Preconditions for Possibility: What Will It Take to Seed a Different Economic Future?
At the Wealth and Work Futures Lab (WWFL), one of our central inquiries revolves around what we call the preconditions for possibility.
For example:
What are the historical conditions that fertilized the soil to grow the economic landscape we live within today?
What new conditions must we nurture now to grow the democratic, relational, life-centered future we know is possible?
This isn’t a passive reflection. It’s an active practice, an act of imagination in the face of structural harm and scarcity. It’s about daring to believe we can live into new futures, even before they feel fully within reach.
At the Lab, this shows up in projects like the Employment Capital Project, which builds on the work of Thomas Shapiro. There, we study how employers can move beyond offering wages alone, but becoming sources of care, stability, mobility, and long-term social wealth.
How the Soil Was Stripped
We can’t plant new seeds without first acknowledging the soil we’ve inherited.
Our current economy didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was designed through policy, disinvestment, and exclusion, to benefit some while harming others. From redlining and the GI Bill to mass incarceration and the dismantling of public systems, deep structural inequities shape our present.
Between 1934 and 1962, the federal government backed $120 billion in home loans—98% went to white families. Redlining and GI Bill exclusions locked Black communities out of homeownership and wealth. Today, Black households hold just 15% of the wealth of white households.
Deindustrialization drained cities like Camden and Detroit of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs, undermining economic mobility—particularly for Black and Brown workers who had gained middle-class footholds through unionized industry. Today, both cities face persistently lower life expectancy and higher poverty rates than their state and national averages, legacies of industrial collapse and chronic disinvestment Policies like the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act fueled mass incarceration.
Among Black men born around 1981, 1 in 3 were projected to be imprisoned in their lifetime—though for those born in 2001, that figure has fallen to about 1 in 5 today. Even in mental health care, disinvestment means more people with serious illness end up in jail than in treatment. In some neighborhoods saturated by trauma and surveillance, PTSD rates mirror those of war zones.
These are not distant histories. They’re the conditions we live in—and grieve—every day. And still, in the face of these layered harms, people have resisted, reimagined, and reached toward one another. The grief is real—but so is the yearning for something more whole. That yearning requires us to shift our frame. Not just what went wrong, but what could be made right—together.
From “I” to “We”
In relation to these truths, I’ve been carrying with me a set of questions from Tracy K. Smith’s To Free the Captives that feel like they belong in the marrow of our work:
Can you live with me? Even if it will require you to loosen your grasp upon something to which you have been clinging a long time, tightly?
Can I live with it, with you? Even if it will require me to cede some stance, some sense of the world, which I have been prizing a long time, too?
What if we are being told, by the violence rippling through the world, that our living must not any longer be solely for ourselves?
What if the object each of us is undertaking is no longer an individual life, but a collaborative work massive in scale?
Smith asks us to reject the seductive falsehood of the American Dream—the myth of individual self-sufficiency. Her questions call us back to something that has all but been lost: the truth that our futures are bound together.
Prefiguration: Practicing the Future, Now
If we want a different economy, we have to ask: What can we do and practice now that will inform that future? What are we rehearsing in our workplaces, our movements, our relationships?
This is what we call prefiguration: the act of living the values and systems we hope to see, even within the constraints of the present. It’s not about waiting for perfect conditions. It’s about practicing them in the here and now.
We saw this clearly in the Occupy Wall Street movement. The encampments weren’t just protests—they were living experiments in cooperation, care, and collective decision-making.
People organized food, healthcare, libraries, and daily assemblies grounded in horizontal leadership. Even the layout of space reflected these commitments—commons were carved out for gathering, rest, care and learning. It wasn’t flawless—existing hierarchies and tensions still showed up—but it was a real attempt to live otherwise. And even after the encampments ended, Occupy’s seeds spread. Many of today’s mutual aid networks, debt collectives, and workplace cooperatives trace their roots back to its influence.
Prefiguration isn’t about utopia—it’s about trying, failing, adapting, and trying again. It’s about learning to act as if a better world is already possible.
We already see this in worker cooperatives, childcare collectives, community-run clinics, and neighborhood fridges. These are not just feel-good stories; they are real, ongoing experiments in economic democracy and mutual care.
From Mondragon’s worker-owned federation in Spain to the People’s Organization of Community Acupuncture (POCA) here in the U.S.—explored in our colleague Andrew Zitcer’s Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism—we see living proof that alternatives not only exist, but can thrive.
Work as a Site of Possibility
So, what does all of this mean for how we spend the bulk of our waking hours—for work?
Work shapes our time, our relationships, and our sense of self. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre points out how we’re judged by entirely different standards at work than at home—efficiency versus character—creating deep internal rifts.
We’re often told to keep work separate from life. But we know that’s not real.
If we spend hours every day in spaces that ignore care and exploit us, we carry that harm everywhere else we go. Likewise, when we experience collaboration, dignity, and shared power at work, it changes how we show up beyond it.
Psychologist Leon Festinger’s work on cognitive dissonance shows that we’re driven to resolve contradictions between our values and our behavior. Our work—how we organize it, who we center in it—is one of the most powerful places where this tension plays out.
This is why we keep asking:
What kinds of workplaces make healing possible?
What practices invite not just productivity—but wellbeing, democracy, and repair?
This isn’t just theory. It’s practice. It’s the work of regenerating the soil.
REFLECTION: What Will You Tend To?
Here’s a set of guided reflection questions, adapted from the Socio-Ecological Model, that we often return to in our work and invite others to sit with:
Individual: What daily practices might bring your actions closer to the future you long for? Where can you begin—or deepen—habits that reflect your values?
Interpersonal: How do your relationships—at home, at work, in community—reflect care and shared power? Which ones feel most nourishing? What ways of being in those relationships could you carry forward elsewhere?
Community: What communities are you a part of that are already modeling dignity, humility, and cooperation? What can you learn from them? How might you bring those values into spaces that haven’t yet made that turn?
Society: How do your political, economic, or cultural choices support or disrupt the systems we’ve inherited? What larger-scale practices could move us toward a more just and equitable future?
These aren’t questions we answer once. They’re questions we live inside—together. Because the future we want isn’t something we wait for.
It’s something we practice.
“What if the object each of us is undertaking is no longer an individual life, but a collaborative work massive in scale?” — Tracy K. Smith