Could a more ‘relational economy’ rise in the post Covid recession? How would it regenerate Economics and all of us?
An early mockup of an Economy vs Relationships conversation tool
The baseline for relationships in a growth-based economy
Future ways of looking at the economy - a relational future
My question
At the start of the pandemic I carried out a piece of voluntary consultancy for The Relationships Project on whether we could conceptualise and explore the economy in a relational way.
I worked with The Relationships Project to frame an investigation into how economics and relationships relate, and whether a more ‘relational economy’ could arise in the recession.
I wanted to ask: How has Covid-19 helped people take stock of the state of their economic relationships? Has it led to new windows of opportunity for different forms of Economics to take root and for us to adopt radically different approaches to problems?
The opportunity
In lockdown we put ‘the economy’ on pause and refocused ‘what matters’. In a world where everything - even the relationship of a parent reading to a child - is often framed in terms of its impact on the economy, Covid 19 changed this.
At a collective level, it has briefly recentred the idea of a society beyond what we understand classically as ‘the economy’ and placed a radically different framing for what matters most to us at the heart of public debate and our individual and social behaviours.
On an individual level, our ‘economic relationships’ were frozen or thrown in the air. Many people’s ‘personal economies’ were on the brink - as a result, their relationships took the strain.
Could there be…
Changes in economic debate? This is a unique time and window of opportunity for the public conversation about Economics to be about the real things it is about: the relationships between people, what we might call a warm web that ties us all, at the base of and through daily lives.
A moment of cultural memory? This could be a moment of cultural and oral memory for Economics, and a moment for people to contribute to our understanding of Economics in their own words. We can use recent happenings to discuss Economics in terms of human experiences: things like what good work is, what quality time means, what public services like the NHS mean to us.
A way to retain our new relational capital? We currently have a huge untapped resource of relational capital that the recession could stand to put to use or destroy: a worldwide shared experience of what huge changes in the economy feel like directly. This relational capital can be put to use in our economy, and in our attitudes towards economic changes in the future to address major settlements needed like the climate emergency and economic justice for exploited people.
Why economics and relationships?
As a discipline, Economics has (a divergent, but also dominant set of) views on how humans relate to each other. Assumptions about human relationships are formed, sustained and changed are at the heart of Economics and these assumptions shape how economic policies are formed and how their success is measured.
On an individual level, our present, past and cumulative economic experiences greatly affect our relationships through, among other things, how and where we live, the time we have available to us and the mental and physical health we have at our disposal.
If we are interested in building a better society, we have to engage directly with how Economics shapes our view of what a better society can be, and how we, as individuals form and change our ‘economic relationships’ with each other.
What did I do?
I wrote this project proposal for The Relationships Project.
Examples of tools I mocked up included:
a set of economic relationships cards
an economic relationships healthcheck
a proposal to curate an oral history of the new economic knowledge about how we might live produced in the pandemic through a method for spoken reflective spaces. I wanted to explore a method which could engage an extreme user in Economics social change - for example, my working-class parents - by developing static pictorial mental models of the economy (including the visual doughnut) into dynamic ones which people could socialise in their identities, lives and relationships over time.