A few weeks ago, I was on a zoom call with some of the big brains of the economic change movement. People who have many books to their names, whose words are frequently quoted as gospel by many of us pushing for economic change, and whose work has contributed to the outline of visions for a better world.
So my imposter syndrome was rife, and when one of them declared that “people” (not sure who exactly was being called out) needed to adopt “new values”, I shifted in my chair and downed a few more sips of coffee.
This claim is something I hear stated fairly regularly. But it is something I strongly disagree with.
Still, I was nervous in challenging him and pathetically, I took the easy way out and typed a note in the zoom chat to the effect that: “perhaps, it is not so much the case that people need new values, but more a case that, deep down, most people have beautifully generous and cooperative values, but what has happened is that an economic system has been built that has obscured, overwhelmed, and dragged people away from these values.”
It is a case of systems working against each other: on the one hand our dominant economic systems, and on the other hand, our personal systems of values (linked of course, to our needs and human nature).
On the one hand, people’s generous, socially minded and cooperative values are evident in our responses to individual struggles. They are documented in the findings of multiple surveys that report that people are supportive of steps to reduce inequality and to protect the environment. Poll after poll of public opinion, and initiatives such as the mammoth My World survey that preceded the Sustainable Development Goals, indicate that people, around the world, want the world to be one where health and the planet are elevated above goals such as economic growth. These polls are underscored by rich participatory deliberations such as Citizens Assemblies. These exercises show that when people are given a chance to sit down with others and reflect about what really matters to them, the priorities they identify are remarkably similar, despite very different contexts. Moreover, folks tend towards intrinsic goals rather than extrinsic ones (see here for a collection of research and here, reinforced by the findings of psychologists, sociologists, neuroscientists, and scholars in development and human need).
This is not to suggest that all communities are homogenous, as of course there are context specific differences and emphasis. But there are clear core common themes in what people identify as important to them: having enough, feeling you have a purpose, the importance of relationships, and dignity. These goals are often supported by and contribute to the way we provide for each other in our homes, in our communities, and via many of our state institutions and public service provision.
So what happens to distort this grounded communality and commonality?
Let’s look at how various elements of the economy pull people away from these values and undermine their influence, like a heavy cloak laying across these values, masking and undermining them. Before doing so, it is worth remembering that the economy is more than just markets and businesses and paid jobs. A broader view of the economy sees it as how a society provides for each other. As British economist Kate Raworth points out, this provisioning happens in various ways, each motivated by different mechanisms. So in the market it tends to be via prices that, theoretically at least, reflect supply and demand. The state provides for people, often (but of course not always) on the basis of need and rights. In communities (the commons), people provide for each other collectively and do so in pursuit of shared aims, and in households, people are provided for on the basis of love and care.
It is the first of these, the market, arguably the realm most commonly associated with ‘the economy’, where community-minded, caring, and modest priorities people otherwise gravitate to, are most obviously undermined. For example:
- If advertising and algorithms drive home messages that your value and success is reflected in what you own, earn and consume, then this milieu is incredibly hard to step away from without losing status, friends, and sense of esteem.
- If economic inequalities spur a sense that we need to compete with each other in a zero sum game, then such competition will be what people are compelled to engage in.
- If our collective institutions do not provide tangible and reliable economic security and public services, then those who can afford to will privatise these needs via insurance, private health care, private schools, personal cars, and so on.
- When people are pushed into financial insecurity because they aren’t paid enough or can’t get sufficient hours, or because the cost of their housing has massively outpaced their incomes, then acting out of a sense of scarcity is perhaps more likely.
- If people are treated as ‘just-in-time’ inventory, akin to simply another factor of production, with no control over their work or their hours, then they will be time poor and face insecurity which can compel holding onto what is known and knowable.
So perhaps it is no surprise that so many people are exhausted: reporting burnout at work, noting a sense of despair at the state of the world, and feeling they have little or no capacity to influence any of it. People are experiencing the stress of these two systems working against each other and are caught in the middle. And in turn, perhaps it is no surprise that they are reaching for coping mechanisms: at the metaphorical pill box (seen in the numbers turning to drugs and alcohol and so on), and at the ballot box…?
There is a risk that in suggesting that people need to change their values, attention is diverted away from the economic systems that are doing harm to people. This is yet another instance of individualisation; when in fact it is those economic systems which are kicking against the best of people’s values and traits. It is an example of putting the onus on individuals, rather than working to transform the system that is dividing communities and creating precarious lives.
What could be a better approach? Leading with compassion for people: recognising and understanding what pushes them in a certain direction and addressing that, not them. In this way, compassion could be the beginning of realigning the economic system with people’s innate, but perhaps displaced, systems of values.
Read more thought pieces from Katherine Trebeck…Image credit: Suwaree Tangbovornpichet via Getty Images
