Who Keeps Society Running?

In short: Every society has the same jobs to do: keep people safe, share resources, care for each other, pass on knowledge. Four kinds of actors do this work: the state, markets, communities and families. No society relies on just one; what differs is the mix. And because they depend on each other, a change in one ripples through all the others.

The Question

What Every Society Must Do lists the tasks every society has to perform. This article asks the next question: who actually performs them, and how?

When people talk about “the system”, they usually mean the government. But a large share of society’s work happens elsewhere: in shops and companies, in neighbourhoods and associations, and above all at home.

Four Kinds of Actors

The state acts through laws, taxes and public services. Its strength is reaching everyone on equal terms and enforcing rules. Its weakness is that it can be slow, distant, and only as good as the politics behind it.

Markets act through prices and exchange. Their strength is coordinating millions of choices and rewarding innovation. Their weakness is that they serve those who can pay, and ignore costs nobody pays for, such as pollution.

Communities and civil society act through trust and shared norms: associations, cooperatives, religious groups, volunteers, neighbours. The economist Elinor Ostrom showed that communities can manage shared resources like forests, fisheries and water well, without either state control or private ownership. Their weakness is that they can exclude outsiders, and they are hard to scale up.

Families and households act through love and obligation. They provide most of the care in any society. The International Labour Organization estimates that people spend more than 16 billion hours a day on unpaid care work worldwide, about three-quarters of it done by women. This work rarely appears in economic statistics, yet without it nothing else would function.

The Main Public Systems

Within the state, and often shared with the other three, a handful of large systems carry out the core tasks:

System	What it does	Main tasks it serves
Political	Decides who holds power and how collective choices are made	Settling disputes, adapting to change
Legal	Turns decisions into binding rules and settles disputes	Security, settling disputes
Economic	Organises production and exchange. See The Economic System	Sharing resources
Education	Passes on knowledge, skills and values	Passing on knowledge
Health	Prevents illness and restores health	Care
Social protection	Supports people facing hardship: pensions, unemployment, disability, housing. See Social Redistribution	Care, sharing resources
Information and media	Produces and spreads news and knowledge	Social cohesion, adapting to change

Countries organise these very differently. The sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen described three broad types of welfare state: ones that leave most to the market, ones built around work and family, and ones where the state provides broadly for everyone.

How They Depend on Each Other

These systems form loops, where a change in one comes back around:

• A virtuous loop: good education raises skills and incomes, which raises tax revenue, which funds better education.
• A vicious loop: misinformation lowers trust, lower trust weakens democratic institutions, and weaker institutions protect the information space less well.

Power also runs both ways. Politics sets the rules for the economy, but economic power, through funding and lobbying, also shapes politics. Neither simply controls the other.

The systems thinker Donella Meadows pointed out that the most effective way to change a system is rarely to push harder on one part. It is better to change the goals, rules or information flows that shape how all the parts behave.

Examples

• Care for older people: depending on the country, it is provided mainly by families, by paid private services, by the state, or by a mix. When families get smaller and women work more outside the home, the burden shifts, and the other actors have to take more of it on.
• The internet and media: within about twenty years, online platforms changed how news is made and paid for. That in turn affected politics, trust and social cohesion. It is an example of a system that changed slowly for decades, and then very quickly.

The Human Side

Each actor meets different human needs. The state and markets mainly cover physical needs and security. Communities and families also meet the needs for belonging, recognition and care that no public service can fully replace. A society that weakens one actor needs another to fill the gap. See Human needs in the Personal Guide.

Open Questions

• What should be done by the state, what by markets, and what by communities? Countries answer very differently, and the balance shifts over time.
• How can care work done at home be recognised and supported?
• How can societies protect a healthy information system without restricting free speech?

Where Next

• Previous: What Every Society Must Do
• Next: The Economic System
• Related: What Is Society For?, Social Redistribution

Sources

• Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990)
• Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990)
• Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems (2008) and “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” (1999)
• Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944), on markets as part of society
• International Labour Organization, Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work (2018)