2006 – Page 5 – Jonathan Rowe

Value Subtracted

If there is a test case for the proposition that corporate property regimes lead to the improvement of a commons, then it is food. More specifically, it is the traditional foods of a particular culture. No one owns these. Here in the Philppines, no one owns the idea of pansit which is a kind of noodle dish, or of skewered chicken, or of shucked corn roasted on a street corner. These are part of a food culture; and according to our leading economic lights, they should therefore stagnate into a culinary puddle of lassitude and waste. Who would improve that which they do not own?

Well, it turns out lots of people will. There is pansit and roasted corn and a multitude of soups and stews that I forget the names of on just about every corner — just as, in the U.S., the common ownership of pizza and moo shu pork has not deterred countless restaurant owners from concocting their own versions of these. To the contrary, it is in the culinary commons that invention is most alive. I can treat you to a lot more varieties of moo shu in San Francisco than I can varieties of a Big Mac. That is because there are no varieties of Big Macs. The corporate property regime has frozen it in place, to change only when a hulking legal and marketing bureaucracy permits.

Advanced Man

The privatization of the earth and all it contains ultimately is justified on the grounds of something called “progress.” To enclose a resource, or process, or aspect of life — that is, to impose a corporate ownership regime around these — is to re-render them in a way that will lead to human advance. Oases will bloom in the desert, miracle cures will emerge, invention and the arts will rise to ever-higher peaks of achievement. Just look at commercial television — pardon me, I tipped my hand there.

We commons advocates usually dispute this premise on its own terms. We point out that often the imposition of a corporate property regime upon a commons stifles innovation, as when a patent minefield stymies the cause of research, and the over-reaching of copyright impedes the artisitic creation the copyright laws was supposed to encourage. We also point out how the enclosure of a knowledge or resource commons drives the use of those in the direction of corporate convenience and gain rather than of human good. We get baldness cures instead of malaria vaccines, theme parks instead of wetlands and forests. And yes, commercial television.

Family Planning Bush Style

Perhaps you had the impression that the Bush Administration was opposed to family planning in the Third World because of moral scruples regarding contraception and the like. Give people condoms and next thing you know, they might……well, actually do it. It turns out however that the scruples have been more over the lack of opportunities for corporations in the planning pot.

That’s the message that comes through in a recent employment ad in the Philippines Inquirier, which is one of the national dailies here. The ad was sponsored jointly by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and something called Private Sector Mobilization for Family Planning, or PRISM as some PR firm has anacronymed it The ad is for an information techie and the job description itself is not of much interest. What is of interest is the nature of PRISM and the way this organization defines its goals.

The Malls of Iloilo

Iloilo is the provincial capital of the province of that name, and the main city on the island of Panay, which is around the middle of the Philippine chain. It is a tired gritty city, with low buildings that become a blur behind the dark web of utility wires, and the grime. There are distant echos of Spanish colonial architecture, a few parks in traffic circles, a bevy of universities that have a bit of grassy charm. But overall, as in much of this country, there is a sense of maintenance deferred to the point of exhaustion, and of a battle against entropy that is not going well.

Partly for this reason, I suspect, Iloilo has become a city of malls. I have not made an exact count, but there must be three or four major ones in the immediate downtown area, plus a number of smaller ones, and a new bohemoth that has arisen somewhat omenously on the outskirts. The appeal of the malls is not hard to figure out. They are clean, bright, and blessedly cool, in a place in which those qualities are not in abundance. People in Washington, DC, often take refuge in movie theaters in the worst of the summer heat. Here it’s like that for much of the year; in the mall you can get cool for free.

Dispatch from IloIlo: Maniacs

On the basis of evidence that is entirely circumstantial, I believe that the motor vehicle licensing exam for the Philippines contains a question that goes pretty much as follows. “True or False? A driver ahead of you on the road poses a fundamental challenge to your manhood and your national pride, and is to be passed immediately, regardless of circumstances and the risks involved.” The correct answer, of course, is “True.” Drivers in many places have reputations for frisky behavior. In the Philippines they are off the charts.

You are on a two lane road, the kind that typically goes out from cities to the farming areas. The shoulders are teeming: kids play, mutts dart and yap, farmers spread rice out on bamboo matts to dry for husking, all within feet of passing traffic. The driver of your jeepney, or cab, is barrelling along at a speed that would give you pause even if the road ahead were clear. But it’s not. Another jeepney is just ahead. Coming in the opposite direction is a motorbike with a sidecar (called a “tricycle” out here) or maybe a dump truck. You think, “No, he’s not going to try to pass. He couldn’t…”

Dispatch from Manila 2: Jeepneys

One thing I agree with Cato-style libertarians on — up to a point — is jitneys. Public transit that uses small vans, individually owned, really can be flexible and do things centralized urban systems can’t. A case in point is the Philippines, where a jitney offshoot called the jeepney (I’ll explain in a minute) is the main means of transportation. The things go everywhere, from downtown Manila to remote farm areas. And at all hours. This morning at 3:00 AM, my wife, son and I, temporally disoriented and tossing in the heat, took a walk out to the road. Jeepneys were going by, along with big trucks, the drivers of which apparently have the sense not to try to make it into the city during the day.

Where jeepneys don’t go, a mosquito fleet of motorbikes with sidecars — called “tricycles” here — does. Tricycles literally swarm at food markets and just about anywhere people might need a ride. They solve two problems that bedevil mass transit in the U.S. One, they are an answer for people who need to stop for groceries etc. on the way home. Two, they can carry people who live too far from the jeepney routes to walk, or else just don’t want to walk in the heat. (Did I mention that it is hot here?)

Dispatch from Manila

We landed in Manila a few hours ago, and now we are out in Cavite, which is a kind of a Third World slurb on the outskirts. The road to here is a welter of cinderblock and corrugated metal, heat and rust. Medical and dental offices sit unpromisingly next to welding shops and piles of trash. The dumps are full again. It’s a chronic problem. It’s a country of chronic problems. The people are resourceful and resilient, but somehow the whole does not congeal.

My in-laws live in a small subdivision off the main road. At first, to an American, it might seem a borderline slum. The houses are close together, with gates or walls around them. They are small, and there is the omnipresent decay and rust. But in fact the place is middle class, and on the rise. There is lots of rebuilding going on. But the main thing is this: by some miracle, the place was designed, or at least laid out, on a traditional village model. The streets are narrow, like alleys, and winding. There are little parks tucked here and there, one of which has been taken over by a man who raises fighting cocks. The main park has a basketball court (basketball is a national passion) and a large gazebo for meetings and the like.

The Coffee House Candidate

Zioncheck for President
by Phillip Campbell
Nation Books, $15.95

Campbell got fired. (His boss was syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage of “Savage Love” fame.) Cogswell asked Campbell to manage his campaign for the Seattle City Council. Zioncheck for President is the story of that campaign.

It is not a campaign memoir in the usual sense. There is not much on strategy and issues, and still less blow-by-blow. The candidate himself is somewhat blurry, beyond his crabbing about printing errors and distaste for fundraising calls. Basically, he comes across as impassioned in a good way–the kind of fellow who sits in coffee houses during the long grey Seattle winters and broods on the absurdity of “freeways” jammed with cars that burn gas as they go nowhere.

The Tragedy of the Corporation

Corporations are a lot like politicians. Often they start with a good idea, or at least an idea, in the form of something to sell.. If that thing is a success the corporation becomes bigger. Soon the career – which in the corporation’s case means growth – overwhelms the good idea that started it. Wall Street clamors. Executives seek to justify their outlandish pay. The result is a grim battle to grab more, and then more, without end.

The problem is not bad people, though often they are not strong people. The problem is encoded into the institutional machinery. The modern corporation has no capacity to say “enough,” or to declare its job done. It always must find another job, and then another, to yield a return for the shareholders and justify its existence.

How Corporations Stymie Innovation

One of the pleasures of the Wall Street Journal is the way the reportorial accounts on the news pages often undercut the editorials. The market dogmatists of the latter apparently have the same regard for “reality-based” thinking that the White House does. Truth is what they want to be true — it’s their space after all — and the dynamics of innovation are a case in point.

One tenet of the market faith is that profit and property rights are crucial to innovation. Without them, no one will lift a finger and progress will grind to a halt. In some cases that might be so, up to a point. But the belief system flounders when one gets to social innovation – that is, the kind that occurs spontaneously in language, music, fashion, food, and even technology in many cultures. Then there’s the matter of figure skates.