In 1990, the novelist and social critic Wendell Berry chose a provocative title for his latest collection of essays: What Are People For? 

In the spirit of Berry’s question, we might ask today, What is the economy for? Whom should it serve and how? Can and should it serve the common good? 

For many Americans, the term common good may suggest the gross domestic product (GDP). That is, it has something to do with our status as consumers.

Or does the common good mean something broader: enabling people to contribute, participate, and belong to a shared world?

The latter view surfaced a few years ago for the tens of millions of YouTube viewers of philosopher Michael J. Sandel’s Harvard course on justice. His best-selling book The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? does not attempt to offer a single definition of the common good. 

But he persuasively identifies several of its characteristics.

First, the opportunity to contribute toward the common good is something all citizens should have. 

Sandel quotes Robert F. Kennedy’s reflection in 1968 on the pain of joblessness and the resulting non-participation in society: “Unemployment means having nothing to do—which means having nothing to do with the rest of us. To be without work, to be without use to one’s fellow citizens, is to be in truth the Invisible Man of whom Ralph Ellison wrote.”

The emphasis here is not merely on distributive justice—i.e., fairer, fuller access to the economy’s benefits. Kennedy was referring to contributive justice, an opportunity to participate in building our shared world and be recognized for doing so—socially as well as economically. 

For half a century, we’ve had declining opportunities of this kind, as people increasingly feel ashamed of their displacement from the world of meaningful work. 

As a result, we find ourselves living within an anti-politics, a retreat from democratic engagement. This withdrawal from democratic life hardens into two responses: partisan aggression and conspiracy thinking, both destructive in their impacts.

As Sandel puts it, “From Aristotle to the American republican tradition, from Hegel to Catholic social teaching, theories of contributive justice teach us that we are most fully human when we contribute to the common good and earn the esteem of our fellow citizens for the contributions we make.”

Second, Sandel argues for a civic conception of the common good, as opposed to the consumerist definition. Going beyond consumer welfare, this vision promotes the cultivation of civic virtue and deliberation with our fellow citizens. 

And unlike technocratic ideas of the common good, it requires an authentic politics—one which recovers a localized, face-to-face context in which we can both hear and speak to each other. The rise of groups in Europe and North America promoting civic assemblies, participatory budgeting, and other tools represents a response to our felt need for greater solidarity. 

Or, to borrow again from Wendell Berry’s work, for “membership,” by which he means “the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives.” 

With this attempt to clarify the term “common good” in terms of this moment, we might ask: What impels citizens to want to contribute to the common good? 

Let’s look for some lessons in the crucible of twentieth-century history. 

An Example of Common Good Politics

As the late historian Tony Judt once reminded us, “Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today’s Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety.” That anxiety included the Cold War’s escalation of fears around the expansion of Soviet Communism.  

But the accomplishments of the post-World War II period in Europe and America—the creation of the U.N., the rebuilding of Europe, and its economic and social integration—were also built from a powerful sense of shared sacrifice and the spirit of “never again.” 

In the first phase of what became the European Union, the movement of Christian Democracy and its several national parties were prominent in these efforts, all of them grounded in a shared vision of the common good at the nation-state level. 

Key principles in that vision were solidarity (mutual support), subsidiarity (appropriate scale), and the dignity of labor (the right to a living wage, decent working conditions, and a voice in decision-making). 

The economic impact of this common good politics became a thirty-year phenomenon for Western Europe, the famous Trentes Glorieuses, in which income rose and inequality remained low from 1945 until the first oil shock of 1975 and the reign of neoliberal economics—a rare and shining example of a more humane, more “social” economy. This period was a time notable for strong labor unions and a generous welfare state.

The Power of Solidarity and Shared Sacrifice

Our condition feels very different today. While the anxieties of the Cold War are long gone, many Americans feel a growing sense of living within a technocratic system that makes them feel managed by tech platforms and voiceless in whatever remains of our public life.

The economic impact of this new reality has been dire for many. In the U.S., real incomes have risen for decades while inequality has reached historic levels. The famous American middle class has shrunk, leaving many to struggle with a shift from manufacturing to service sector work, often of a precarious kind. Ownership of assets—home ownership being once a road to middle-class status—is increasingly the privilege of the few. 

And yet a similar feeling of entrapment was shared by the early organizers of the Polish Solidarity movement of the 1980s. It spurred them to create the most successful nonviolent popular movement of the century, eventually toppling the Soviet empire. 

Interestingly, members of the Solidarity trade union did not rise up because they were hungry or lacked housing. Their independent labor movement—declared illegal and forced by the Communist leadership to operate underground until 1989—was primarily contesting the system’s perpetual degradation of work and workers’ dignity, as well as its repression of anyone who attempted to speak out. 

And their “secret weapon” was quite simply the power of solidarity, a “willingness to bear each other’s burdens,” as Solidarity chaplain Fr. Józef Tischner once defined the term.

Not that political recognition of the dignity of labor is unknown in an American context. In 1968, the same year that Robert Kennedy spoke about joblessness, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. tied the dignity of striking Memphis sanitation workers to their contribution to the common good. 

Michael Sandel quotes King: “One day our society will come to respect its sanitation workers if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage is in the final analysis as significant as the physician—if he doesn’t do his job, disease becomes rampant. All labor has dignity.”

Rebalancing the Economy toward the Common Good

Thus, we can speak about economics for the common good, drawing on real historical examples such as the Christian Democracy movement in post-war Europe. 

Another and more recent example is the Scandinavian model, which emphasized social solidarity and aimed to achieve high living standards, low income inequality, and a strong social safety net, including free education and health care. 

In our current moment, a common good economics should not be wholly a matter of national policies and programs. The concept of a “partner state”—found in other countries, such as Italy and South Korea–describes the way nondominating governments at all levels can better enable local communities to determine their own destinies. 

For example, in Italy and South Korea, the state effectively partnered with civil society by passing legislation that established legal frameworks for cooperative business structures. Italy’s 1948 constitution gave worker cooperatives (worker-owned, democratically managed enterprises) a special status that included a legislative mandate of financial support. Additional legislation has given tax breaks to investors in these enterprises and eliminated withholding taxes for worker-owners. 

South Korea’s Framework Act on Cooperatives was passed in 2012, easing regulations on forming businesses and clarifying categories of cooperatives. The result was a sharp upturn in the number of cooperatives formed, reaching over 22,000 by 2023. 

By empowering and connecting local economies, this kind of collaboration lessens the combined impacts of disinvestment (leaving poorer communities) and growing financialization (dominance of high return-driven investment, itself a key driver of gentrification).  

If we believe an economy of the common good implies rebalancing away from the “FIRE” sector (finance, insurance, real estate) toward the “real economy” (production of good and services, especially from small businesses), then we should welcome the signs of civil society–especially in the form of our local communities–organizing itself to reclaim a greater role. (Some examples will follow below.)

Toward a More Humane U.S. Economy

How might the U.S. reimagine public policies which recognize and further empower this shift toward a more humane economy which serves society instead of undermining it?

First, advocacy for wider ownership of assets—a rare zone of bipartisan collaboration—deserves amplification across the political spectrum. The latter effort should include not only home ownership but also businesses owned by employees. This category includes worker cooperatives, employee ownership trusts (EOTs), and other employee-owned enterprises, as well as public ownership (as in returning a privately owned electric grid to city ownership). 

The Worker Ownership, Readiness, and Knowledge (WORK) Act of 2022 is a move in this direction, as is the proposed Retire Through Employee Ownership Act of 2025, which aims to improve and clarify regulation of employee stock ownership (ESOP) programs. All these strategies are promoted via the new generation of employee ownership centers now operating in 24 states.

An example of a business putting these principles into action is the Drivers Cooperative–Colorado (DCC), a Denver-based worker-owned rideshare service with over 1000 driver-owners, many of whom are immigrants. These drivers left platforms like Uber and Lyft to take advantage of DCC’s much more generous fare structure, as well as its democratic workplace.

Second, we need to learn from European models of “social businesses”–i.e., hybrid enterprises which serve a community benefit while operating on a for-profit basis. Our current regulatory wall between for-profits and nonprofits tends to discourage this kind of social innovation and thus loses its potential benefits in greater community cohesion.

Social businesses also share the trait of being highly localized–i.e., they do not relocate, partly because they are designed to operate within particular local ecosystems. They have also been shown to be more sustainable (lower failure rates) than conventional businesses while not requiring government subsidies. 

An example of a regionwide ecosystem of social businesses is The Industrial Commons in Morganton, NC, where a network of worker cooperatives has built on the region’s textile legacy with a vision “to rebuild a diverse working class based on locally-rooted wealth.” 

Finally, to the concept of wider ownership, we should restore the dimension of membership, which is part of relocalizing and rebalancing the economy. We are discovering that our widespread condition of social isolation is partly due to our loss of participation, whether in a workplace, a neighborhood, or a house of worship.

As an example of the costs of nonparticipation, our collapsing social care sector is suffering not only from a lack of funding but also from a scarcity of care enterprises that can 1) offer fair wages and 2) do so in a humane workplace. 

Care businesses and nonprofits thrive best when they are embedded in local communities of support rather than tied to national platforms which manage workers–often precariously–as individuals. For parents, child care from your local church group will feel very different from child care delivered via an app tied to a platform. 

A key dimension in developing these enterprises is of course funding, including the need for policy support of community investment funds, essentially a form of investment clubs with a Main Street focus. The National Coalition for Community Capital is one organization working in this area. Importantly, local funding, like local care, is inherently more relational but also more necessary in the current economic climate. 

This work of building a new common good economy is in fact already underway. And it is occurring at all levels—federal, state and local—simultaneously, even if it still lacks visibility.

Its hopes of widespread adoption, however, depend first on cultivating local and state working models, if only to give policymakers a proof of concept and the blueprints needed to legislate wisely when and if they move to scaling up what is already working.

In the U.S., we refer familiarly to “our health care system” or “our military.” Perhaps we can hope for the moment when we begin referring not to “the economy” but to “our economy.”

Elias Crim is the founder and editor of Solidarity Hall.