Featured Article
Land Grab at Amtrak
If you want to kill a railroad, one of the first things you’ll do is split the tracks from the operating line and put them into a separate corporate entity. Riders on Amtrak’s Coastal Starlight between Los Angeles and Seattle know this. Trains on this otherwise scenic route are chronically late – often by hours – because they operate on tracks owned by the Union Pacific. Amtrak trains must stop at sidings to let the UP freight trains pass.
David Gunn, until recently the president of Amtrak, knows it too. Gunn has run the transit systems in New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. He resuscitated the New York City subways to great acclaim back in the 1980’s. When the Bush appointees to the Amtrak board moved to split off the maintenance of the tracks and stations on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor into a separate entity – which could be a first step towards privatizing them – Gunn resisted. The Bush board fired him partly as a result.
Commons
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Economic Indicators
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Looking Backward: Economics and the Cult of Yesterday
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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.