The Maholian Way - Part Four: Building self-reliant economies

There are two main reasons why – across the industrialised world – the above goods and services may not currently be sourced locally. One reason is that, in the absence of full environmental costing of transport, storage and packaging, it’s economic for goods to be produced at some distance from the consumer. The other reason is that a local area may not have a big enough or prosperous enough population – and thus market – for the local market alone to be economically viable. In Maholia the situation is different. With full environmental costing of all economic activity – including transport, storage and packaging – the pendulum of viable production and service provision has swung substantially towards the local. And in Maholia there is a strong focus on ensuring that local economies have the critical mass - through populations that are big and prosperous enough – to make it viable to produce goods and deliver services in all or almost all the categories listed above.

Looking at this latter issue more closely, we are all familiar with stories of the regional town that has a large industry close down. Typically, before long many of the businesses supplying equipment, materials and services to that industry also close down or decline. Without jobs or customers people who have been working in these industries start leaving town, and those who stay have less money to spend. As a result, shops, tradespeople and professional services decline or close their doors. Banks relocate. The local high school population shrinks, and a decision is made to close it and bus students to another town. Perhaps the local hospital suffers a similar fate. Now that the town has far fewer facilities, services and jobs, it becomes a much less desirable place to live in because, if you do, you have to either travel elsewhere to obtain these things, or do without. So more people move out and the few who move in are generally seeking cheap housing.

While the large industry that closed down may not have been economically viable, the reason the town’s overall economy and population declined from that point on was that the closure of that industry set in train a vicious cycle of contraction of otherwise viable enterprises. But it’s also possible to generate virtuous cycles of economic and population growth in a locality. Private enterprise can do this, but governments and communities can also have a hand in doing it. As noted, in Maholia there has been a conscious effort to foster prosperous, self-reliant economies, within localities maintained within the range of 50,000 to 250,000 people.

There are four Maholian cities with populations larger than this, but they attained this size before relationalist policies were adopted, and they now each contain a number of regional centres around which self-reliant economies have been developed.

As a result, local economies across the country are large enough and prosperous enough to provide markets for the range of goods and services listed earlier. And within these economies there are smaller economies providing a smaller, but still substantial, range of goods and services.

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