As with so many aspects of the larger human project, it becomes very easy to confuse the map with the territory, or to confuse an abstract concept with a physicalness outside of people’s minds. One stark example is the labeling of collective human productive activities (an economy?) as one “-ism” or another. If you, the generous reader, will permit some cognitive flexibility, consider that any of the 19th century ideologies didn’t have a worldwide instantaneous communication network as an explicit contingency. All “economic systems” are ways of talking about (constructing a narrative around) how people interact. There are no economic systems “out there” in nature, we construct and mold the current state of affairs to our needs (perceived and real) based on our (best?) understanding of human nature. I would content that we know a bit more about human nature now than 200 years ago, and therefore shouldn’t our economic organizing be updated as well?
From the 10,000 meter view, it’s obvious that we’ve never had “true” laissez faire capitalism, nor collective communism. All human interactions are arbitered to some degree, and therefore the question is more “what regulations and to what degree” than “no regulations” or “the state runs everything”. Given the innate human biases and survival heuristics, it is unfair and unproductive to expect rational Homo economicus behavior for all things that matter (health insurance, education, standards and measures across large geographies). Likewise, there is tremendous value in the adaptive collective intelligence of consumer markets (for most things that aren’t strictly necessary for survival). I’ll pick on capitalism just as an example, largely because I’m personally more a fan of capitalism than communism (see, even I’m not immune). As Zak Stein mentioned in the Village Venture Podcast we don’t’ even truly have markets, which require adequate mutual information and accounted for negative externalities. OR, a more visceral metaphor, that capitalism is like an adolescent brain with an adult body, capable of power, but not trained in long term consequential thinking (ie return on shareholder investment isn’t exactly in line multigenerational infrastructure)
I like words that do heavy cognitive lifting. “Communism” and “Free market Capitalism” are reductive and restrictive and not reflective of actual human macro-psychology, and thus I don’t find them terribly useful as labels for the larger human project. What if we subsidize the behaviors we want to see via the public coffers, while simultaneously regulating capital markets for consumer goods? It might be hard, because it isn’t “capitalism” nor “socialism”, or perhaps it might be easy once we stop equivocating terms with realities.
What has this to do with a 24/7/365 school? Funding, for one; if we even pretend to care about the wellbeing of children, we should subsidize it, regardless of which economic theory we subscribe to. Freedom and markets depend on an adequately educated populace, so it’s important to make an investment in the next generation of consumers and producers (or more appropriately, people). Also, formally instilling elements of Piaget’s Formal Operational Thinking will be a critical component of education, especially, as I mentioned above about abstract principles which have no physical reference (like an economy), we get the opportunity to construct these abstract principles rather than accept them for granted.