Every morning across the Caribbean, thousands of people wake up to a routine defined not by opportunity, but by quiet persistence in the face of systemic institutional failure. Take Keisha, for example: she drags herself out of bed at 4:30 a.m. not for an early work shift, but because this is the only window water flows reliably from her taps. She rushes to finish laundry and stockpile buckets before the supply cuts out again, a common disruption that has become ordinary. When her partner Rhaj leaves the house at 6:10 a.m. for an 8:00 a.m. work shift that’s just 20 minutes from their home, he builds in extra hours to account for unpredictable public buses and perpetual traffic congestion. For Keisha and Rhaj, the accumulated small struggles of daily life keep them from accessing basic opportunities they desire: a water storage tank, a personal car, private education for their children that offers a more reliable alternative to failing public schools.
Later that same day, Keisha and her friend Lasonta join a snaking line for passport applications that stretches out the door of the government office, even though they arrived early. After two hours of waiting with no end in sight, Lasonta points out the unspoken rule: they will spend all day here unless they have a personal connection to skip the queue. This cumbersome, exclusionary bureaucratic process is no accident. As Professor C. Justin Robinson, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal of The UWI Five Islands Campus, outlines in the first installment of his three-part series on the Endurance Economy, the modern passport application process retains the structural logic of post-emancipation administrative systems designed to control formerly enslaved people through endless registration requirements and documentary barriers. By evening, when the power cuts out again, Keisha adds another item to the growing list of private coping solutions her household must buy to compensate for public failure: a personal generator like the one Lasonta owns.
This pattern of daily, unremarkable struggle is what Robinson calls the Endurance Economy: a system where ordinary people do not participate in an economy that serves them, but instead endure an institutional structure designed around priorities that leave their needs as an afterthought. What makes this system so persistent, Robinson explains, is that none of these individual inconveniences qualify as large-scale disasters. They never make front-page news, never prompt emergency cabinet meetings, and never get counted in official national statistics. They are just accepted as the “normal” texture of everyday life for thousands across the region.
Robinson first introduced the concept of an economy that people endure rather than choose in his previous article “No One Is Coming to Save Us.” In this series, he aims to formally define the Endurance Economy, dissect its underlying mechanisms, and propose actionable solutions to dismantle it. Beyond unreliable utilities and bureaucratic queues, other common features of the system include circular documentary requirements for government services (where citizens are asked to provide a government-issued document to get another government-issued document) and months-long wait times for basic vehicle replacement parts shipped from abroad.
Robinson pushes back against the common, harmful narrative that the Endurance Economy is a product of Caribbean cultural traits, arguing that this lazy explanation is nothing more than an excuse for systemic institutional failure. The same people who are incorrectly labeled as indifferent or unmotivated when working in public sector agencies like the passport office or water authority deliver world-class service in private sector roles at hotels, international call centers, accounting firms, and export businesses. The difference is not the people, Robinson emphasizes: it is the institutional structure, clear performance expectations, robust supervision, meaningful incentives, and most critically, the option for customers to take their business elsewhere if service fails.
Rooted in the legacy of the region’s plantation economy, the Endurance Economy carries forward the same core priority: organizing institutions around the needs of external and elite interests, leaving local communities to take whatever resources and services remain. As economist Lloyd Best argued, the traditional plantation economy structured all activity around the demands of foreign enterprises, with domestic populations only receiving whatever was left over. This dynamic has evolved directly into the modern Endurance Economy, where local people are afterthoughts, served only after institutions have protected their own procedures, hierarchies, revenue, and convenience.
The Endurance Economy survives because its costs are invisible. Unlike a catastrophic Category 5 hurricane or a collapsing hospital roof that triggers immediate public outcry and official investigations, the daily small nuisances of the Endurance Economy only produce private frustration, and often even lead to blame being cast on the victims themselves. Robinson describes it as “death by a thousand cuts”: a slow, cumulative drain on well-being and productivity that never gathers enough public attention to spur reform.
American journalist Annie Lowrey coined the term “time tax” to describe the uncompensated hours citizens waste waiting in lines, filling out redundant forms, and returning multiple times to access basic services. It is a levy no one voted for, that never appears in any government budget, and that is collected from people trying to access services that are already rightfully theirs. For Keisha and Lasonta, that time tax is the entire morning wasted waiting for a passport application. For Rhaj, it is the extra two hours he spends every single workday commuting because of unreliable public transit and unaddressed traffic.
This time tax is levied on top of official taxes, and it falls disproportionately on low-income and marginalized communities. Wealthy and well-connected people can simply buy their way out: they pay for private backup generators, water tanks, private education, and skip public lines through personal connections. These costs never appear when finance ministers present annual budgets, even though they add up to a massive hidden drain on household resources and national productivity. To address this gap, Robinson proposes the creation of a formal “Endurance Account” to track and publish these hidden costs.
A particularly damaging dynamic of the current system is that the groups most capable of advocating for reform are often the same ones that can afford to exit the system privately. When Keisha and Rhaj finally buy a water tank, they stop experiencing daily outages and stop raising complaints. When Keisha’s mom buys a generator, she stops calling the electricity company to demand better service. When Keisha and Lasonta send their kids to private school, they stop advocating for improvements to public education. None of these private choices are morally wrong—families are just doing what they must to protect their own well-being—but every private exit removes a powerful voice from the movement for public systemic change.
The first step to dismantling the Endurance Economy, Robinson argues, is to drag its invisible burdens into the public light. Building on colleague Professor Troy Lorde’s call to address Caricom’s missing infrastructure, Robinson proposes the Endurance Account: an annual public report paired with accessible public dashboards that measure and publish the full cost of coping with the Endurance Economy. These dashboards would track key metrics: hours citizens spend waiting in lines or returning multiple times for services, total annual hours of water and electricity outages, total household spending on private backup systems and substitutes for failed public services, and the average wait time for routine applications, repair requests, and claims to be processed.
Robinson asks whether Caribbean nations can legislate a statutory requirement for all public agencies to publish their own annual time tax data. Once the full scale of lost productive time and diverted household income is made public, he argues, it will fundamentally change the national political conversation. By turning anecdotes about long lines and constant outages into formal public data, private inconveniences become public problems, coping is no longer mistaken for prosperity, and citizens will demand the systemic change needed to build an economy that serves them, rather than one they must endure. Robinson will dive deeper into customer service failures in the Endurance Economy in the second installment of the series.