This article was originally published by Joe Waters on LinkedIn.
As many commentators have noted, a half-century-old paradigm, neoliberalism, is collapsing to bipartisan applause.
Take our cities. Neoliberalism prompted decades of austerity policies, which no longer look prudent to Republican or Democratic mayors. They’ve been forced to cope with our enormous infrastructure deficit–all those roads and bridges are long overdue for upgrades and repairs. Thus, in 2021, we saw President Biden’s infrastructure legislation pass with bipartisan support.
Yet, with all the billions being spent on “hard” infrastructure, we continue to overlook “soft” (social) infrastructure. Social infrastructure refers to the physical spaces and systems essential for our communities’ well-being. Think of our hospitals, community housing, child care facilities, museums, parks, clinics, prisons, and schools. This infrastructure is our common house, for which we must finance and build a new floor and ceiling.
Social infrastructure has become more relevant for a particular reason. Beyond its historic neglect of the built environment, neoliberalism is an ideology of isolation and loneliness. As Sen. Chris Murphy recently wrote, it has brought “spiritual disintegration” across the country, making us a less hopeful and less happy society.
We’re living in the wreckage of this radically misguided economic project, measured in terms of “deaths of despair,” mental health problems (in 2022, a reported 55.8 million American adults received treatment), addiction, and financial precarity (for example, 100 million Americansare struggling with medical debt).
We’ve discovered that neoliberalism was not only a political project but also a cultural one. Of course, it wasn’t sold that way. For politicians of the 1990s–the glory years of neoliberalism–supply-side thinking was liberating: letting “the market” take care of things supposedly offered lawmakers an efficient escape from messy consensus-seeking, including in areas such as social care and family support.
However, by the Great Recession of 2007-9, the punitive era of neoliberalism began, with a spike in inequality. What was once an ever-growing pie of GDP that should have supported citizens instead began to shrink for all except elites and billionaires. Caregivers across all walks of society struggled to meet their most basic needs, suffering financially and emotionally as social connections frayed and their sense of agency eroded.
Neoliberalism’s dominance gave us ideological blinders. We didn’t see the vital work of social production in the “care economy,” especially in areas like rearing children and maintaining a household. How did this happen?
Here’s a partial answer. Something else has been lost to neoliberal ideology in the last two or three generations: our social imagination. As Geoff Mulgan recently argued, for most of us, thinking about our common future calls up one of two scenarios: apocalypse or salvation by tech breakthrough. We find it hard to imagine a better society, partly because our universities, political parties, and think tanks have vacated this space. Whereas they once offered big visions of a confident future, they now tend to focus on the next crisis, especially as refracted through social media.
Albert Einstein famously noted, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” We need to free up our thinking to imagine radical new solutions for caring for our children and each other. As Mulgan suggests, the kind of social imagination we need exercises the creative power of combination, asking questions like, What if schools became sites for healthcare? What if democracy was introduced into the workplace? What if platform business models were applied to social care?
With an active social imagination, we can take up the messy but essential work of fighting inequality and promoting societal resilience. We can foster solidarity and human connection. We can build up our long-neglected social infrastructure–our common house.
Ironically, given the unparalleled power of the Internet, we have the tools to do this work of social imagination. We invest heavily in business and the military but fund little of the brainpower needed to deliver the social solutions we need.
It’s time to seize this moment–as we see the failures of neoliberalism and the promise of a reawakened social imagination–to rebuild our social infrastructure and achieve a livable future in which we can all flourish. We are beyond speaking of programs and short-term policies: we need system change.
Restoring the resilience of local communities and bolstering shared agency, the breeding ground for cooperation, solidarity, and mutual aid is half of that future.
The other half is the new floor and ceiling of our common house. The floor is a mix of a Universal Basic Income, a job guarantee, Universal Basic Services, and Universal Basic Assets. Together, these systemic changes would create a baseline of support below which no one can fall.
The new ceiling is the lid we must place on inequality’s upward spiral by applying a mix of financial and tax reforms. The latter must include a major reinvestment in regulation in areas like antitrust and consumer protection. We need a ” whole-of-government” approach to these issues, ensuring that policy supports initiatives in the care sector, particularly those focused on children and families.
Without a vibrant social infrastructure, the rebuilt physical structures of our world can’t save us, nor can they address our desperate need for well-being.
We’ve done big things for large sectors of the population before. Think of the enormous impact of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, which used low-cost loans to quickly build up an electric grid in rural America.
This new shift in our political landscape offers a rare opening for genuine system change. The time for rebuilding our common world–a world where children and families can flourish–has come.