I’ve been looking through some US and EU labor data and I have started to wonder why don’t more of the working poor join local mutual aid groups instead of staying at their likely shitty jobs or relying on charities?
This is a study on the labour distribution in the US among the working poor
On table 4 it shows that there are about 5,812,000 people that are classified as working poor ( Its says number in thousands so I multiplied the number given by 1000) and that alot of those jobs are in essential services like making food or providing support to others.
Similar diversity is show in the EU as well
So if most of these people decided to stop working at their current job and instead bring that those skills to a mutual aid network wouldn’t they still get most of the resources they need because other specialists would be there to help them and also live a generally more happy life?
Also the reason why I am saying instead of charities is because charities become less effective the more people request from them because they have limited resources to share and also mainly supported by wealthy people that can unilaterally give and take away support.
Whilst mutual aid networks can take the diversity that more people joining the network gives them and use it to offer more services to other people in that community.
This seems like a no brainer so what am I missing?
What you’re describing is essentially how society functioned for most of human history until the advent of large-scale, organized civilization. In fact, even in modern society, most family structures and friendship dynamics worldwide still use this.
Mutual aid depends upon reciprocity, the idea that I help you today on the understanding that you’ll help me when I need help. But what happens when Gondor calls for aid but Rohan refuses to answer, especially despite being capable of it? Well, at a small scale (such as within families or among friends) we make a mental note to never help that particular person again, and we might even tell others that they’re a selfish scumbag and not to trust them. Therein lies the disincentive to cheat: if you cheat, you will find yourself cut off from any future aid.
But humans have a fundamental limit to how many personal relationships we can maintain. In fact, this concept has a name: Dunbar’s Number.
> Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.[1][2]
> It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.[8][9]
So if your society/family/mutual aid group gets bigger than Dunbar’s number, you stop being able to meaningfully keep track of who’s a cheat, and so does everyone else. Without that, cheaters can cheat without nearly as much repercussion, which breaks down the whole system of trust mutual aid is built upon.
And that’s why we now have more complex systems in modern society. Things like currency and laws to ensure fair exchange and stop cheaters. But even with all of this, we still have mutual aid in the form of our immediate friends and family. And because friends and family are a naturally select group, they’ll never surpass Dunbar’s number, allowing the system of trust to (mostly) function. It still sometimes breaks, of course, such as when families excuse toxic behavior so as to not rock the boat.