David Morris

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“Wherever possible, we should shrink the distance between those who make the decisions and those who feel the impact of those decisions,” says David Morris, describing the mission of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a think tank with offices in Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis that he has helped guide for the past 25 years. His statement sounds so sensible, so indisputable, so all-American—who could be against it? A lot of powerful interests, it turns out.

“Right now, society is going the other direction,” Morris notes. He can point to an avalanche of economic and political trends threatening the vitality of self-reliant communities, from megamergers that consolidate financial power in faraway boardrooms to international trade agreements that strip authority from democratically elected leaders and give it to international bureaucracies.

“Politicians gargle with the word community,” Morris says, “but they spit it out as soon as they walk offstage. The policies they pursue drive us away from community.”

Yet Morris remains a strong-willed optimist. “Small, local enterprises need not simply tap into our nostalgic yearning for a simpler and more rooted yesteryear,” he declares. “They can make a powerful case that humanly scaled institutions are the most effective way to go.” Always armed with real-world evidence to back up his beliefs, Morris notes that the savings and loan institutions that stuck close to home in their lending during the 1980s did not generally get into financial trouble. It was S&Ls who strayed from the mission of working in local regions who stuck taxpayers with the multi-billion-dollar tab for the S&L bailout.

He recently launched the New Rules project, dedicated to showing public officials, business leaders, and citizens that communities are best served when people draw upon local resources—both human and natural—to run their economy and make the decisions affecting their lives.

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