Going Local

Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age

Michael Shuman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136782329
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría política

National drug chains squeeze local pharmacies out of business, while corporate downsizing ships jobs overseas. All across America, communities large and small are losing control of their economies to outside interests. Going Local shows how some cities and towns are fighting back. Refusing to be overcome by Wal-Marts and layoffs, they are taking over abandoned factories, switching to local produce and manufactured goods, and pushing banks to loan money to local citizens. Shuman details how dozens of communities are recapturing their own economies with these new strategies, investing not in outsiders but in locally owned businesses.

Place Matters1

Ask your family, friends, and neighbors what matters most to them, and you're likely to hear words like love, security, spirituality, beauty, good health, even fun. Americans wax eloquent about their children and grandchildren having a decent education, safe neighborhoods, humane values. They reflect on the importance of their church or synagogue, their favorite sports teams or television show, or their latest political cause. Coloradans brag about the snow-capped Rockies, Midwesterners about the muddy Mississippi River, and Californians about the breathtaking coastline. Even the most business-minded mention families and passions before they turn to shopping, mortgages, wages, and material possessions that are the preoccupation of economists.

Our deepest yearnings are linked to a sense of place. We care especially about our neighbors, our community institutions, and our ecological heritage. Even post-modern nomads who crisscross the globe for pleasure or profit carry loyalty to somewhere. Why else do you get excited when you're driving down a highway, a thousand miles from home, and see a car with your state's license plate or with your university's name prominently displayed on the back windshield? Why, when you're in a foreign airport and discover that the person standing next to you grew up in your hometown, is there an odd sense of connection, familiarity, and comfort with someone who is otherwise a total stranger? Our politicians, keenly aware of this phenomenon, declare their loyalty to place at every opportunity. (In the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections, Bill Clinton grew misty-eyed whenever he spoke of his hometown, “a place called Hope.”)

Between 1990 and 1991, pollster Richard Harwood conducted focus groups for the Kettering Foundation in 10 cities across America. The topic was “Citizens and Politics.” Participants expressed deep cynicism about national political discourse, and it was clear that both a cause and an effect of this trend was the collapse of community. According to Harwood's published report:

It is no secret today that citizens feel a loss of community; and many citizens remarked that this loss undermined people's desire to participate in politics. Consider these comments by a Richmond woman: “We no longer have neighbors. You say ‘hello’ but you don't really know them. We lost that togetherness to share and reach out. We don't live like people should in America.” And a Los Angeles man, who said, “We lead such factious lives—our work, our homes—[and] technology makes it all so impersonal.” A Philadelphia man observed, “I know my neighbors, but I don't know the people on the next street.” Now . . . neighbors change regularly, people do not answer their doors after dark, citizens increasingly take less of an interest in each other and in each other's concerns.¹

Politicians and political organizers across the ideological spectrum decry the loss of community. During the 1996 presidential campaign, both Bill Clinton and Bob Dole were for reviving communities. Conservative moralist Bill Bennett regularly preaches the importance of community as fervently as does progressive moralist Reverend Jesse Jackson. The word “community” has become such a familiar mantra, recited by the advocates of such radically different agendas, that it's worth pausing for a moment to ask what it really means.

Some people use the term to refer to a social network, such as the Catholic community or the business community. But most Americans also mean a specific place—one where they have deep attachments to the people, culture, aesthetics, and nature. The term will be used this way throughout this book. A community is a geographically contiguous area with political and legal power that is closest to its own citizens. The concept applies to municipalities of all sizes, including big cities, suburban towns, and rural villages. But even if Americans can agree on what community is, and how much it's missing from their lives, they have no common view on how to restore it.

BAD PEOPLE AND BAD CIVICS

One popular view is that communities have broken down, not for economic reasons, but for social reasons. Prominent conservative thinkers such as Charles Murray, Norman Podhoretz, and Thomas Sowell put the blame on the proliferation of people with bad habits: sixties hippies, women's libbers, gays and lesbians, immigrants, and—of course—the poor. These groups, the argument goes, have lost the family structures, religious values, and basic work ethic necessary for a community to thrive. Another group of influential intellectuals with more progressive leanings, who call themselves communitarians, blame modern liberalism for overemphasizing individual liberties at the expense of communitarian values. The group, which includes Benjamin Barber, Robert Bellah, William Galston, Mary Ann Glendon, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Roberto Unger,² explores the implications of communitarian-ism in policy areas like crime, education, affirmative action, and welfare, in a quarterly journal called The Responsive Community.

The conservative position is nicely summarized by Joe Klein, the New York magazine columnist and confessed author of the novel Primary Colors, who argues that “businesses began to flee the inner cities in the early 1970s—along with many of the remaining middle-class residents, black and white—as a consequence of higher crime, a declining pool of educated or disciplined workers and higher taxes (which were themselves caused by the increased cost of dealing with all these disasters).”³ The real causes of community decline, Klein believes, are laziness, promiscuity, stupidity, and antisocial behavior. “The ‘truly disadvantaged,’” he writes, “represent the demographic sliver that is not ready, willing or able [to work]. . . . [T]heir behavior—their social and educational limitations, the psychological and cultural signals that they send prospective employers— is what keeps them out of the workforce.”⁴

Blaming the breakdown of community on the bad work habits of the underclass, however, overlooks one contradictory piece of evidence: Most American communities (and not just inner cities) are struggling today. Footloose corporations are deserting urban, suburban, and rural areas alike to relocate in the maquiladoras of Mexico or the sweatshops of Malaysia. Most Americans, and not just the poor in the ghetto, are facing lives characterized by growing economic insecurity. Real wages have been going down since 1973; four out of five American workers have seen their wallets shrink.⁵ Corporate pensions are increasingly being swallowed up in mergers and acquisitions. And social-security reform, if it occurs, is as likely to improve the lot of retirees as welfare reform did for the estimated one million children about to be thrown into poverty.

Yes, we need better education; we need better crime control; we need healthier families; we need a stronger work ethic. But without a thriving local economy, none of these goals is possible. Without a strong tax base, a community cannot possibly hire decent teachers, social workers, or police. Without decent incomes, even families committed to good parenting must struggle as both spouses work overtime to pay the bills. Without the availability of decent-paying jobs, even motivated workers earning a minimum wage can be destitute. (Today's minimum wage, despite its recent increase, is one-fifth smaller than it was in the late 1960s, once inflation is factored out.⁶)

The first communitarians acknowledged the central role of economic change. In 1984, Michael Sandel of Harvard University expressed concern “about the concentration of power in both the corporate economy and the bureaucratic state, and the erosion of those intermediate forms of community that have at times sustained a more vital public life.”⁷ He recommended, among other things, that states committed to communitarian values should “enact laws regulating plant closings, to protect their communities from the disruptive effects of capital mobility and sudden industrial change.”⁸ Yet, in the decade since, communitarian writers have offered remarkably little in the way of an economic program.

The bible of the communitarian movement has become The Spirit of Community, written by George Washington University professor Amitai Etzioni, who argues that American communities have been decimated by the steady expansion of personal rights without concomitant social responsibilities.⁹ The book contains myriad prescriptions for strengthening families, schools, and civic institutions, and deciding the proper level of government intervention to fight crime, AIDS, and “hate speech,” but the attentive reader strains to find even a sentence or two about the responsibilities and betrayals of globe-trotting business. The same can be said about the articles published in The Responsive Community over the past five years. Fewer than a half-dozen even remotely touch on economics, and even these tend to focus on economic incentives for getting the poor off welfare, increasing volunteerism and voting-participation rates, and otherwise inducing higher moral standards in wayward community residents.

The scholar with communitarian inclinations who has probably attracted the widest popular audience is Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam. His 1993 book, Making Democracy Work, examined 20 regional governments in Italy, and concluded that the administrations with the highest levels of civic engagement were most successful at “creating innovative day care programs and job-training centers, promoting investment and economic development, pioneering environmental standards and family clinics.”¹⁰ Among the best indicators of civic engagement were “voter turnout, newspaper readership, membership in choral societies and literary circles, Lions Clubs, and soccer clubs.”¹¹ Social networks within churches, cooperatives, neighborhood associations, and guilds provided “organized reciprocity and civic solidarity.”¹² And these provided a foundation for economic development:

These communities did not become civic simply because they were rich. The historical record strongly suggests precisely the opposite: They have become rich because they were civic. The social capital embodied in norms and networks of civic engagement seems to be a precondition for economic development, as well as for effective government. Development economists take note: Civics matter.¹³

Putnam popularized his findings in the United States in an article in The Journal of Democracy cleverly entitled “Bowling Alone.”¹⁴ (Other versions subsequently appeared in The Responsive Community and elsewhere.)¹⁵ Between 1980 and 1993, he noted, even as the number of Americans bowling increased, participation in league bowling declined by 40 percent. “The broader significance,” he wrote, “lies in the social interaction and even occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza the solo bowlers forgo.”¹⁶ Putnam gave other examples of weakening civic ties in the country. Since 1973, one-third fewer Americans report attending a school board or city council meeting over the course of the year. There also is evidence of decreasing attendance of church, membership in labor unions, or participation in Parent-Teacher Associations.

Critics of Putnam's work cite other data that suggest that civic participation may be holding steady, or perhaps even increasing. Nicholas Lemann notes the spectacular growth of soccer leagues, restaurants, small businesses, charitable contributions, and advocacy groups like the American Association of Retired People.¹⁷ Katha Pollitt, a columnist in The Nation, calls Putnam's view of civic life “remarkably, well, square”:

I've been a woman all my life, but I've never heard of the Federation of Women's Clubs. And what politically minded female, in 1996, would join the bland and matronly League of Women Voters, when she could volunteer with Planned Parenthood or NOW or Concerned Women of America, and shape the debate instead of merely keeping it polite? It's probably going too far to argue that the decline of the Boy Scouts is directly related to its barring of gay and nonbelieving lads. But should it really surprise us that such a stodgy organization has a hard time finding volunteers?¹⁸

Perhaps the deepest flaw in Putnam's work—and in the communitarian approach in general—is the assertion (little more) that civics trumps economics. Strong civic ties may create the foundation for a strong local economy, as they did in northern Italy, but they cannot save a dying community. What can civic ties possibly accomplish if residents of a community have declining incomes and no jobs? One reason adults no longer bowl in family-style leagues or participate in PTAs is that both parents now have to work to make ends meet. They come home, cook dinner, put the kids to bed, and collapse from exhaustion. As Washington pundit Sam Smith observes, “In a corporatist world there is no time for bowling, period. Someone else would be glad to take your job if you really prefer ten pins to working late.”¹⁹

Civic ties are undoubtedly valuable for economic development. But without a viable economic base, even a strong civil society faces only three options: migrate, rebel, or collapse. To focus on political reform, social policy, and civic culture, while giving only minor lip service to economic policy, puts cause and effect backwards. Communitarians, like their conservative counterparts, effectively distract attention from the real roots of the collapse of community, and from the real solutions.

THE SCIENCE OF EFFICIENCY

Communities cannot simply tinker with personal and civic morality and expect a dying local economy to bounce back to life. But the advice offered by mainstream economists also is of limited use. As we saw in the Introduction, economics, like ancient religions, now requires periodic public sacrifice to appease the gods of prosperity. Onto the altar of steady growth must be tossed one out of twenty workers to achieve a “natural” rate of unemployment and low inflation. Environmental tribute must be paid in the form of endangered species, sacred canyons, the stratospheric ozone layer, clean air and water, whatever it takes to keep the economy growing. The willingness of economists to write off certain workers and ecological assets suggests the low value they assign to community.

Economics was originally touted as a scientific tool to help a society reach the goals it really cares about. Paul A. Samuelson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been writing the most widely used introductory text on economics since 1948. The twelfth edition, published in 1985 and cowritten by William D. Nordhaus of Yale University, defines economics as “the study of how people and society choose to employ scarce resources that could have alternative uses in order to produce various commodities and to distribute them for consumption, now or in the future, among various persons and groups in society.”²⁰

Put another way, economics is the science of efficiency—the efficiency of consumption, production, and distribution. Economics cannot tell us which natural resources to consume and which to conserve; but it can tell us, once these decisions have been made, how to consume and conserve efficiently. It cannot tell us which commodities are socially useful and which are dangerous, addictive, or unimportant; but it can tell us how to make goods we choose to manufacture in the least costly way. It cannot tell us what constitutes a fair distribution of commodities; but it can pinpoint how best to achieve a socially desirable goal of equity. Applied creatively with democratic processes that set society's goals for consumption, production, and distribution, economics can be an indispensable tool for strengthening communities.

But an ambitious reader of the classics of the profession will be stunned to discover that community is barely mentioned at all. Adam Smith focused on the Wealth of Nations, not the wealth of communities. So did the other influential early writers on economics and political economy, like Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and David Ri...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• More Praise for Going Local
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. PLACE MATTERS
• 2. NEEDS-DRIVEN INDUSTRIES
• 3. COMMUNITY CORPORATIONS
• 4. FINANCING THE FUTURE
• 5. PRO-COMMUNITY LOCAL GOVERNANCE
• 6. BRINGING HOME POWER, NOT BACON
• 7. MAKING HISTORY
• Appendix: Around the World Economy in 80 Ways
• Notes
• Index