(this is part of a series of posts, the link to the next one is at the bottom of the page)

There is a room in Stockholm where a bunch of kids I know hang out. It is a Sverok lokal, which is to say a little clubhouse for a gaming association, and it is exactly the unglamorous kind of good you would hope it is. Kids who do not have anywhere else to be go there. They play games, they argue about games, they sit around being teenagers together in a warm room that is not their bedroom and is not a shop that expects them to keep buying things. Some of them would be pretty lonely without it. It is, by any reasonable measure, a small and real social good.

I want to start with the fact that it works, because the rest of this post is about a problem, and I do not want you to come away thinking the situation is hopeless. It is not. We know how to make rooms like this. We have made one. The kids are ok, at least those that find this kind of resource.

Why does it exist?

It exists because it gets a grant. Public money for associations, what in Sweden we call föreningsbidrag, in this case handed out by MUCF, the agency for youth and civil-society affairs, through a system that was set up to fund youth organisations. Someone, at some point, decided that gaming clubs count, so a trickle of money flows to a federation, and some of that becomes rent on a room. That is the whole reason. Take the grant away and, almost certainly, no room.

And here is the bit that bugs me. The market was never going to build that room. Not because the market is evil, but because there is genuinely no money in it. You cannot sell “a place for lonely teenagers to feel less lonely.” The value is real, but it spills out sideways, onto the kids and their parents and the neighbourhood, and nobody can put it on an invoice. Economists call this a positive externality, which is a fancy way of saying a good thing that happens as a side effect, that the person doing it cannot charge anyone for. The dumb version is: the room makes the world a little better and makes precisely zero kronor, so left to its own devices, the economy does not build it.

So the room only exists because someone reached in by hand and paid for it directly. Can we teach the economy to see the value there naturally, without needing a planning committee? Hold that thought. I think it is most of the answer, but I want to show you the size of the problem first.

The rooms are disappearing, and so is a lot more

That Sverok lokal is an increasingly rare kind of thing. The general version has a name, the third place¹, the spot that is neither home (the first place) nor work (the second place). The café, the pub, the library, the club, the church hall, the union that was also just somewhere to be. We have fewer of them than we used to², and the ones that are left either don’t have many visitors or want you spending money the entire time you are in them.

But it is not only rooms. Look around and you notice a whole category of things quietly going missing, and they have a suspicious amount in common.

Nobody visits grandma. Partly because grandma is three hundred kilometres away, since everyone moved for work, or partly because grandma herself maybe is still working. Kids end up in front of a screen in the afternoon, because both parents have to be at a job and a tablet is a cheap stand-in for a present adult. The neighbour you used to know. The club someone used to run. The friend you used to see every week. People report fewer close friends than they used to, to the point that actual public health officials now say “loneliness epidemic” with a straight face³.

Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Every single one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have nothing to do with me at all. I am not going to claim I have found the one secret root of loneliness, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. We cannot cleanly untangle these. That is just honestly true.

What I will say is narrower, and I think it holds up: these all rhyme. And the thing they rhyme on is that they are all unpaid. Visiting grandma, raising your own kid, running the club, being a decent neighbour, keeping a friendship alive. None of it pays. All of it takes time. And I think one of the reasons we have less of it is the same boring reason I keep banging on about on this blog, which is labor pressure.

The thing the economy keeps doing

For almost all of us, a wage is the only way we get a claim on the things the world produces. That is what a salary really is. Not a reward for effort, but the one socially accepted ticket to food and shelter. Economists call this the distribution function of the wage. I just think of it as the only pipe through which stuff reaches you. And because it is the only pipe, you have to feed it. You sell your hours to a job, because the job pays, even in the cases where the genuinely better use of your time is something that does not pay. The afternoon with your kid. The Tuesday running the club. The trip to see grandma.

So you take the shift. And the economy looks at you taking the shift and concludes, smugly, that the shift must have been the most valuable thing you could possibly have been doing, because look, you chose it. Except you did not really choose it. You chose between the shift and not making rent. The room full of kids, the present parent, the visited grandparent, all of it lost a contest it was never actually allowed to enter.

The economy never sits up and goes “hang on, who is going to run the room?” It has no way to say that. It just quietly fails to fund the room, fills your afternoon with a job of marginal value, and moves on. If it could talk, the most it would ever manage, years later when maybe you’ve gotten away from a subsistence wage, is a sheepish “oh, yeah, that probably was not worth it.” And by then the afternoon is gone. You do not get the afternoon back.

This is the same idea as what I have called make-work, just pointed at your living room instead of at the office. It is the economy spending a genuinely scarce thing, human time, on output worth less than the time, and not even noticing, because all the price signals look fine.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea

I need to put a fence here, because “people have less time for family and community” is a sentence that some people love to finish in an ugly way.

This is not me saying the past was lovely and we should go back. It is not a call for mum to quit her job, or for grandma to be conscripted into unpaid childcare, or for any particular person to go back to any particular kitchen. That is the opposite of the point. The point is that people have quietly been stripped of the option to do the unpaid thing, because the unpaid thing does not pay rent and rent is not optional. The problem is not that someone is shirking their duty. The problem is that we built an economy where the loving, useful, unpaid choice is a luxury most people simply cannot afford.

So the fix is not to push anyone anywhere. The fix is to make the unpaid choice affordable, for whoever wants it, whoever they happen to be. Give people enough room to choose grandma, or the club, or the kid, without the alternative being “or starve.”

Three ways to pay for a room

So how do you actually get rooms full of kids? There are basically three settings.

One: leave it to the market. As established, you get no room. The market cannot see things it cannot sell, and a room full of happy teenagers is invisible to it. This is the default, and the default is bad.

Two: pay for it by hand. This is what Sweden does, and it is genuinely much better than nothing. The state notices a gap and plugs it directly with a grant. It is the improvised second pipe, the patchwork of grants and transfers we have bolted on, one programme at a time, to do the distributing that wages no longer manage on their own. It works. Our lokal is proof it works. But it is a patch. Someone on a committee has to keep choosing to fund it, every single year. And it only ever reaches the goods that somebody specifically thought to pay for. Nobody ever wrote a grant for “being a good neighbour,” so that one just stays broken.

Three: teach the economy to do it on its own. This is the one I actually want. Instead of the state hand-picking which good rooms deserve a cheque, you change the rule underneath, so that the people who would run the rooms can simply afford to. You do that by fixing the pipe. A basic floor of income that everyone gets, funded in a careful way I am not going to relitigate here (see the next post in this series for that), means the person who wants to spend their Tuesdays running the club is not forced to spend them on a marginal shift instead. The whole point is to stop the price system being blind to value that does not happen to arrive in the shape of a wage.

Does this replace the grants?

I am not going to pretend a basic income magically conjures gaming clubs out of thin air. It does not. Somebody still has to start the club, find the room, do all the boring organising. A floor does not do any of that for you. Targeting and universality each do something the other cannot. A grant can deliberately build one specific thing. A floor can quietly make a thousand unspecified things possible, without anyone having to choose them in advance.

So I am not even saying we should scrap the grants. The floor goes on top of what we already have (again, it is not difficult to fund, you just have to do it carefully! Check out the next post). Keep föreningsbidrag. Keep funding the lokal. All I am saying is that right now, a room full of kids gets to exist only because a committee remembered to fund it (sounds like a planned economy eh?), and that is a silly and fragile way to run a civilisation. We managed to build one room almost by accident. The goal is an economy where rooms like it are the normal outcome.

We have a room in Stockholm because, more or less by happenstance, someone funded a social good almost directly. That is genuinely wonderful, and it is not enough.

We need to teach the economy how to do that on purpose.

The next part of this series looks at Sub-subsistence work as well, and introduces the solution. The post is here.

Footnotes:

1. The term comes from Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (1989). Home is the first place, work is the second, and everything good and informal happens in the third. ↩︎
2. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) is the classic on the long decline of this sort of associational life, “social capital” in the jargon. He blames a whole pile of things, time pressure among them. ↩︎
3. U.S. Surgeon General, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (2023). It is an American document, but the pattern is not unique to America. ↩︎

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