Featured Article

Slouching to Enclosure Land: How We’ll Lose Those Parks

Most of life is habit. We like to think that we think and choose. Economists have made a religion out of this assumption. But in daily life, what we think, say and do is pretty much what we thought, said and did yesterday, and the day before. Is there anyone out there who could not predict how the Wall Street Journal editorial page would come out on a given issue, or the clerics in Iran for that matter? Most of us are less extreme versions; but still the mechanism takes over, and the grooves run deep.

Dictators and corporate marketers know how to use this to their advantage. Monsanto knows that if it gets genetically engineered seeds into the food chain, people will accept them sooner or later. Genetic engineering will become a new normal. The mental grooves will take shape around it, as will the practices of the food industry itself. PR can create an enabling mental atmospheric to ease the process. And once done it will be hard to reverse. Habits are easier to make than to break, as the old saying goes.

More

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.

Read more about Jonathan Rowe…

Popular Articles