Markets and Communities

In primitive societies, people were entirely self-sufficient. They gathered their own food, made their own clothing, and found their own shelter. Today no one's self sufficient; we're all specialized and depend on many other people worldwide in a nonzero-sum way. Everything you consume you could never produce on your own — your daily life depends o... See more

This is because our reliance on one another has become increasingly abstract — the producer never meets the consumer, and so the dependencies between us aren’t as legible.

Tyler Cowen’s book Create Your Own Economy observes that, as individualized social feeds have dwarfed newspapers and personalized Netflix recommendations dwarfed movie theaters, we have less of a shared substrate — less collective knowledge we all learn, less collective experiences we all share, and less collective identities we all embrace.

The Third Pillar argues this is a huge loss, and that communities are the “third pillar” needed alongside markets and the state for society to function.

Zooming out: great communities, in the traditional sense, required limited options so people would remain dependent: no specialists or external trade (to ensure we all collectively worked together), and no diversity or weird ideas (to ensure a homogenous group with a focus on tradition). We had far worse medical treatment, underwent excruciating ma... See more