2007 – Page 2 – Jonathan Rowe

Strange Coincidences: Tainted Toothpaste and the Intellectual Property Cops

It seemed a little fishy earlier this year when news first broke of tainted toothpaste from China. Was it totally coincidental that those disclosures came just as Congress was about to take up a bill to make it easier for Americans to buy drugs from Canada and Europe, and so avoid the ridiculous prices the drug companies charge here? The bill failed, amid a flurry of concern about the safety of health-care products from abroad (a concern that was notably absent during the sales jobs for Nafta and Gatt.) This was even though there have been no reports of tainted drugs from Canada to my knowledge, only lower prices.

Now there is a new round of disclosures, this time regarding children’s toys with lead paint and kindred health hazards. I have little doubt that China’s eager entrepreneurs have been less than fastidious. Why would we expect them to be any different than America’s were at a similar stage in its development. (Cf. Upton Sinclair’s description of the U.S. meatpacking industry in The Jungle.) But then I saw a story in the current Business Week(September 24, 2007) that suggested something more might be afoot.

Management Lessons from the Commons: How to Make the Boss Shape Up

One of the many tragedies of the conventional economic mind is the grip that the “tragedy of the commons” has upon it. Among other things, the “tragedy thesis,” as it is called, feeds the economist’s arrogance about modernity itself. Traditional societies all were stupid and programmed for destruction, it says implicitly. Only we moderns, with our market mechanisms and technological wonders, can save the world.

This is, of course, total bunk. Most traditional societies did far better jobs of managing their resources than we moderns, or post moderns, have been able to do. An example is the remarkable water sharing organizations in the Northern Philippines called zangera. These embody a native genius in husbanding the water commons in such a way that everyone gets a just share. They also show how to arrange a system – “incentivize” it in the econ parlance – so that leaders work to that end rather than to their own aggrandizement and gain.

Dirty Harry Saves the Bay View

Three decades ago, the Dirty Harry movies gave shape and license to the revenge fantasies that fed the law-and-order politics of the era. Is it possible that dramatic acts of resistance to enclosure could help launch a new politics of the commons today? That thought comes to mind with news reports from Manila, where Mayor Alfredo S. Lim has ordered the bulldozing of the bars and clubs that had encroached upon the famed Baywalk along Roxas Boulevard in that city.

Lim has a reputation as a straight shooter. When he was police chief in Manila he put down a Right wing coup attempt against Corazon Aquina, who took office in the peaceful revolution against Ferdinand Marcos, the former dictator. He actually was known as “Dirty Harry.” He did have reasons to eliminate the bars that were not solely environmental. They had been approved by the previous mayor, and were months behind in their concession fees. In the Philippines, such facts are suggestive in a way that is all too familiar there.

Walking Cities and Commons-Based Health Policies

When I lived in New York City I walked everywhere, and all the time. It wasn’t just because driving there is insane and I didn’t have a car anyway. The city calls you forth. In decent weather you can walk for miles and hardly be aware of it. As a walker I was not alone. New York is a city of them. On visits upstate I’d see a great many hefty people. At malls I’d get stuck in aisles behind matching double-wides. In the city there wasn’t much of that.

People often think of New York as a decadent and unhealthful place. I began to wonder if in fact the opposite was true. I made some calls but couldn’t get anywhere. This was about fifteen years ago. Apparently, some researchers have been on the case in the years since. The current (August 15th) issue of New York magazine has a feature story called “Why New Yorkers Last Longer.” Residents there, it turns out, live on average nine months longer than Americans do generally. Their life expectancy is increasing at a faster rate. Walking is a major reason why.

The Untapped Power of Social Sanction

Social sanction is a force that our policy makers, in the thrall of economic thinking, have neglected for too long. It really is effective. I once visited Calgary, in Canada, and on my first day experienced a “chinook,” which is a balmy wind that raises the temperature into the fifties in winter. The temperature dropped from there to about ten below in about two hours. I was downtown, waiting to cross the street, and freezing to my bones. The signal said “Don’t walk” but there were no cars coming. Of course I crossed.

Did I say “of course”? The people waiting patiently on the other side did not feel that way. In Calgary, I grasped quickly, you do not cross against the light. Their stony disapproving glares cut through me like the artic wind. Nobody said a word. For the rest of my visit, which was about a week, I waited patiently along with everyone else. (I also paid my fares on the city’s transit system, which was on the honor system.)

Working to Save Endangered Social Spaces

People have worked hard to protect our great unspoiled spaces here in West Marin and rightly so. But, we haven’t done as much to protect our social spaces – the … More

The Fountains of Boston: Childhood is a Commons

Am I the only one who thought of Huck Finn and the Mississippi when I read Efren Gerardino’s post about the river of his youth in the Philippines? There was the absence of fences and boundaries, the openness and sense of possibility – an American story but also the story of childhood everywhere. Efren remembered “the good life” even though he and his friends had very little, materially. Childhood is a commons. Where it is abundant, children can feel rich so long as they have food to eat.

The commons of my own childhood was abundant in its own way. We lived in an old, close-in Boston suburb, with meandering streets that followed the contours of the land. We played in the old aqua-duct, and at the swamp that formed a wooded basin behind the houses. By unspoken agreement, the entire neighborhood was open to us kids. We played football in one yard, wiffleball in another. We didn’t know the owners, and no one seemed to care.

Cooperators of the Prairies

It was not accidental that the man who embedded this version into the political vernacular, Ronald Reagan, was himself reprising a role from his “B” Westerns. The late ex-president didn’t just memorize his scripts—he believed them. Not for the only time, he chose a congenial fiction over an inconvenient reality.

Start with the notion that wealthy Americans all have made their money through honest endeavor, and that taxes therefore are a form of theft.

Missing Parents and Mega-Malls

A visitor to rice country in the Philippines these days encounters scenes that don’t add up. Amid the bamboo houses and scrawny yapping mutts are sturdy cement dwellings with televisions and other appliances and maybe even a computer and an SUV. The rice fields next to these homes are no bigger than the others. Where does the money come from?

In Filipino cities, meanwhile, American-style mega-malls, with Burger Kings and Pizza Huts, are rising up near sprawling squatter colonies and landscapes of grimy cinder block and corrugated rust. Inside, you almost could be in an air-conditioned First World cocoon, except for the security at the doors, and the bathrooms without toilet seats.

The Cowboy Commons

Almost forty years ago, Garrett Hardin, a biologist, bid us to “picture a pasture that is open to all.” This pasture was everywhere and nowhere, and inhabited by dimwits enlisted from the economics texts. They had no history or social affinities, no context of custom or law, just an internal calculator of their own immediate financial gain. From that hypothetical Hardin spun out the “tragedy of the commons,” which has been a staple of the economics texts ever since. It was theology rather than economics, which made for a congenial match.

Many commentators have pointed out that if Hardin had bothered to observe the world, he would have found that commons often have worked wonderfully – and continue to do so to this day. He didn’t have to go far. The evidence was practically right outside his window, historically speaking, in the open pastures of the old American West.