We know there are many buzz words floating around in society today. Lately, I think at least once most of us have heard the phrase, “stimulating the economy” and most often it is in the context of the global economy. Thus, with the focus on global rather than local, it may be a struggle to grasp how economics plays itself out in our everyday lives, unless you live in Cook County and just got your tax bill for 2011! But, most times it seems we are just bombarded on the nightly news with economists who sleep statistics, numbers and strange formulas (Burkett, 2009) and talk more about global economy then what is going on right next door.  Yet, as author Mike Greenberg suggests, “While ‘the economy’ of the economists inhabits an abstract number space, the economy of the real world happens in physical space, in the places where you and I and our neighbours interact”.  Burkett further explains that an understanding of our local economy should be on the front burner of everyone’s priorities. When we see social isolation, a lack of neighborhood businesses and other enterprises, a cultural of fear and dependency, and no sense of community, we should be deeply concerned. A way to draw people into being concerned about the local economy may rest in analysis that contain real life stories with real people..not abstract statistical equations or what could happen with out-of-this world probabilities!

Rather than economic change being the result of economists jumping into the arena Burkett contends that more community development workers or maybe community psychologists will agree to “jump into the good fight” and grapple with questions such as, ‘How can we truly address poverty in its many forms?’ This means that more folks engaging in community capacity building have to embrace it from an economical perspective. What follows below is especially poignant that Burkett shares:

“The roots of the word “economy” are interesting in themselves. Economy” comes from the greek oikos, the house, and ‘nomos’ or management…so essentially it means management of the household.  Of course the word “ecology” comes from the same root, finishing with logos, or knowledge, so meaning “knowing the home”.  The idea that economics is about considering our world and our communities as a ‘home’ provides us with a wonderful framework for understanding the principles and practices of community economic development: In a home we are concerned not just with the well-being of one or two people, but the well-being of all members of the household; We know, in a home, that if we pollute one room, then that will affect all other rooms of the home; We wouldn’t sit at the dining room table and prepare a feast for only one or two members of the household while the others starve. 

As community development experts, community psychologists or nonprofit organizations serving the community, we have all signed on to “client-centered” services and agree that we need the full participation of all involved in development and research including the benefactors. Towards this end, as we have embraced this philosophy or framework for development, interventions and the like, we now have to create this same model for what Burkett calls community centered economics.

Very interesting because historically economics has favored corporations and not community households as its unit of analysis. Of course, this means that the interests of corporations have been at the forefront of economics and certainly not households.  In “community centered economics”  human community and its inter-related ecosystem is veiwed as a holistic unit of organization for the production and consumption of goods to meet the community’s current needs, and for the preservation and enhancement of the community’s present and future productive capacity. Economic development occurs when the community’s capacity for increased future economic output, including the sustainable output of its natural resources and ecological capital, is increased (Soxa, para, 9).

Well see there. It seems as one person put it, “Global economies have gone local, and local economies have gone global.” Believe it, or not.