2006 – Page 3 – Jonathan Rowe

Takings, Givings and the Tragedy of the Petulant Me

Of all the whiners and complainers that beset the politics of this country, the “property rights” lobby is surely among the most self-dramatizing. I’m not talking about people who have a normal concern about their property – who don’t want people using their windows for target practice or making bonfires in their yards. I’m talking about people who regard just about every restriction upon their property as a “taking” of it; and who demand compensation from the taxpayers, while they rail at the impending totalitarian state.

What such people lack in maturity and wisdom, they have in money or moneyed enablers. The result has been a raft of ballot measures that would turn “takings” dogma into law. The first to pass was Measure 37 in Oregon, a state that was a pioneer in land use laws. Not coincidentally, the state today is green and clean, downtown Portland is thriving, and sprawl has been remarkably contained. Measure 37 pretty much dismantled that system. Now kindred ones are on ballots in Montana, Idaho, and Washington State.

Defending the Commons, Defending Life

In a sense, President Bush has done humanity a service. He has provided a foil in a drama that was lacking one, and set in motion a politics that did not before exist.

The president did not invent the assault on that which we Americans own together—our air and water, our public lands, our Main Streets and public spaces, our public domain of culture and knowledge, and the rest. The enclosure of these for corporate gain has been going on for decades.

When Patents Become “Financial Assets”: Megabuck Patent Trolls and the Conflict Between Production and Finance

A little over a century ago, in the wake of the crash of 1895, Brooks Adams, brother of the more famous Henry, set out to understand the role of money and finance in the larger sweep of human history. The result was a book, The Law of Civilization and Decay, which rightly has been called a neglected American classic.

To simplify greatly, Adams saw in Western history a chronic conflict between two economic types – those who produce wealth in actual things on the one hand, and those who conjure gain out of an abstraction of wealth called money on the other. When a society is vital, Adams observed, the producer is ascendant. But when the financial type gets the upper hand, it generally signals a decline. Which brings me to Nathan Myhrvold, the first technology chief of Microsoft, and his new company Intellectual Ventures.

Can-Do Mayor of La Castellana

These are not good days for democracy in the Philippines. Corruption has metastasized down to the barangay, or village level. So many trained people are leaving — 1 in 10 Filipinos now work abroad — that the political base is starting to hollow out. In the last election, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the president, was caught on tape trying to fix the vote count.

There has been political skirmishing in Manila, but among the populace the response has been a shrug. The nation that forced Ferdinand Marcos into exile in the People Power revolution of 1986 has just about given up.

Drug ads sell a problem, not a solution

It is an old saying in the advertising trade that you sell the problem, not the solution. That helps explain why the media today are awash with images of disease. Erectile dysfunction, depression, stress, attention deficit disorder, on and on – you can’t escape them and the sense of looming peril that they conjure up.

Politicians sell terror and fear; pharmaceutical companies sell disease. Every state and stage of existence has become a pathology in need of pharmaceutical “intervention,” and life itself is a petri dish of biochemical deficiency and need. Shyness is now “social anxiety disorder.” A twitchy tendency has become “restless leg syndrome.” Three decades ago the head of Merck dreamed aloud of the day when the definition of disease would be so broad that his company could “sell to everyone,” like chewing gum.

Closed Code in the White House

Business Week ran an article last month (July 10, 2006) on corporations that make a point of learning from their mistakes, and the list is shorter than one might expect. The profit motive apparently is not the sure prod to diligence that the textbooks assume. At most companies the instinct is to bury mistakes because the boss doesn’t want to hear bad news.

Smart executives, by contrast, seek it out. “They try to prove themselves wrong” the way scientists do, Business Week observes. “That focus on potential flaws makes failure, and the lessons that come with it, happen earlier.”

The Comedy of the Neglected Private

In the belief system called “economics” it is an article of faith that a commons is inherently tragic. Inherently and by definition. What belongs to all belongs to none; and only private ownership can rescue a resource from the sad fate that will otherwise befall it. Just look at urban brown fields, clear-cut forests and the strip mines in Appalachia. Oh wait. Those were owned privately, by corporations.

Economics texts nortwithstanding, private ownership is no guarantee of wise use, only of use that yields short-term monetary gain. At the same time, common ownership has worked wonderfully throughout the ages, provided there is a governing structure of law or local custom. Today I’d like to add a corollary – the comedy of the neglected private. Private ownership actually can help a commons, provided the owners don’t pay much attention and don’t worry about financial gain the way the textbooks say they should.

Who Owns the Batting Average of David Ortiz?

Let’s suppose that the Diebold Corporation gained a monopoly on vote counting in the U.S., and then tried to charge a royalty for the use of vote counts in news reports, academic studies, and the like. It’s not that far-fetched. I used to work for a House member who served on the Agriculture Committee during the Reagan years. After Reagan privatized the assembly of certain Ag Department data, this Congressman got a letter from the company that got the contract, offering to sell him, at a hefty price, the data he was authorizing taxpayer money to collect.

Faced with the Diebold scenario, most of us would say, “Wait a minute. How can you ‘own’ information that the taxpayers pay for and that concerns a public event that is central to the functioning of our democracy? For that matter, how can you ‘own’ any information – the raw data not the write-up of it – that has been reported and discussed throughout the nation?” That exact case hasn’t arisen yet to my knowledge. But a somewhat similar one took an encouraging turn this week, when a federal judge in Missouri ruled that fantasy baseball leagues – and by extension perhaps others as well – don’t have to pay a royalty to the major league monopoly for the use of baseball statistics.

The Long Tail and the Market Me

This question of the “long tail” gets under the skin in a way unusual for a business idea. See, for example, the forth-and-back here over the last week or so, which is just a tiny corner of the larger debate.

One reason people take it so personally is that it is personal. The long tail is ourselves – most of us who are disposed to read and talk about it at least. It forces us to consider the implications of our actions and even of our own identities and natures. Ultimately, I think, it raises questions about a fundamental assumption of market thinking – namely, that the goal of life is to have exactly what we want; and that happiness and well-being increase exactly to that extent.

Close Those Libraries! Change Those Names!

Now that the Bush Administration has realized that climate change could be an argument for nuclear energy, it isn’t quite as resistant to the prospect as it was before. But when nuke plants aren’t on the table the Bushites still are pretty down on the idea. To address climate change would mean more regulation, they say. It would hurt the economy – or I should say “the economy,” because the way they define the economy is essentially a tautology, and boils down to saying, “If we have to address climate change, then we won’t get to do what we want to do.”

Climate change would be inconvenient. Ergo, it could not exist. Yet many of the items in their doom-and-gloom scenario are confronting corporations now, because action has been so slow in coming. That’s the import of an article in the July 17th Business Week entitled “Business On A Warmer Planet.” The subhead tells the story: “Rising temperatures and later winters are already costing millions. How some companies are adapting to the new reality.”