Greg Travis, one of the participants in our first Bloomington RootsCamp, talked a bit on Saturday about income leakage in Monroe County. His main example is the limestone industry, upon which Bloomington sits at Ground Zero. For years — once the resource was discovered to have a market — local owners employed local workers, exchanging one wealth (stone) for another (money). That isn’t the case any longer, however.
Our extractive industry is now less about trade and more about liquidation. It’s less about a balance of payments, money coming in at least equal to that going out, and more about money just going out.
That has created this strange dichotomy of a county of wealth surrounding an impoverished population. Income leakage is symptomatic of what economists term extractive industries, but Greg would like to see the definition expand: “I think we should consider any industry that exists to pump wealth out of a community, and into the pockets of those who don’t live in the community, as an extractive one.”
Greg’s math sums it up this way: “When community payday comes, one guy who flies in from Arkansas gets $16 bucks, and 99 homeboys get 85 cents, each.”
This example of community dynamics has real implications for designers. Often, these kinds of mechanics are overlooked. We can look at the richness of a resource and assume it to not only be constant but also a sign of health. We can look at the poverty and think there is a problem to be solved. It is more and more rare that we can find systems that simplistic in how they separate. The interconnectivity of one strength and another problem is vital to the health of a good design.
From the RootsCamp discussions, there were two tangible things I could do about this problem. One is to blog about it. Thanks to a timely email prompt from the Bloomington Alternative, I’ll check that off (although there is much more that can be written about the subject). The second is to “Buy local.” This is sometimes easier said than done, since walking around the campus or downtown doesn’t provide the cues to verify whether I’m contributing to income leakage. I can avoid corporate brands, and that is probably a safe bet. However, what if the product I’m avoiding doesn’t have a local provider? Worse, what if it does but I have not information channels that point the way to the right shelf? I suppose I could also make a habit of asking such questions and hope for guilt-relieving answers.
