Welcome to The Third Oikos
Welcome to The Third Oikos, a newsletter about what the good life looks like when technology is reshaping the household.
Oikos is a Greek term that means house, household, or family. The management of household work — oikonomia — is where we get the word “economy.” In a piece for National Affairs, Jon Askonas and Michael Toscano argued that history has been dominated by two main forms of household organization and production. But, almost without noticing, we’ve passed into a third form.
The first oikos was the household until the Industrial Revolution. Before that shift, the household was the central hub of economic production, and production was ordered by the needs of the household. In different societies, men and women had different roles, but “work” was something that both sexes did.
The second oikos came with the Industrial Revolution. In this period, productivity shifted to larger scale enterprises: the factory and the office. As production moved to corporate settings, the home went from a site of both consumption and production to one of mere consumption. Many of our ideas about domesticity are rooted in the modern split between the worlds of consumption and production.
But perhaps since the digital revolution, and surely since COVID, we’ve entered the third oikos. Technological developments have reshaped what a “household” is to a degree not seen since the Industrial Revolution.
The result is a mix of opportunities and challenges for households. Production is returning to the household, both via white collar Zoom work and more hands-on production techniques. There are opportunities to retrieve ways of ordering a household that were impossible a generation ago.
On the other hand, the challenges to communal and family life are real: social isolation, a massive spike in gender polarization, a massive drop-off in pairing off, a dramatically increased cost of living, and a plummeting fertility rate look like parts of a vicious cycle. “How do I live a good life?” is an eternal human question, but it can feel like a completely new challenge today. We can no longer take for granted basic facts about friendship, neighborhood, community, and family.
Each month, I’m going to interview flourishing family and community builders. I’ll try to understand their ambitions, and identify the practical techniques they use to make their households functional and beautiful. I’m hoping to draw out how individuals and families have adapted to the new technological environment they find themselves in: how they are protecting against new challenges to family life, and taking advantage of new opportunities for flourishing.
What does the good life look like in the third oikos? I don’t exactly know yet, but join me and let’s figure it out.
This interview series is made possible by the Foundation for American Innovation and the Institute for Family Studies.
