will rebalance the pillars at a level more beneficial to society and preserve the liberal market democracies many of us live in.
definitions
To avoid confusion later, let us get over the tedious but necessary issue of definitions quickly. Broadly speaking, the state in this book will refer to the political governance structure of a country, usually the federal government. In addition to the executive branch, the state will also include the legislature and the judiciary.
Markets will include all private economic structures facilitating production and exchange in the economy. The term will encompass the entire variety of markets, including the market for goods and services, the market for workers (the labor market), and the market for loans, stocks, and bonds (the capital or financial market). It will also include the main actors from the private sector, such as businesspeople and corporations.
According to the dictionary, a community “is a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.”2 This is the definition we will use, with the neighborhood (or the village, municipality, or small town) being the archetypal community in modern times, the manor in medieval times, and the tribe in ancient times. Importantly, we focus on communities whose members live in proximity—as contrasted with virtual communities or national religious denominations. We will view local government, such as the school board, the neighborhood council, or town mayor, as part of the community. A large country has layers of government between the federal government (part of the state) and the local government (part of the community). In general, we will treat these layers as part of the state. Finally, we will use the terms society, country, or nation interchangeably as the composite of the state, markets, communities, people, territory, and much else that compose political entities like China or the United States.
why the community still matters
Definitions done, let us get to substance. For early humans the tribe was their society—their state, markets, and community rolled into one. It was where all activities were conducted, including the rearing of children, the production and exchange of food and goods, and the succor of the ill and the elderly. The tribal chief or elders laid down the law and enforced it, and commanded the tribe’s warriors in defense of their lands. Over time, as we will see in Part I of the book, both markets and the state separated from the community. Trade with more distant communities through markets allowed everyone to specialize in what they were relatively good at, making everyone more prosperous. The state, aggregating the power and resources of the many communities within it, not only set common regulations for markets but also enforced the law within its political boundaries, even as it defended the realm against aggressors.
Markets and the state not only separated themselves from the community over time, they also steadily encroached on activities that strengthened bonds within the traditional community. Consider some functions the community no longer performs. In frontier communities, neighbors used to help deliver babies; today most women check into a hospital when they feel the onset of childbirth. They prefer the specialist’s expertise to their neighbor’s friendly but amateurish helping hand. The community used to pitch in to rebuild a household’s home if it caught fire; today the household collects its fire insurance payment and hires a professional builder. Indeed, given the building codes in most developed countries, it is unlikely that a home reconstructed by neighbors would be legal.
However, the community still plays a number of important roles in society. It anchors the individual in real human networks and gives them a sense of identity; our presence in the world is verified by our impact on people around us. By allowing us to participate in local governance structures such as parent-teacher associations, school boards, library boards, and neighborhood oversight committees, as well as local mayoral or ward elections, our community gives us a sense of self-determination, a sense of direct control over our lives, even while making local public services work better for us. Importantly, despite the existence of formal structures such as public schooling, a government safety net, and commercial insurance, the goodness of neighbors is still useful in filling in gaps. When a neighboring engineer tutors our son in mathematics in her spare time, or the neighborhood comes together in a recession to collect food and clothing for needy households, the community is helping out where formal structures are inadequate. Given the continuing importance of the community, healthy modern communities try to compensate for the encroachment of markets and the state with other activities that strengthen community ties, such as social gatherings and neighborhood associations.
Economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren attempt to quantify the economic impact of growing up in a better community.3 They examine the incomes of children whose parents moved from one neighborhood into another in the United States when the child was young. Specifically, consider neighborhood Better and neighborhood Worse. Correcting for parental income lets the average incomes of children of longtime residents when they become adults be one percentile higher in the national income distribution in neighborhood Better than it is in neighborhood Worse. Chetty and Hendren find that a child whose parents move from neighborhood Worse to Better will have an adult income that is, on average, 0.04 percentile points higher for every childhood year it spends in Better. In other words, if the child’s parents move when it is born and they stay till it is twenty, the child’s income as an adult will have made up 80 percent of the difference between the average incomes in the two neighborhoods.
Their study suggests that a child benefits enormously by moving to a community where children are more successful (at least as measured by their future income). Communities matter! Perhaps more than any outside influence other than the parents we are born to, the community we grow up in influences our economic prospects. Importantly, Chetty and Hendren’s finding applies for a single child moving—movement is not a recipe for the development of an entire poor community. Instead, the poor community has to find ways to develop in situ, while holding on to its best and brightest. It is a challenge we will address in the book.
There are other virtues to a healthy community. Local community government acts as a shield against the policies of the federal government, thus protecting minorities against a possible tyranny of the majority, and serving as a check on federal power. For example, sanctuary communities in the United States and Europe have resisted cooperating with national immigration authorities in identifying and deporting undocumented immigrants.
Although no country can function if every community picks and chooses the laws they will obey, we will see that some devolution of powers to the community can be beneficial, especially if there are large differences in opinion between communities so that centralized “one-size-fits-all” solutions do not work.
Furthermore, community-based movements against corruption and cronyism prevent the leviathan of the state from getting too comfortable with the behemoth of big business. Indeed, as we will see in the book, healthy communities are essential for sustaining vibrant market democracies. This is perhaps why authoritarian movements like fascism and communism try to replace community consciousness with nationalist or proletarian consciousness.
In sum, the proximate community is still relevant today, even in cosmopolitan cities where ties of kinship and ethnicity are limited, and even in individualistic societies like those of the United States and Western Europe. Once we understand why community matters, and that people who value staying in their community are not very mobile, it becomes clear that it is not enough for a country to experience strong economic growth—the professional economist’s favorite measure of economic performance. Since such people cannot abandon their community easily to move to work where growth occurs, they need economic growth in their own community. If we care about the community, we need to care about the geographic distribution of growth, and about “place-based” economic policies that affect that distribution.
What then is the source of today’s problems? In one word, imbalance! When the three pillars of society are appropriately balanced, society has the best chance of providing for the
