2021: Rebuilding the Economic Engine

Positioning the household as the engine of sustainable economy

In 2021, houses in Austin are hot commodities. This might sound good from a transactional perspective, i.e., the sellers & the City are financially benefiting from the higher prices, but is that the best way to measure the value of this container?

What is lost when a house is limited to its transactional value?

We have been entrained to reduce our interactions with each other to economically measurable transactions, e.g., monetary capital for goods and services. This devalues the additional, invisible capitals in play that brought us to that point: attention, relationship, time, trust and wisdom, aka the ‘keystone capitals’ in our economic ecosystem.

These five keystone capitals were discussed in a podcast episode. Unlocking these forms of soft capital will bring forward unexpected complexity that enriches your investment in neighborhood economics.

What are “keystone capitals?”

Well, think about keystone species within an ecosystem: “a species on which other species in an ecosystem largely depend, such that if it were removed the ecosystem would change drastically.”