08181 Design your household economics

Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly: "Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs."

… The refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt. It's not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn't aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization. — David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

One of the really big design questions in your life is —

How do you manage your household economics?

It doesn’t matter if at this point in your life you are a household of one or a dozen, you need a design for your household economics or you will be following the default design, which is —

  • Borrow money, work overtime, never take a vacation,

    — so you can buy, gorge and consume junk.

  • Take emetics, diuretics, and laxatives,

    — purge, vomit, and excrete trash,

  • then borrow more money, work more overtime, never take a vacation,

    — so you can buy, gorge, and consume more junk.

  • Then you take more emetics, diuretics, and laxatives,

    — purge, vomit, and excrete more trash,

  • And so on and so forth until you collapse and die of exhaustion.

If that’s what you want to do with your life, you wouldn’t have made it this far into iPermie. So now you design a better way to live.

Your economic design is a significant component of the permaculture design for your life. Your personal economic system does not exist in isolation from the rest of your life. In fact, your personal economic system is a reflection of your life.

There are five components of your household economic system design:

  • Earning,
  • Doing,
  • Spending,
  • Saving,
  • Circulating surplus (giving and Investing)

Earning and Doing.

What are the human needs you must satisfy? That is, what are the non-negotiables? These are food, water, shelter, clothing, companionship, community, a certain level of stuff.

How will you meet those human needs?

Will you somehow earn and spend money for them?

Will you be part of other systems that will satisfy some of those basic human needs?

Besides needs . . . what are the human wants in your life that you would like to satisfy?

Is this about stuff? Something more about community? Beauty? Wisdom? To be of service to others? To discover something wonderful? To heal hurts? To solve problems? What is it that you want to do in your life that is different from resolving your basic needs?

You could make a needs, wants, benefits, and costs list for you as a person and look for beneficial connections.

How much of what you need will you pay for by EARNING and how much will you obtain by DOING?

Will you buy all of your food?

Or, instead of buying food, will you grow food? Will you grow all your food or part of your food? If you can't or don't want to grow all or part of your food, will you participate in a sustainable local food economy? What does that participation look like?

You may think, “Well, I’m not going to be a farmer, I will have to earn more so I can buy more.” You may think that the need to earn money to satisfy your daily needs and wants will always be a primary factor in your life.

Maybe this will be true for you.

Or maybe not, depending on how you design your life, what your needs and wants are, what your community is like, and etc. Maybe you will trade services or work for food.

What is your economic community? Is it just you and no more? Is it your household? Do others contribute to the economic well-being of the small community of your family or household? Can you be part of an urban ecovillage that provides a system of goods and services outside of the ordinary unsustainable economy?

How this plays out changes and evolves as your life goes on. Plan for that from the beginning and you will be ahead.

Earning choices include —

  • Job in the globalized economy, which is what most people would call a “job job.” Maybe there might be some additional communitarian/sustainability component, and certainly if you are in the globalized economy, you don’t want a job that involves despoiling the environment. This can include professionals who choose to work for governments or institutions, such as a doctor who works for a hospital, or a teacher in a school.

  • Job in the local economy. This is the grassroots approach. It includes people working for local governments, institutions, or non-profits that are financed by local revenues.

  • Entrepreneurial activity in the globalized economy. This is where you work for yourself and maybe others work for you. Entrepreneurial activity includes the professions that practice independently, such as doctors, lawyers, nurse practitioners, accountants/CPAs, etc.

    Entrepreneurial activity in the local economy. Farming, crafts, artisan production, making, distribution, arts, communications.

    Cooperative business in the globalized economy. Your job or business is in conjunction with others in some form of cooperative endeavor.

    Cooperative business in the local economy. Local food coops, farmers’ cooperatives, etc.

None of these alternatives necessarily require full time work, in the form of the traditional 40 hour, five day work week. The amount of work you need is entirely a product of the level of the lifestyle you want to pursue, the value the economy places on the job or service you can do, and how much you want to do for yourself and community instead of spending and buying.

Doing alternatives include —

  • Membership in a work cooperative where in exchange for work you receive stated benefits or products.
  • Making! Clothing, body care products, herbal medicines, crafts, do your own repairs, build/make stuff for yourself and others. Etc.
  • Time banks (see 08091)
  • Barter networks and activities
  • Growing food (gardening on the ground, in containers, on walls, balconies, community gardens, etc.)
  • Membership in a cooperative work space/maker collective where you can make things.
  • Barn and house raising activities.

Spending

Economics is not only a matter of earning. It is a matter of spending. It is certainly a matter of not-spending everything. You need to earn a surplus over and above your basic needs and wants so you can do two things — share surplus with others, and store surplus for your own future needs.

This involves avoiding all of the greeds, being selective and prudent your wants, and frugal about your needs.

All of us receive and so we must give, but if our spending equals our income, there is no surplus to be given to others.

When you do spend money, where will you spend it? As we do our individual parts to move us toward a sustainable economy, our general goal is to spend our money in the local economy as much as possible and avoid the globalized economy. While few of us at this time and place can spend all of our money locally, everyone can pick the “low hanging local economy fruit.”

  • Everyone can avoid national restaurant chains and eat at locally owned establishments.
  • Everyone can avoid buying new cars from the globalized economy. If you need a vehicle, buy a used vehicle in the local economy.
  • Everyone can buy some food from local farmers.
  • Everyone can buy some artisanal body care products from local producers.

As we get our spending under control, we develop a surplus. This surplus is available for the other three primary economic activities: saving, giving, and investing.

Saving, Giving, Investing.

There is a difference between saving and investing.

Savings are immediately accessible and secure. This could be a hidden stash of money or regular savings or checking account in a locally owned bank or credit union. People need a year's supply of money for their basic needs in savings. For many of us, that is a very challenging goal. Given the economic tribulations of this era, nothing less can be advised. Many people who are now homeless due to economic disasters wish they had been more prudent when they had money.

Some of your savings should be in the form of food and other necessary consumable items.

There are many necessary activities which depend on the charitable support of others to provide their service to the community. Those with more than their needs have a moral duty to share with those who have not. To do this, you must have a personal surplus in your own life. This is one way of circulating surplus.

Investment is another way of circulating surplus. Investment comes after you've developed your personal savings to equal a year's worth of needs. This section has many ideas about investing in your local watershed.

Designing our way to economic freedom.

The purpose of permaculture design is to help you break free of the diuretic and laxative driven cycle of gorging and purging that is so characteristic of the modern economy.

If you want to Unplug, you won’t make it without a design to get you there. By careful attention to the details of the design of your economic affairs, you can avoid the traps laid for the unwary in the modern economy and find a liberating release from the unhealthy and ecological devastating cycle of consumption and waste.