The Dance Floor Is an Economic Policy

We tend to frame today’s epidemic of loneliness and isolation either as a mental health crisis — rising rates of anxiety and depression— or as a political one, feeding polarization and the erosion of trust between groups. Both are true. But there is a third crisis running alongside those two: the crisis of vast economic inequality that has reached proportions we have not seen in over a hundred years. And rebuilding embodied, collective experiences isn't a lifestyle nicety to pursue once we've fixed the economy. It's a precondition for fixing and building a more equitable, more mutualist economy and society.

In its simplest form mutualism is based on the belief that individual and collective well-being are inseparable. Mutualism recognizes that your economic and social well-being is inseparable from that of your neighbors’ — a truth the pandemic made viscerally clear, when one person's infection became everyone's risk. A mutualist economy is not about eliminating markets, it is about embedding markets in social context and within social constraints.

More than 75 years ago, Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi warned in his book The Great Transformation that market economies, left unchecked, produce market societies, societies in which exchanges governed by custom, obligation, and need get stripped of that context and are judged only in price terms. When enough of social life gets commodified this way, profit-seeking stops being one force among many and becomes the organizing logic of everything— sometimes with catastrophic results. In such societies people can be denied medical care if they can’t pay for it, urban spaces are designed for automobiles instead of communities, the home is viewed as a financial asset rather than just a place to live and raise a family.

For sixty years, American society has been over-marketized, turning many parts of the basic social infrastructure people rely on for their wellbeing into financial assets, whose value is measured in financial rather than social returns. Financial markets, financial institutions, and financial elites have gained greater influence over economic policy and have garnered a larger portion of economic returns. In the process, our health, education, housing, and caregiving institutions, along with many others have become driven by the logic of financial returns at the cost of social cohesion and wellbeing. In a marketized society workers, students, tenants, elderly, and sick are viewed as revenue sources rather than compatriots we share social obligations with.

There is no shortage of policy fixes for curing today’s vast wealth inequality: reforming the tax code, rethinking executive pay to reward social along with financial returns, expanding worker co-ops and employee ownership, strengthening community banks, building a public option for AI. The list is long, and largely sound. Examples of these policies working exist in many parts of the world. However, in the current climate in the US, many such proposals are treated as politically unserious — utopian, unrealistic, a nonstarter. That verdict says less about the policies than about the culture and institutional arrangements in which they are circulating, a culture that has normalized an economy in which a handful of individuals control more wealth than entire nations, while their neighbors ration insulin and are drowning in debt.

That normalization didn't happen through legislation alone. It happened because we stopped believing in and seeing ourselves as a part of what Martin Luther King Jr. called "an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." Management guru Peter Drucker liked to say that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Having spent decades studying economic inequality and innovation cultures, I would argue that culture also eats policy and economics for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. To change policies, we need to change culture. And one powerful means for doing so requires bringing people together in physical spaces, in collective rituals and embodied experiences--music festivals, farmers’ markets, library readings, dance halls, communal choirs, knitting and sewing circles, and myriad other spaces where we connect with others in physical, not just digital spaces.

When we are physically together--when we drum, sing, dance, or march together, our brains synchronize — and do so far more powerfully than when we perform the same acts together online. Endorphins rise. Pain thresholds go up. We feel what the sociologist Émile Durkheim called "collective effervescence," a sense of euphoria from dissolving, however briefly, into something larger than ourselves. Strangers told to hold eye contact for two minutes report more attraction to each other than those who exchange only passing glances. Even a warm cup of tea, handed from one person to another, measurably increases the feeling of closeness between them. When we are together, our physiology changes. We are built for proximity. It is no accident that one of the cruelest punishments we can devise is solitary confinement.

None of this is new. Sharing meals, praying, chanting, dancing, playing music in groups— these rituals appear in nearly every human society because they are essential for social cohesion. We can think of them as technologies of belonging, evolved to blur the line between self and other. What is new is how many such technologies have been forgotten, and how much more we stand to lose as we hand our conversations, our companionship, even our affirmation, to algorithmic companions engineered to remove all friction and serve our every need.

The disappearance of embodied, collective life is not a side effect of our economic arrangements; it is one of their central drivers, and it feeds directly back into loneliness, distrust, and a tolerance for inequality that would otherwise be unthinkable. A comprehensive review of scholarly research has documented America’s growing levels of economic inequality since 1970’s moving in parallel with, and exacerbated by, physical segregation in our neighborhoods and social spaces. “Rich and poor Americans today are less likely to know one another and to share the same social spaces,” research concluded.

We need to start thinking of promoting embodied communal experiences as an economic policy priority beyond direct revenues such activities generate. It is tempting to file events like this under culture or tourism — nice to have, good for attracting tourists' dollars or improving property values — but not the real solid work of economic policy. That gets it backward. We need to invest in them to re-weave our communal culture and engender a sense of mutual interdependence essential to a well-functioning society and economy. A more mutualist economy will not be built by policy alone. It must be practiced — in habits, in norms, in rooms full of other people. The work starts not only in the tax code, but on the dance floor, at the communal table, in the choir loft: the places where we feel in our bodies, that we are bound together in a single fabric of destiny.

● Festivals is economic policy

● Music gatherings is economic policy

● Dance spaces is economic policy

● Library reading and discussions is economic policy

● Crafts circles is economic policy

● Teach-ins and learn-ins is economic policy

● Farmers’ markets is economic policy

● Communal meals is economic policy ● Civic imagination eve