Book Review:
Saving
Communities, Saving the Country
Thad
Williamson, David Imbroscio and Gar Alperovitz, Making a Place for
Community: Local Democracy in a Global Era (
Here is a book that will take the reader a very long way toward
understanding the connections between troubling problems of local economies in
the U.S. -- plant closings and economic decline—and the economic theories and
governmental policies that contribute to them. Authors Thad Williamson, David Imbroscio and Gar Alperovitz lead
the reader through economic theory and hundreds of concrete examples without
ever using an equation or retreating into social science jargon. What is more, the authors propose moderate,
gradual, and practical remedies that could be accomplished all at once or
piecemeal.
The book opens with
a challenge to the widespread assumption that the ups and downs of local
economies don’t matter as long as the national economy overall is prosperous
and friendly to private enterprise. Instead, the authors see local economies as
the very building blocks of democracy, “where diverse citizens join together in
self-governance,” where civil society can develop and where social capital is
created. When local communities are shaken apart by excessive economic change,
the result weakens the foundation of democracy, and for that reason, efforts to
preserve and stabilize the economies of geographic localities are essential.
They cite research showing that long-term residents of stable communities are
more likely to vote, more likely to be involved in local groups and politics,
more likely to have social trust and to create more inclusive governments with
more equitable policies.
The beneficial impact of
economic stability on democracy and civil society can best be seen when it is
lacking, as in an economically blighted community, where people are so
concerned with survival that they don’t have time for participation, where
turnover in schools is high and learning suffers, where young adults have to
leave to find employment, where people don’t have time to look after their
homes and neighborhoods because they must travel long distances to find work,
where neighbors move so often that no one knows names and routines, so homes
become vulnerable to break-ins and vandalism.
The fallout wastes individual and community capital when housing stocks
depreciate because of economic weakness and community infrastructure is
abandoned long before it is obsolete.
What is more, much economic
instability at the community level arises from government policies that could
be altered to mitigate the problems they create. For example, the decades of
redlining denied federally insured mortgages in poor neighborhoods, and
neoconservative trade policy opens investment opportunities abroad and allows
profits from those investments to flow into tax havens, making the movement of
jobs offshore an irresistible strategy for increasing profits. Not only is
offshore labor cheaper for the company, but profits can be directed to offshore
tax havens.
But if the authors skillfully
show the problem, they also propose a remedy, or rather, a raft of remedies.
Many of these are simply local economic development strategies. Employee
buyouts are one approach, but there are others—public enterprises, public
venture capital funds, governmentally owned corporations, community development
financial institutions, targeted pension investments, community development
corporations, local currencies, small-business incubators, community land
trusts. Each type of organization is described with several working examples.
The variety and extent of ongoing activity is remarkable. Descriptions in the
text are supplemented with an indexed appendix of the organizations’ contact
information.
Remedies are also proposed for the national and international level, such
as increased trade adjustment assistance, limited and negotiated protectionism,
new roles for international financial institutions, and a tax on international
currency speculation.
This is a vision of local communities with sufficient economic activity to
comfortably support the local population. The authors’ goal is not to freeze
economic change, but to slow down harmful change and avoid the trauma of rapid
and massive economic shifts, as when huge facilities are built or abandoned
within the space of a few months, with devastating impact on the people living
there and often at great expense to taxpayers. Helping communities develop
strategies to buffer against swift and massive economic change, they argue, is
not only compassionate, it is fundamental to strengthening democracy. OAW