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Walking Cities and Commons-Based Health Policies

When I lived in New York City I walked everywhere, and all the time.  It wasn’t just because driving there is insane and I didn’t have a car anyway. The city calls you forth.  In decent weather you can walk for miles and hardly be aware of it. As a walker I was not alone. New York is a city of them.  On visits upstate I’d see a great many hefty people. At malls I’d get stuck in aisles behind matching double-wides.  In the city there wasn’t much of that.

People often think of New York as a decadent and unhealthful place.  I began to wonder if in fact the opposite was true. I made some calls but couldn’t get anywhere.  This was about fifteen years ago.  Apparently, some researchers have been on the case in the years since.  The current (August 15th) issue of New York magazine has a feature story called “Why New Yorkers Last Longer.”  Residents there, it turns out, live on average nine months longer than Americans do generally. Their life expectancy is increasing at a faster rate. Walking is a major reason why.

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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

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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

About

Headshot of Jonathan Rowe

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.

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