Tag: life

Measuring the back-stop jobs

Here’s a familiar story:

This is a story of a layer of social life that doesn’t appear in any contract, law, or job description — and yet, without it, the whole thing quietly falls apart.

Call it the system of imperfect obligations. No single person is required to act. No one is legally on the hook. But someone steps up anyway — and in doing so, they hold something together that would otherwise fracture.

You know these moments when you see them:

The stranger who jumps into a pond to pull out a drowning child. The passing drivers who stop at a roadside crash and stay until help arrives. The employee who becomes a whistleblower, knowing the personal cost, because the fraud had to be exposed. The friend who drives an elderly neighbor to chemotherapy every Tuesday — not because they were asked, but because someone had to.

None of these are rights. They aren’t enforced, and failing to perform them carries no legal penalty. They live in the space between law and love — the domain of norms, trust, and quiet expectation.

What’s remarkable is that this space scales. When a community of people consistently honors these unwritten obligations — not because they must, but because they understand that everyone benefits when they do — something more durable emerges. Consider diamond traders, who conduct enormous transactions on a handshake, backed by centuries of community reputation rather than legal contracts. When trust reaches that kind of density, informal obligation starts to function like institutional infrastructure.

That’s the hidden architecture. Rights protect us from the worst of each other. Laws keep order. But it’s the imperfect obligations — the voluntary, uncompelled acts of people showing up when no one technically has to — that make a community worth living in.

We don’t talk about this enough. Maybe because it can’t be mandated, it gets overlooked in policy. But cultivating it matters: in how we raise children, build organizations, and decide what kind of neighbors we want to be.

The backstop only works if someone is willing to be it.

At the juncture

Liberalism seems straightforward. Individuals are meant to live their lives freely. They flourish when they can follow their ambitions, or talents, or desires for a quiet life. As long as they do no harm to others, people left to their own devices can lead good lives.

All this is fine and good. But of course, we don’t live alone. We live with others. And it is at the juncture of protecting the desire for the self and the duties to the group that friction seems the most keen.

It’s perfectly acceptable for spouses to assign their liberties to each other. One takes care of pecuniary matters while the other looks after the relational part of the family, which is a common division. But sometimes the first is caught saying, “I own it all,” and the other is planning without a thought for the other. After a decade or two, one forgets what the other does for them. Slowly, without gratitude, all the small tasks enabling the freedoms they cherish are taken for granted.

The public and private often evolve into a crisis of duty.

Children easily take for granted the investments their parents made in their upbringing, especially in the US. It is easy for them to minimize what was done and begrudge them beneficial attention in their later years. Neighborhood dwellers take for granted the civic do-gooders who are responsible for small but useful things like stop signs and play lots. Volunteering to maintain or perpetuate shared services is thought of as optional.

And then, coming at the friction from the other angle, there are the enforcers. Those who wish to make every norm a rule. Instead of contributions made in sync with people’s time and talents, they wish to meter it all out and pass the collection plate with vigilance. The spirit of the exchange is ruined. Instead of thankful for the effort, people are resentful for the absence.

Liberalism maneuvers best along a framework for optimal execution. Liberalism needs a framework to avoid undermining itself from the illiberal tendency residing in most human hearts.

How would it feel?

People speculate why young people have delayed home purchases. Only around 20% of home purchases fall in this category. A historic low. But is it that surprising? Look at the surge of foreclosures in ’07-’08 and ’09. Hundreds of thousands of people who were never meant to have financial struggles lost their homes.

Children ages 8-12, old enough to sense the stresses within their families, yet too young to analyze the impact of a national financial crisis, were bystanders to these unpleasant legal actions in the early 2000’s. These are today’s young home buyers. Uncertain of what a real estate purchase will do for them. The anxiety associated with foreclosures has often been portrayed in litterature.

In Death of a Salesman, the family’s fear of losing their home emerges gradually, revealed not through a dramatic announcement but through Linda’s quiet confession that they are barely keeping up with the mortgage. She tells Biff and Happy that Willy has been borrowing money just to make the house payments—a disclosure that reframes the entire domestic landscape. What had seemed like an ordinary family home is suddenly understood as something fragile, held together by secrecy and strain.

The looming threat of foreclosure exposes the play’s deepest emotional fractures. The mortgage becomes a symbol of Willy’s unraveling identity—his failure as a provider and his desperate clinging to the American Dream. Linda’s hushed explanations carry a mournful tenderness, showing how fear and loyalty tangle together under financial pressure. For Willy, the house is both sanctuary and burden, and the possibility of losing it turns that symbol of pride into a reminder of collapse. The family’s anxiety over the home’s instability reveals how economic pressure corrodes affection, pride, and hope, tightening around them until it shapes every gesture they make toward one another.

A social model of Trick-or-Treat

Everyone laments the commercialization of the holidays. How tacky! How capitalistic! So why do these distasteful traditions continue to weave their way through our culture? Let’s investigate the social upsides to see if there are compensating factors.

First, it is necessary to identify the parties involved. There are the vendors of fun-size treats. These folks are unabashedly money-oriented organizations. There are parents who dutifully open their front doors and dig handfuls of treats out of their stash to parlay them into the bulging pillowcases or plastic pumpkins presented by the costumed youngsters yelping: Trick-or-Treat! These folks are subsidizers. They purchase the candy with no designs on a pecuniary return for their money. And then there are the kids. One might think they have no investment, but that’s not true. Their delight at the mystery of the evening, at the intrigue of mask-wearing, and at the innocent charm they exude is a draw to those around them.

For a proper evaluation, one must anchor the focus of discretion. This tracks which group is being considered in the balancing of accounts. Let’s start with the stores. They are commercial ventures, supplying items their customers demand in return for enough to pay their expenses and a little more. If Halloween went to the wayside, they would simply move on to something else. There seems to be very little to model here in terms of the social sphere.

Now, let’s anchor the view from the adult participants. They lay out the cash– so what do they get? They bring joy to their kids and perhaps a little to themselves. The event might rope in grandma and grandpa, a couple of worthy backstops in the activities of family life. Lastly, the business of activity on the streets brings out a Jane Jacobsian benefit. So, parents and adults can gain in private pleasure, family bonding, and community spirit.

Lastly, consider the kids. It might seem like a windfall for them. However, probably more than one parent keeps the incentives of a successful Halloween as a behavior modifier. So they too pitch in with a bit of work when it comes to supporting the holiday.

For the foreseeable future, the balance in favor of the social gains indicates a continued future for this spooky festivity.

How many homes in a Neighborhood?

As we say here at Home Economic, context is important. Recently I heard the figure of twenty homes as a sweeping number with respect to an impact on a neighborhood. In order to evaluate an impact, it is necessary to know how many homes total constitute a typical neighborhood.

A standard city block with a sidewalk out front and an alley to the back generally has twelve to fourteen homes per city block. So if you were to think that your neighborhood was your block and two to the north, two to the east, two to the south, and then two to the west – you would have about 230 homes in total. In this case, twenty homes is about ten percent. If all these homes were in poor repair, for instance, this could be noticeable and have a negative effect on the outward appeal or from the street view.

Neighborhoods are quite a bit bigger than a cluster of two blocks to either side. Here’s a neighborhood map of Minneapolis, for example.

The USPS offers a useful tool for direct marketers which calculates the number of residential mail stops on mail carrier route (it’s called Every Door Direct Mail). We can use it here to help estimate the number of households by neighborhood. The first map is for the Armatage neighborhood. The number of homes comes in at 2620. Since the routes overlap into Fulton, let’s use a number of 2400. In this case twenty homes in the Armatage neighborhood makes up 0.83% of the total.

The Fowell neighborhood on the other side of town is know for having a larger share of corporate owned rental housing. Here, our USPS tool tells us that the neighborhood contains 2182 properties. Again rounding down is appropriate as the one route that runs on the west side of the cemetary is in the Victory neighborhood. Let’s use 2000 homes, in which case twenty porperties is 1% of the total.

It’s hard to see where one percent of a total number can have an effect on quality of life issues.

When a raw number gets tossed into a conversation as if it were a grenade ready to explode, always ask for context.