Economic Culture, What’s That?

Too often, people are treated as passive participants in the economy rather than co-creators of the systems that shape their lives. While communities are deeply tied to local and national economies, the cultural foundations of these economic systems—the norms, values, and beliefs that govern them—are often invisible, disempowering, or misunderstood.

This cultural disconnect weakens people’s ability to understand and exercise their economic rights. It fuels harmful public narratives: electing leaders who promise prosperity but fail to deliver; viewing safety nets as “handouts” rather than tools for stability; and crediting corporate success for job creation and economic growth while ignoring the public investment behind it.

Because cultural drivers remain unexamined and unchanged, current economic justice solutions alone — from policy advocacy to direct service provision – fall short of what we need in the New Economy. Until we make these invisible forces visible and change them, families will continue to struggle, and structural inequities will persist.

Powering Public Sector Collaboration

In the face of rising national authoritarianism, local governments are powerful vehicles of resistance through innovation and culture change. Yet often, they look upward to the federal government—rather than across to regional allies—for the power and partnerships needed to advance their economies.

Economic Culture Lab takes a place-based, regional approach to shaping economic culture, by bringing together civil servants, political and civic leaders with leading economists to conduct real-world demonstrations. These demonstrations unlock new understandings of the economy, reshape economic values, and model new practices — changing how public leaders and the families they serve align with economic policies and programs.

Economic Culture Lab acts as the connective tissue and infrastructure for public servants — through facilitation and implementation support — to create bold, harmonized programs fit for the New Economy.

Our first initiative, the California Economic Culture & Rights Table (CERC), activates municipal leaders and economists to pool resources, generate combinative strategies, and implement largescale demonstrations.

Starting with the New Economy

The New Economy — often described as the fundamental restructuring of the economy in a rapidly evolving era of data and technology — is where we start. We look to the future and work backwards to understand how we need to shift today. Partly, this means expanding the lens of economic justice solutions such as for wealth building, from traditional assets like income and real estate, to emerging sources like data and digital assets.

Grounded in the lens of the New Economy, Economic Culture Lab is

  • informing public understanding to demystify how the economy actually works;

  • incentivizing values that lead to equitable outcomes; and

  • influencing everyday economic practices to support the well-being of families.