Economic Independence vs. the Alternatives

John Barrymore as Sherlock Holmes. Wikimedia Commons.

In my last essay I tried to describe a plausible and attractive vision of the future, one shaped by a movement toward “economic independence.” The basic idea is to make it possible for families, neighborhoods, and communities to reassume some responsibilities now outsourced to the market and the state, giving them independent control over important aspects of their lives and revitalizing their personal relationships by imbuing them with practical functions. In sum, more independence from the impersonal system made possible by greater interdependence at the face-to-face level.

As I’m very uncomfortably aware, this isn’t an idea that’s already in circulation — at least not as an overall program of social reform. The raw materials for it are lying at hand, but nobody has yet assembled them into a coherent whole. Making matters more challenging, ideas that are in circulation and that bear some resemblance to mine — namely, by calling for a greater emphasis on the small scale and the local — come from a worldview totally alien to my own and aim for a future that I reject as both dismally limited and utterly impracticable.

I know, therefore, that there is great scope for confusion here, and that I have a heavy burden to meet to convince readers that I’m onto something worth pursuing. So in this essay, I’m going to try to bring the idea of economic independence into clearer focus by contrasting it with other, better known alternatives.

Let me start with the ideas that at least superficially resemble my own: the longstanding yearning for a return to the organic simplicity of the local and small-scale. In the 1960s and 70s, this yearning manifested itself in a wave of utopianism and social experimentation. In the realm of ideas, we got books like Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture, Charles Reich’s The Greening of America, and E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. On the ground, we got the hippie movement, a wider backlash against both commercialism and bureaucracy, and a burst of efforts to create new alternatives in the form of co-ops, communes, and other intentional communities.

The quest to build a sustainable counterculture with radical alternative institutions ended in complete failure. Almost all the communes dissolved, and starry-eyed hopes for an Aquarian millennium gave way to some combination of bitter disillusionment and rueful embarrassment. What remained, though, was the environmental movement, with its pronounced preference for apocalyptic over millennial thinking; the yearning for smaller-scale living made its home there as part of the larger radical green critique of capitalism. These days “small is beautiful” thinking is expressing itself most visibly in the “degrowth” movement, which positions itself as the answer to capitalism’s alleged environmental unsustainability as well as its alienating agonistic materialism.

Here is the best way, I think, to understand the relationship between my ideas and these: my idea of economic independence differs from traditional “small is beautiful” thinking in exactly the same way that the ecomodernist vision of reconciling technology with the natural world that I outlined in this essay differs from the traditional environmental movement.

As I’ve argued previously, rising to the challenge of the permanent problem and reaching the next level of social development requires that we address two conflicts created by industrialization and the rise of material plenty: first, the conflict between our technological dynamism and the wellbeing of the natural world; and second, the conflict between the liberating individualism of modernity and our nature as social animals.

In both cases, I see an important and serious problem, and that distinguishes me from small-c conservatives who are comfortable with the status quo. With respect to the environment, we’re all dependent today on the fossil fuel/factory farming economy, and that leads many of us to minimize the harms this economy is causing and the risks of future calamity it is stoking. I was once in that boat, but now I stand with mainstream environmentalists in recognizing that a big problem exists. Unlike the dominant, anti-Promethean strain of environmentalism, however, I don’t see this problem as an indictment of capitalism, or of humanity, and I don’t think that the solution lies in retreat — in settling for less and reverting to older and simpler ways of doing things. Rather, I see this as essentially a technological problem, and the solution to the problem of dirty technology is clean technology. Recognizing the reality of serious environmental harms doesn’t lead me to give up on progress; it shows me the direction that progress should take.

Likewise, along with localists and “small is beautiful” advocates, I see that the gigantism and impersonality of the contemporary capitalist system imposes serious strains on our wellbeing: there is a strong tendency toward atomization that leaves people disconnected from the vital personal relationships that are at the heart of human flourishing. While people in the elite enjoy compensations for these strains that allow them good opportunities to enjoy fulfilling lives, everybody else is exposed to the full brunt of the pressure — and the result is serious social disintegration as ties to work, family, church, and community unravel. Here again, though, I don’t see this problem as a reflection of capitalism’s essential inhumanity, and I don’t think that the solution lies in retreat. Instead, we need to keep moving forward: we need to marshal capitalism’s capacity for technological and social innovation to develop new social arrangements that ease the strains of dependence on the impersonal system by supporting strong, functional face-to-face relationships.

Let me turn now to comparing the idea of an economic independence movement with other, more widely known proposals to address the new class divide — what I call capitalism’s crisis of inclusion. I’ve written previously about two of these reform ideas — wage subsidies and a universal basic income. Before getting to those, though, I’ll start off by looking at another competing proposal that I didn’t discuss in that earlier essay: a jobs guarantee.

The basic idea, hearkening back to the Depression-era Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, is for government to offer a job at a set wage to anybody willing to take one. Participation in such a program would presumably fluctuate with the ups and downs in private unemployment, but the program’s open offer would act to set an effective national floor for wages and benefits. In the United States, interest in the idea has warmed up in recent years, thanks in part to support from Bernie Sanders. Sanders has backed a plan to guarantee jobs offering $15 an hour plus benefits in three basic areas: environment, community service, and child and elder care. Senator Cory Booker followed up in 2019 by introducing legislation to fund job guarantee pilot programs in 15 different localities.

Proposals along these lines are, I’m afraid, completely unadministrable. Do you really think a quality work environment can be constructed when there are no job qualifications and nobody can be fired? Do you really think a quality work environment can be maintained when a recession hits and millions of new workers stream into the program? There has to be supervision and leadership for the program: how can that be expanded and contracted in line with macroeconomic conditions? Put aside the huge financial outlays involved, as well as serious possible disruption to private labor markets in particular localities: I just don’t see any possibility of creating quality employment for people with no job requirements, no accountability, and no control over how many workers there are. As far as helping ordinary workers to find dignity and purpose, luring them into empty make-work is surely worse than just giving them a check.

That said, I do think that there are real possibilities in the idea of expanded public sector employment, and that the WPA and CCC from the 1930s offer interesting models. I can imagine a 21st century domestic service corps that is organized as a kind of unarmed branch of the military, with an officer corps and enlisted members and various ranks within each, dedicated to serving their country by providing important public goods like disaster relief, conservation projects, and remediation of urban blighted areas. Such a service corps could also be tasked with administering a program of national service by young people. Expanding national service in this way could meaningfully bolster state capacity while providing important and useful work and valuable skills to millions — along with the self-respect and sense of purpose that come with doing important and useful work. As an incremental reform within our existing system, the idea of expanded national service has real merit and deserves serious consideration.

Let’s turn next to wage subsidies, which I’ve already discussed as a possible path to a more inclusive capitalism. I believe that, in the short term at least, it offers a genuine palliative, but that’s as far as it goes. And the longer a system of wage subsidies remains in place, the greater its defects become.

Wage subsidies provide higher pay, and possibly higher status associated with that, and these are genuine benefits. Beyond that, they encourage employment by reducing labor costs for employers. In the present context, with declining work commitment outside the elite part of a larger pattern of social disintegration, wage subsidies push against that disintegration by strengthening people’s connections to the large society around them.

But the short-term advantages of wage subsidies also constitute their long-term limitations. A low-productivity, low-autonomy job with no security or connection to a career track is certainly made more bearable by improving its pay, but it’s still a low-productivity, low-autonomy job with no security or career track. The forces of social disintegration that bear down on people in these positions will be attenuated somewhat by higher wages, but only modestly. Meanwhile, a system of wage subsidies incentivizes employers to create and maintain more of these positions, thus freezing our society into indefinite dependence on large numbers of crummy, low-value jobs. It’s like historical preservation, but applied to the labor market at a time when it is incapable of providing a rewarding work experience or upward mobility to most of its participants.

Wage subsidies would thus operate in a similar fashion to price supports for agriculture, which boost farm incomes and ensure that we have more farmers, and more agricultural output, than would otherwise be the case. Although the fact is that most ag subsidies are hoovered up by large-scale agribusiness, the durability of their political appeal rests on the widely shared sense that family farms support a way of life that is worth preserving. The means are badly flawed, but at least the ends make a certain kind of sociological sense. But what sense is there in preserving in amber our current occupational structure? No one can think that this is a way of life worth defending and maintaining, so acting to do so amounts to a grim declaration of defeat: we simply can’t think of any better way to occupy people as they play out their lives.

A universal basic income, by contrast, would work to reduce dependence on the labor market. The idea is to lift up ordinary people with extra resources that give them some measure of financial independence and existential security; the point isn’t to substitute entirely for paid work, but to provide an income floor that gives people greater choice about when and where to work for pay. These goals are quite similar to those that an economic independence movement would seek to achieve.

Depending on its terms, a UBI could offer anything from a modest boost to a transformational transfer of resources. But no matter how big the check, it’s still just a check. A UBI would treat the symptoms of ordinary workers’ reduced social significance, but it can’t do anything about the underlying causes. A movement for economic independence, by contrast, aims right at the root of the problem. Within the capitalist system, ordinary workers’ limited ability to contribute to the system consigns them to marginalization and low status; the solution then is to provide them the resources and capabilities to take care of their own basic needs, giving them true independence and real status as valued contributors to their own small community.

A UBI would give people additional financial resources, but nothing in the way of the skills or social capital that are needed to make good use of the increased options provided. Workers in the bottom half of the labor market tend to be undersupplied with the talents, personality traits, and social networks that are needed to thrive in the contemporary world. Getting a check every month would give many people resources to upgrade their condition, but in too many cases it would simply make being stuck on the margins of life somewhat easier and thus dull incentives for self-improvement. An economic independence movement, by contrast, would expand people’s productive skills directly and situate them in productive personal relationships; this human and social capital would not only provide resources for the equivalent of a basic income, but also would carry forward into the rest of life as well. When you teach someone to fish instead of just handing over the day’s catch, you not only give them lifelong productive skills; you also give the self-respect that comes with existential competence and the sense of belonging of being a member of a productive, interdependent community. Getting extra money can provide a helpful leg up, to be sure, but it is no substitute for the actual components of human flourishing. Here the gap between a UBI and true economic independence is vast and unbridgeable.

A UBI would give workers some financial independence and thus greater economic leverage in the labor market, and with more resources they would have greater collective capacity to influence politics as well. But for creating countervailing power within society, a successful economic independence movement would have far greater impact. It would create a new class of more self-sufficient citizens whose collective economic power is truly free-standing, depending neither on the market nor on the continuing beneficence of government. Economic independence thus creates political standing in the form of a new, autonomous source of social power.

This last point is relevant to another crucial deficit of a UBI compared to an economic independence movement — namely, the difficulty of getting it off the ground politically. As I’ve written about previously, the obstacles to reforming capitalism from within are daunting — and a UBI would be a very big reform, constituting a major shift in a nation’s political economy in an egalitarian direction. At any kind of meaningful scale, a UBI would be extremely expensive and entail a massive redistribution of income. How then could it ever happen except at the insistence of a powerful egalitarian political movement that campaigned and agitated relentlessly on its behalf? And where exactly is this powerful egalitarian movement going to come from, given the economic and political marginalization of everyone outside a relatively narrow elite and the focus of politics elsewhere on issues of identity?

A successful economic independence movement would also require supportive government policy, but at a much smaller scale. And in general, it is much easier to build political support for policies promoting productive work and self-reliance than for unconditional Peter-to-Paul transfers.

None of this is to say that a UBI isn’t worth pursuing: I would very much like to see it put into practice somewhere in the world so that we can see how it plays out over time. That said, it seems clear to me that, relative to all the attention that UBI proposals have received, the idea of an economic independence movement is seriously underrated. It addresses root causes rather than symptoms; it offers much more than just money to advance the cause of human flourishing; it creates badly needed countervailing power to balance against the elites of the capitalist system; and it appears to be more politically feasible.

Sherlock Holmes once described his reasoning method as follows: “Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” A similar reasoning process has led me to my interest in the possibilities of what I call economic independence. That process began with the recognition that we are flailing in the face of the permanent problem: we have thus far been unable to translate our immense technological and organizational powers into the kind of inclusive society that affords all of its members good opportunities to “live wisely and agreeably and well.” Surveying the various leading proposals to uplift ordinary workers and improve their access to the good life, I find all of them wanting in comparison to the project of directly empowering people, working with their families, neighbors, and communities, to take charge of their own lives and provide the basic elements of the good life for themselves. Thus my conclusion, however improbable it may seem, that a move toward greater economic independence is the best available option.