Jonathan Rowe | Writings on economy, commons, language and other things

It is an article of faith among economists that a resource without a private property regime is destined for overuse. Yet on Bali, an island in the Indonesian archipelago, that [...]

There was a time, a few days ago in human history, really, when people spent a lot of time looking at the sky at night.   To read Greek mythology, and [...]

For a preview of the next big turn of the political wheel, we might consider a drama that is unfolding in the realm of computers and the World Wide Web. [...]

GDP and productivity don’t measure what’s really going on in the economy—or in people’s lives. Jonathan Rowe on measuring what matters.

Testimony of Jonathan Rowe Co-director of the West Marin Commons Before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce, Trade and Tourism March 12, 2008 [...]

Why we need new measures of progress, why we do not have them, and how they would change the social and political landscape

Enlarging Our Sense of “the Economy”

What is called “economics” is really psychology on steroids. It starts with a model of human nature and extrapolates an entire scenario for how the world works from that. The [...]

When Jimmy Wales, a refugee from options trading, set out to create an encyclopedia online, he thought first of the Britanica model, except with volunteers. He assigned articles to professional [...]