The thoughts in this diary are shaped in part by the book I'm reading, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by Steven Greenhouse. Reading this book, it's becoming clear to me that America in the 21st century -- especially in light of the recent removal of the card-check provision from the Employee Free Choice Act, which cuts the heart out of that legislation -- is going to be a poorer place for everyone except the executive elite.
The question is, how can Americans live in poverty and still be happy? I'm reminded of the studies that show that once basic necessities of life are covered, having more money doesn't translate to greater happiness; specifically, that money spent on things doesn't increase happiness, although money spent on experiences does.
Examining the many different things in life on which we spend money, I've come to the conclusion that the more nakedly capitalist America becomes, the more communally Americans will have to live.
To begin with, let's take housing -- the most costly item in most household budgets -- as an example. In this highly mobile age, many of us live alone in a studio, one-bedroom or two-bedroom apartment. In a typical urban area such as, say, Columbus, Ohio, a studio apartment runs about $450 per month, a one-bedroom about $650 per month, a two-bedroom about $750 per month, and a three-bedroom about $950 per month. One doesn't have to be a math genius to realize that three people can live more inexpensively in a three-bedroom apartment than one person can live even in a studio.
And why not? Do three people need three refrigerators? Three stoves? Three bathtubs? Three televisions? Hardly. This is one of several fundamental principles we're going to confront again and again as even "middle-class" Americans (an obsolete concept) find themselves having to get by on pre–New Deal wages: the more you can share rather than buy on your own, the better.
It's probably not an original thought, but while reflecting on this challenge, I conceived of the Ladder of Communality. At the top of the ladder is Nature. Anything that exists in nature, provided that it's publicly accessible, is the ultimate in communality. It belongs to no one and everyone; use it as you will. Next down the ladder are Public Amenities: services provided by the federal, state or local government, or shared by the neighborhood or block. Next down, but sort of off to the side, are Nonprofit Services, which are similar to Public Amenities but depend in part on private funding streams and must be applied for rather than simply used. The next-lower step on the actual ladder is that which is Communally Shared within a household, followed by that which is Individually Owned but Shared; the very bottom of the ladder is that which is Individually Owned. (Things that are privately owned by someone else and must be rented, or bought to consume, are off the ladder entirely.)
The idea, to live cheaply and sustainably, is to look for everything you need as high up on the ladder as possible. Take recreation: The best recreational facility is open land or water that no one owns. But barring that, a national, state or local park is excellent, better than a box of games or sporting equipment shared by everyone in the house, and better by far than going out and buying an Xbox. Or take transportation: We were designed by nature to walk, so walking is best. But if we need to go farther than walking can take us, we should look first to public transportation, then to a nonprofit service such as car sharing, then to a household vehicle or a carpool, and last to a privately owned, single-occupancy vehicle. (Please don't take this to mean that I favor car-sharing or carpooling over bicycling, since the natural power of bicycling is far superior to the privately extracted oil that fuels cars. But shared bikes are better than individually owned bikes.)
Akin to this is the environmental mantra "Reduce, reuse, recycle," which is not only more sustainable but also cheaper. Substituting shared consumer goods for individually purchased ones both reduces consumption and saves money. Ditto for housing and services such as communication and transportation. Repairing machines and clothing, or repurposing household containers, is both more sustainable and cheaper than buying new ones. As for recycling, in some places, it can actually provide a source of income.
Another mantra to memorize is Resilience Through Diversity. Farmers, environmental biologists and financial planners will all tell you that with monoculture comes risk. A farmer who grows nothing but corn will be ruined by a blight. An ecosystem that loses too many species will go into cascade failure. A retirement portfolio that contains a variety of investments will endure an unfortunate decline in the price of just one. Similarly, a household with a variety of income earners will fare far better than a household with just one or two. If a sole wage earner is laid off, it's a catastrophe; if one out of half a dozen is laid off, the impact is far less. And having enough wage earners to cover household costs also allows some adults in the household to stay home and attend to domestic concerns, without necessarily reverting to locked-in traditional sex roles. In fact, I would argue that this sort of arrangement might offer a psychological buffer against the blow of being laid off: A man who loses his job could retain his dignity and self-worth by coming back to the fold and taking over some domestic duties for a while rather than feel the pressure to go out and find another job immediately because the entire household depends on him. Also, I think even the most die-hard feminist would agree that children are better off with an adult at home looking after them, regardless of the sex of the adult.
Finally, as suggested in the introduction to this diary, the affordable 21st-century lifestyle will emphasize experiences over things. This means a reliance on activities in which the combination of participants' ideas and personalities provides an infinite variety of possible outcomes -- parlor games, musical jams or just plain conversation. Or toys, such as building blocks, that don't limit children's notions of how to play with them.
Undoubtedly, certain readers are recognizing everything I'm describing as existing already in the extended households of traditional rural areas, poverty-stricken inner cities and less developed nations, and that used to exist in America in earlier eras. Well, of course! These are places and times where people have had to adapt to having very little and made do for themselves as much as possible. They're way ahead of us on this. Granted, not everything about how people live in such places (or lived in the past) is pleasant or admirable, but we can recognize what works, what's effective and what makes it possible to live life to the fullest on a shoestring while still holding on to our own values and yardsticks for determining what decisions to make day by day. Unfortunately, we have to realize that individual self-determination is a luxury that our economic system is hell-bent on stripping away from us -- and that, in many respects, is wasteful and fails to nourish our humanity. We are social animals, after all, not solitary ones, like spiders.
Here's one portrait of what an "adaptive household" might look like:
Housing: Communally owned, if possible, rather than rented, and occupied by four to eight adults and their children. Two large common rooms (the "noisy room" and the "quiet room") and a farmhouse kitchen (which may or may not include the "noisy room"), surrounded by private bedrooms and possibly small workrooms. (Alternatively, work might take place in a coworking space, either in the household or nearby.) The "noisy room" is the nexus of social activity in the house. One wireless Internet hot spot serves everybody, as does one land-line telephone, and one computer set up with iTunes functions as a household jukebox.
Food: Communal eating replaces restaurant-bought food. Meals are cooked from scratch (cheapest by far) and served family-style on the Chinese banquet model, so that different tastes and dietary preferences can be accommodated simultaneously. Meat consumption is substantially reduced; heavily processed foods are eschewed. As much produce as possible comes from a household garden; farmers' markets are the next-best thing.
Transportation: The household is in a dense location, near a public transportation node and household members' workplaces; as much as possible, household members walk, bike or use transit. The entire household belongs to a car-sharing service.
Consumer goods: Energy-efficient and built to last, appliances are designed to be repaired rather than replaced. Home electronics are comparatively rare -- household members make their own fun.
Work: Most, but not all, adults work outside the household or freelance from within, while the remaining adults take care of domestic work and, if applicable, child care (not determined by sex). As much as possible, workers try to detach themselves from the corporate system and take command of their own earnings and working conditions; coworking spaces become hotbeds of entrepreneurship and small-scale production. Many services, and even some goods, are provided by households to other households in an off-the-grid barter system. (Let the corporations who bought our government pay for it!)
DIY-ness: Whatever household members can do for themselves, they do, unless the service is already provided by the government -- from growing and preparing food to machine and clothing repair to making music. Some households may even make their own members' clothes -- striking a blow against both sweatshop capitalism and the "label premium." Households that can do this with a sense of style may barter the service for other services that household members can't perform. Free public education being higher up on the Ladder of Communality than homeschooling, this activity still takes place predominantly outside the household.
Social connections: Household members keep loneliness at bay by making full use of free outdoor gathering places such as parks and public squares and streets, where they exist and when weather permits, and otherwise congregating in the "noisy room." Bars and coffeehouses wane in importance, while homebrewing becomes more popular, as do parlor games and the art of storytelling.
Of course, not every adaptive household will look exactly like this; the idea is that people with compatible tastes and values will gravitate toward one another and create the kinds of communities that serve them best. These may be larger or smaller, offer more or less privacy, embrace manufactured pop culture more or less, revert more or less to domestic crafts, and so forth. No one formula will work for everybody. The point is to adhere as much as possible to the Ladder of Communality, to reduce/reuse/recycle, to resilience through diversity, and to experiences over things, in order to live as cheaply as possible, yet also as happily as possible.
Or we could keep fighting for card check. But it never hurts to have a plan B.