Did you know that Christmas in the U.S. is wasteful? Not in the way that is numbingly obvious to most of us, but in a narrower and more technical way […]
Gifts
A child is born, and its first cry goes right through you. It changes you; and more it creates you. Something that was latent and unrealized – a parent – […]
The Technology of Obedience: Corporate Research and the Invisible Hand
Is technology an independent force that evolves inexorably along a particular path – the path of best answers? Or do the corporations that drive innovation steer it towards their own […]
Who Decides Who’s Sick?
Back when, Ralph Nader used to ask college audiences, “Who defines what a problem is in America today?” Who decides that tired hair, say, is a problem of epochal proportions, […]
The Strange “Economics” of Breast Milk
OnTheCommons.org December 1, 2006 By Jonathan Rowe You probably heard about the woman who was kicked off a Delta flight recently for breast feeding her daughter. She was in a […]
Consumed by Commerce
How Commerce Consumed the Commons
Where the commons went, and how to get it back
Milton Friedman: Romantic
We tend to romanticize the opposite of what we don’t like, and in political economy the tendency reaches full flower. To those who hate “the market,” the government is a […]
The Seed Gestapo and Third World Farmers
In my wife’s dialect of kari-ya, which is spoken on the island of Panay, in the Philippines, there is a word binhi, which refers to the grains of rice that are […]
Blue Commoners, and Abstractions in the Red Zone
The Red States/Blue State trope lost ground last week, at last. It never was what it seemed to begin with. As numerous writers have pointed out, the electoral divide is […]
Billboards in Space, Accomplices in Enclosure
The greatest ally of the corporate trespasser is our human tendency to forget. So long as a violation lingers in the memory there is a possibility of doing something about […]