Featured Article
If the Commons is a Form of Property, Does that Make it a Commodity?
We can become attached to the object of our loathing. Look at Bush and Iraq, or Ann Coulter and “liberals.” What would the gracious lady do without the nemesis that shapes her psyche? Would she have anything to say? So too, in a slightly different way, with Marxists and property. They can be so opposed to it that it sticks to them like glue.
This came up at the commons conference in Berkeley I wrote about last time. In my talk, I used the terms “ownership” and “property” in connection with the commons, and this caused great displeasure for another person on the panel. I was a “commodifier” he said. A commons is the opposite of property, not a version of it. I was told afterwards that this gentleman is a Marxist. But in fairness, others can feel uneasy in a less rigorously dialectical way. To say that a commons is a form of property can make it seem a carrier of the disease it is supposed to resist.
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.