Perhaps "community" is itself changing. FW is a sort of community and has appeared and persisted over time. Entirely voluntary this group could be sitting around the cracker barrel in a general store in Vermont but sits around cyberspace.
arthur -----Original Message----- From: Keith Hudson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2003 3:05 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: 054. Community as the next Status Good? So far, I have tended to concentrate on status and on "hardware" Status Goods. Many other aspects of our culture are, of course, permeated by status -- the arts, fashions, politics, etc -- even scientific hierarchies! -- but there is no reason why we shouldn't consider what could be called "software" goods within economics. Indeed, sectors such as financial services are growing apace in developed countries, and there will probably be vast developments in educational delivery in the coming years. On my website home page (which should appear very shortly) I will be describing sexual choice, status and community inclusion as being intimately interlinked. What is community? you may well ask. It has almost completely disappeared in modern society. Adequate discussion of community would take a chapter of a book at least so I will not attempt it here, save to mention briefly what I think are the two chief reasons for its decline. One is that each successive new form of governance in human history (each initiated by an innovative weapon of war) has become more comprehensive in its scope and has reached down deeper and deeper into the personal lives of its subjects. The second, much more recent, is that the energetic basis of economic activity super-abundant in the last 200 years or so with the discovery and exploitation of very cheap fossil fuels -- coal, oil and natural gas. The cheapness of freight and travel in that period has probably done more than anything else to tear the workplace and the living place apart. If we have anything that can be called a genuine, albeit fragile, community these days, then it's more likely to be at our place of work than in the area in which we live. But I want to dwell only on the first aspect for the moment. Types of governments have not only become larger but they have also become more centralised. This has become so, especially in the last half-century where notions of equality of human rights and educational opportunity have held sway and must be spread over wider and wider areas of a country (never mind that the more equal the opportunity, the easier it is for the most able to be creamed off and attracted away from the place in which they were brought up). The result is that local communities have been increasingly denied the normal powers they used to have and, in short, have become a-responsible in most cases and irresponsible, even criminal, in some. The following article is an out-and-out party political piece -- rather unusual for the Financial Times -- but it's an interesting case history of what happened in Vermont where Howard Dean was governor. The blame can't be put on him particularly. Other governors in other American states have been doing the same because that's the way they've been impelled by stronger forces. But if belonging to a community really is an important part of our genetic make-up, then we either face extinction if present trends continue (and perhaps the steep decline in birth rate in Europe is a forerunner of this) or there will be a mounting pressure for community to be re-established. To a limited extent this is already happening. Gated communities for the wealthy and the retired are gradually becoming more numerous, at least in America and England. These self-managing communities are condemned by many for being standardised, even lacking in responsibility for wider society, but at least their members feel secure from burglary and vandalism there and, because they are usually rich and/or retired folk, with plenty of time at their disposal, then they do have a much richer sense of community than is possible eleswhere. But they could be Status Goods in the making, could they not? As always, Status Goods have to be purchased by the rich and the higher status first because only they can afford them initially. But is there not a way that gated communities could not be packaged more cheaply as time goes on? Here I must declare an interest because I am a shareholder in an architectural business which has been closely in touch with hundreds of house builders, large and small, all over the UK in the past 15 years. In that time there has been a distinct trend towards planning layouts in which houses tend to be nested together, rather than strung out in long roads which was common before then. They are not gated communities but certainly a step towards them. I think it is very possible that an innovative house-developer in the coming years could now take the next step towards building nested groups of houses, together with an office where individuals (who have quite separate jobs with distant firms) could actually work. One of the greatest disappointments in the Internet age has been the slow take-up of distance-working. Only a small fraction of those jobs which could be done in this way have actually become detached from a central office. The reason that researchers giv e for this reluctance to work from home is that people require company when at work. They don't like working by themselves at home, even though technically they could easily do so. However, if there were purpose-built communities with office accommodation then a true community might be possible -- where people both work and live together. I think that this, as the next significant Status Good is a strong candidate. Meanwhile here's Amity Shlaes' description of what went on in Vermont: KH <<<< DEAN THINKS BIG ON REDISTRIBUTION Amity Shlaes As Howard Dean gains in popularity, he is also gaining a reputation as a paradox. On the one hand, Mr Dean is campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president from the feral and populist left. He is making 1970s-style anti-authoritarian statements, such as: "We're going to take our country back!" On the other hand there is the Dean record as governor of Vermont (1991-2003), from which office he religiously tended the state's bond rating. The Vermont period, we are told, proves him to be a judicious, moderate and fiscal conservative. In the course of his Vermont tenure, Mr Dean did indeed balance the books But he also supported legislation that led to a doubling of the state budget in 10 years. What is more, the change involved more than increased tax and spending. Mr Dean also participated in -- and at points led -- a dramatic centralisation of government to the state capital, Montpelier. In the Dean era, Vermont's steepled villages and mill towns had their budgets stripped and lost core powers they had taken for granted for centuries. The mechanism of this audacious power-grab was education. In America, secondary and elementary'schools were historically a local matter, even a village matter. Citizens paid property taxes to their towns. The towns in turn built the school and hired the teachers. The education provided was far from perfect. Over the past 50 years many state governments have topped up local budgets -- as does the federal government to varying degrees. Nor could the old local system rectify racial injustices: ghetto neighbourhoods suffered from narrow tax bases and, therefore, often worse schools. But most of the time, and for most of US history, local finance worked pretty well. And, more often than not, it perpetuated a virtuous cycle. In towns with good schools, property values increased, which in turn generated more cash to, pay for their schools. And that was the case in Vermont, a small state with a strong history of home rule (after the Thirteen Colonies revolted against Britain, Vermont revolted against the Thirteen Colonies). School policy was, for example, often set at an annual town meeting, where every citizen had a say, as in a Norman Rockwell painting. But, of course, spending in the states, including Vermont, was rarely "equal" in the sense that every town spent the same for every child. And throughout the 1980s and 1990s, state courts increasingly ruled that individual pupils were entitled to equal dollar spending. Many of these rulings concerned issues that did not affect homogeneous places like Vermont, such as race. Nonetheless, in a 1997 decision known as Brigham, Vermont courts followed the trend and ruled for equal education entitlement. Enter Governor Dean and the Vermont legislature. There were a number of ways to comply with the court finding, at least in theory. They could, for example, have tried to fight for a simple increase in state subsidies. But everyone -- the courts, the state legislature, the school unions in their Montpelier headquarters and, in the end, Mr Dean -- wanted something radical. They would throw out the old town hall system. They would create a uniform state property tax at a statewide rate, diverting hundreds of millions in local property taxes to Montpelier. The state would then share the money out in a flat, per child payment -- something over $5,000 (�3,100) -- to ensure equity. From now on Montpelier would control purse strings and policy. The new school law, known as Act 60, also imposed a range of new state regulations on schools. (Ironically, Mr Dean now criticises President George W. Bush's education mandates.) Governor Dean called the new era "joyous". The change did indeed mean that per capita spending on some children in the poorest towns increased. But it also did much to destroy the civic culture. Localities now had less say in a number of areas of education -- curriculum, staff and, of course, budget. Many towns' school budgets were reduced by 20 or 30 per cent. Communities that had paid high taxes still paid high taxes. But they no longer received value for their money in the form of high-quality local schools. The virtuous circle was broken. Act 60 generated class antagonism in Vermont, especially between the "have not" towns that received subsidy for schooling and the "haves" that paid for it -- wealthy ski towns such as Stowe and Killington. There was more bitterness: if the "gold" towns, as they were also called, wanted to sustain their old high level of school spending, they were allowed to do so. But only if they poured yet more cash for every additional dollar they spent on themselves into a special pot for needier towns. People called the new legislation a "Robin Hood law". Mr Dean can point to a number of facts in his defence. One is.that Vermont was merely part of the national trend. Another is that the Vermont courts and legislature left him no choice but to follow suit. But for all his avowed pragmatism, Mr Dean ultimately pushed for a redistribution of wealth and political power. As John McClaughry of Vermont's free market Ethan Alien Institute points out, Mr Dean presided over increases in the sales tax, the petrol tax, the corporate tax and the tobacco tax. The point is a simple one. In the context of Vermont's left-leaning legislature, or a Wall Street bond house, Mr Dean may be a moderate compromiser. But as the Vermont schools story shows, he is clearly comfortable with big government. Financial Times 11 August 2003 >>>>> Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
