Finding the Invisible Fist
Frontline community work can leave you feeling pretty battered about by problems beyond your control.
You’re working well with a vulnerable child, but they have to leave the area because of the housing shortage. You’re working well with a school, but they’re so cash-strapped that they’re firing teachers, so of course they can’t fund an external charity anymore. You know you’re saving someone money by preventing small issues blowing up into big problems, but why is it so hard to get anyone to pay for it?
When I left The Hackney Pirates in 2017, I was hungry to reflect on the root causes that meant that children needed extra support in the first place, and why it was such a slog to provide that support. There are lots of root causes, of course. But especially amidst the tumult of Brexit, I became particularly focused on the imbalance in democratic and economic power that different groups of citizens have.
Economic discussions are often wrapped in a haze of technical terms and self-assured-expertise that makes it hard for the un-inducted but deeply-affected to ask the right questions. I remember talking this through with a friend, wondering whether I needed to totally re-tool to really understand the forces that knocked my community around. His advice was fantastic: “There are only really two levels when it comes to economics - there’s level 1 which is just understanding the basic principles and lingo, and this is where most of the world is at. Or Level 2 is a PhD, and that’s not what you should spend your time doing”.
So I resolved to get to Level 1. I read. I watched. I was lucky to have the chance to do a mid-career Masters, and focused a portion of my time on economics. I went cross-eyed with supply-demand curves; I researched the UK’s 2010-onwards austerity policies; I trawled through government economic statements.
While I can think my way back into Solow’s growth model if I really have to, the most powerful outcome was giving me the vocab and ideas to spot when politicians or other commentators are presenting something as common-sense which is at best contested, or alternatively misleading, previously discredited, or just plain wrong. And it turns out that there’s plenty of each of those. Across all parts of the political spectrum, and among very smart people.
I began researching and contacting organisations that were using economics as a tool for change. This led me to a year’s work with the Balanced Economy Project on strategy and fundraising. Their simple but dazzingly powerful concern is that in every sector of the economy - from pharma to tech, from care homes to vet practices, the last 30-40 years have seen a dramatic consolidation of power into the hands of a small number of firms. Our economy has been fundamentally restructured to allow for a smaller and smaller number of mega-companies to call the shots, with hardly any mechanisms to oversee what they are doing or challenge their power. Most of us have little ability to even see the problem when competition policy is wrapped up in a technocratic bubble which obscures the core social and economic choices at the heart of any policy. Whether you want to get decent care for an elderly relative, or for your small business to have a fighting chance, or to see democratic control over social media giants’ involvement in elections, the underlying issue is that we need our regulators to have the desire and teeth to challenge unchecked monopoly power. This is actually something that left and right can agree on: hardly anyone actually thinks having a few companies run the whole economy is a good idea. It didn’t used to be that way, and it doesn’t need to stay that way.
Which brings me to my underlying passion - bringing the citizen back in. We can’t expect all citizens to become economics experts. But we don’t need them to be. We can - and must - experiment with the mechanisms that open up economic decision-making to everyone who is affected. If the justice system relies on citizen-power (i.e. juries), including for hugely technical issues, so can our economic systems. Alongside the explosion of enthusiasm for participatory democracy, we need more mechanisms to support participatory economics. Many ideas like participatory budgeting are already growing in popularity, but we can do much more: Citizen’s Assemblies on tough fiscal policy decisions; lay-panels to input into and scrutinise major economic decisions like mergers; citizen witnesses feeding into economic impact assessments. Keeping economic policy-making at arms’ length from the majority of citizens excludes the very experts who have an essential stake in how our economy is run – namely, all of us.
One of BEP’s really exciting ideas (floated alongside Citizens UK, and for now still on the drawing board) is for a project called Monopoly Town. Monopoly power is not exactly an issue which is in your average citizen’s top priority list. It feels distant, technical and disconnected from tangible daily problems that citizens face. But that’s the point. In the words of Lawrence Freedman: “The greatest power is that which achieves its effects without notice”*. While there’s vitally important policy work to be done amongst the technical competition community, there’s also an urgent need to bring the problem into plain view. Monopoly Town would connect community organising and storytelling to the issue of monopoly power. It would support groups of citizens to together identify the tangible effects of community power in their neighbourhoods, to bring those issues to life - and work on how they can take on that power. The jobs that aren’t there anymore, the high streets that are dying out, the dysfunctional care homes that are run out of offshore private equity outfits. These issues affect real lives in the most fundamental of ways - but we have to tell those stories if we’re going to create the social and political will for change.
If you’re just starting out at understanding how economics is driving the community issues you care about, there are lots of exciting organisations and projects to follow as well as the Balanced Economy Project. The Economic Change Unit do fantastic briefings to explain and monitor economic thinking about current social issues. The Finance Innovation Lab focus on building an alternative vision of our financial institutions. The Doughnut Economics Action Lab are working on practical experiments to put alternative economic ideas into practice across citizens, communities and governments. And there are many more trying to change the way economics is taught, thought about and put into practice. Wherever you are in your economics journey, don’t let any oozingly-confident self-proclaimed common sense-ers bamboozle you into thinking there aren’t alternatives.
If you’d like to consider how you can bring some citizen-power into your economics work, or some economics thinking into your citizen-work, do get in touch.
* Freedman, L; 2013; Strategy - A History; Oxford University Press; p.615