make reforming anything more difficult. I focused first on community and civic life because without those things, reform and transformation seem unlikely if not outright impossible in a democracy. But reforming and ultimately redesigning our economy from its growth-at-all-costs status quo may be the work that helps us reclaim our civic life at the same time.One of the most pernicious failures of neoliberalism is its misdistribution of recognition, respect, and esteem. Maximizing economic value in aggregate as defined as the most efficient fulfillment of people's consumer preferences not only explodes wealth inequality and devalues production and the pride of creation, it consistently and dramatically devalues our civic and social contributions to society and to each other in ways that undermine civic and life and erode people’s sense of self, value, and esteem. Combined with the consistent lie of trickle-down wealth policies, our economy is designed to produce both the wealth and esteem inequalities that pervade our current society. It is not broken: it is working exactly as it is meant to for the few it is meant to benefit — but it can be redesigned.
In his 2021 Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel focuses on the long-term economic consequences of inequality and stratification that results from neoliberal failures at meritocracy, but this erosion also contributes to the consistent disengagement from civic life we see in American politics. The consistent experience of being disregarded and undervalued helps explains how many communities vote against their so-called economic self-interest so readily because they value more than wealth and refuse to allow their value to society to be measured only in dollar units. They may be voting against one form of self-interest but are voting for another. Markets and market-based thinking is often appealingly simple but is always insufficient to understanding the complexity of human life and the interdependence of human community.
As the Left and the Democrats reckon with the reasons (plural) for and consequences (plural) of the 2024 elections, we need to reengage a broader conversation about the economics of effort and value over the narrower ideas of work and wage. This conversation will tap into the foundations of work by a series of social capital theorists and sociological political scientist types going all the way back to L.J. Hanifan in 1912 and then Jane Jacobs in the 1960’s up through Robert Putnam and his seminal Bowling Alone in 2000 that has sought to study and quantify the effects of social capital on everything from innovation to resilience. Weaving these concept directly into our our economic models and defining economics in a broader civic context (mutual aid, caretaking, parenting, and civic volunteerism) rather than narrow consumerist terms might allow us to better account for the value of our contributions to community as valid sources of esteem and respect and social standing and to value our productivity in terms not accounted for by GDP. It also encourages us to expand our notion of work to efforts beyond market consumerism and allows us to see social and civic contributions on par with other forms of wage work rather than merely as activities to engage with only in our personal time once the market is done consuming us as inputs of labor to generate more consumer goods. Seeing our contributions as producers of both things and civic/social services with equal weight changes the terms of value we use to determine both economic value and community value, respect, and esteem. This expansion of our aggregate understanding of value also invites an expansion of our personal understanding of success and achievement that might enable us to embrace the distinction between calling and career in more genuine and tangible ways.
This kind of realignment of value also allows us to reconcile the social hierarchy of economics with the wealth inequality of neoliberalism in a way that reorients our assessment of value toward contribution regardless of market value in wages and reset our scale of value toward moral and civic productivity first and wealth and wage second. People will continue to care about money because we still need to buy food and shelter and the like, but decoupling (or more weakly coupling or even just conscious additive acknowledgment of) esteem and value from affordability reduces the moral and social opprobrium connected to wealth and to poverty and feeds people’s sense of esteem and value in more genuine and accurate ways than a pure labor market cannot (and will not). If our economic policies follow from and focus on civic value, care, and community in these broader ways by elevating wages on pace with growth, getting more people into a single economic curve with the divergent wealthiest and participating in the economic value of the current wealth streams through full participation compensation plans and cooperative equity structures, getting enterprises into single modes of operation through something like a modern Glass-Steagall framework that applies to all industries where operating on multiple sides of a market disadvantage people and society including banking but also information and data, and taxing wealth and work in fair and consistent ways, then we may finally be on a path to a more humane economy.
There is a distinct chicken-egg quality to the challenge of where to begin. Can we realign our civic life before reforming our economy? Do we need to win more institutional power, make the necessary systems reforms, and then the reclamation work of our small ”d” democratic culture will unfold organically as a vibrant, emergent phenomenon? Ultimately, I think the answer is likely to be yet another both-and: reform what we can where we can and consciously and consistently reinvest in reweaving our social fabric. For one, I'm not sure we can afford to wait on either. Second, winning in a system of badly immoral and unequal incentives has a cost — I am reminded of two barnyard metaphors: hard to lie down with dogs and not get fleas and never wrestle a pig, you both get covered in shit and the pig likes it. Systemic reforms may feel out of reach in this moment and frankly so might the bridging and community work our society needs, but both are needed and both must be done by those safe enough in our current systems to try.
As long as work and survival are tightly coupled, we cannot ignore wealth and wage inequalities but perhaps a stronger commitment to an economics that includes civic and social value — either by compensating more and different contributions or by expanding the units we use to measure economic value beyond monetary concepts — can reorient us toward a more comprehensive, more accurate, more balanced view of our shared interdependence and acknowledgement of the efforts that go into making our communities work that are disregarded by markets and leave too many feeling disregarded as human beings. Broadening our conceptions of value also invites us to consider economic frameworks that prioritize equilibrium over growth and tie our understanding of economic health more tightly to the lives everyday experiences of more of our neighbors making it more likely that we respond to crises of affordability with plans to help than with economics lectures on inflation. It also makes us more capable of seeing the creative value of diversity and broadening our cultural valuation of new and different perspectives to include their strategic and economic power as well. And in this way we can build bridges between populist conversations at the core of the working class and of the caretaker and creative communities that have often been separated (and othered and pitted against each other) in the more traditional left-right spectrum of America politics.