Featured Article
Consumed by Commerce
Part of the spell that the term “the market” casts upon our minds is that it appears to refer to something specific—but it does not. “The market” of policy is not the world but rather a way of looking at the world—a system of belief, a mental overlay, that has been projected into all space and defines it, regardless of what is actually there. To many, it is the functional equivalent of God.
But in the beginning this was not the case. Markets were particular events, much the way street fairs and farmers’ markets are today. There was society, and part of that society was times and places for commercial exchange. The process by which actual markets have become “the market” has brought a kind of economic failure that economists don’t even know how to see. Their prescriptions, in fact, are making the problem worse, because they are displacing further the productivity of the social commons and stripping away the generative social functions that markets used to serve.
Commons
Pre-Distributive Economics and Sufficiency for the Long Haul
Part I: Inequality, The Iatrogenic Spiral, and Systemic Diminishing Returns The problem is that the explosive growth of the global economy has not brought a corresponding increase in global well … More
The Missing Sector
Enlarging Our Sense of “the Economy”
Meet Us at the Zocalo
We humans like to gather, and to be around other people in informal and unstructured settings. For time out of memory, places in which to do so were built into … More
Economic Indicators
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Looking Backward: Economics and the Cult of Yesterday
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.
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The Gross Domestic Product
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 … More
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Is Happiness a Commons?
Gunnar Myrdal, the late Swedish economist, once noted the strange tendency of his profession to barricade itself against human reality. In true sciences, such as biochemistry and physics, hypotheses are … More
Economics
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Pre-Distributive Economics and Sufficiency for the Long Haul
Part I: Inequality, The Iatrogenic Spiral, and Systemic Diminishing Returns The problem is that the explosive growth of the global economy has not brought a corresponding increase in global well … More
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The Missing Sector
Enlarging Our Sense of “the Economy”
-
Looking Backward: Economics and the Cult of Yesterday
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.
About
Jonathan Rowe was a writer who wrote about the commons, diseconomy, economics, economic indicators, corporations, and many other subjects.
Jonathan was an editor at the Washington Monthly magazine and a staff writer at the Christian Science Monitor. He contributed to Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, Reader’s Digest, Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, American Prospect, Adbusters, and a host of other publications.