Today I am learning about The Economy of Communion movement in Omaha, NE. My visual first impression of downtown Omaha is that it looks like mid-century New York City.
The Economy of Communion, founded by Chiara Lubich in Brazil in 1991, is an example of cooperation emerging through voluntary economic relationships. Businesses participating in the movement operate in competitive markets, but they commit to sharing profits and supporting people in need.
EoC gave me some books in which I came across a chapter by Luigino Bruni that included a passage on expressive rationality:
A rationality that is capable of communion should also transcend the simple instrumental logic… This term was introduced to indicate economic action that is guided not by a logic that is primarily instrumental, but by the desire to “express” something of one’s own personality or one’s own values…
Some concept of this runs through economic literature (Kreps 1997). Bruni claims that the idea can be traced back to Max Weber. The EoC project could also relate to the work of Elinor Ostrom (1990), who challenged the conventional wisdom that common resources inevitably suffer from overuse. Ostrom documented communities that successfully developed their own institutions for cooperation.
- Economy of Communion. “About the Economy of Communion.” Official project website.
- Kreps, David M. “Intrinsic Motivation and Extrinsic Incentives.” The American Economic Review, vol. 87, no. 2, 1997, pp. 359–64. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2950946. Accessed 7 Nov. 2026.
- Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.
