What Remains Open

The deepest open question in the internal economic architecture concerns the relationship between Providence's internal economy and the external economic environment in which its participants live. Participants have external economic lives — mortgages, healthcare costs, family obligations, student debt — that create pressures on their participation in Providence's internal economy regardless of how well that economy is designed. The question of how Providence's internal economy accommodates the reality of its participants' external economic lives, without either becoming complicit in the external economy's extractive logic or becoming so disconnected from it that only the economically privileged can participate, is one of the most difficult design questions the institution faces.