Featured Article
Perambulate That Parking Space
There was a time when commoners had legal rights, and could take matters into their own hands when it came to dealing with trespassers. Centuries ago in England, people with common rights to land would “perambulate” it – what a wonderful word — to make sure no bossy lords had installed fences or gates. Laborers might carry “an axe, a mattock, and an iron crow…for the purpose of demolishing any building or fence which had been raised without permission,” says E.P. Thompson, the British scholar, in his book Customs In Common, quoting a contemporary source.
These evictions had an established legal basis. Coke’s Institutes (an abridged version) noted that “[I]f the Lord doth enclose any part, and leave not sufficient common…commoners may break down the whole inclosure.” Today we can only wish. But while we don’t have many legal rights to stand up to the enclosers, there still are ways to challenge the psychology of defeat, and help people remember what they have lost.
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.