The Common Good

An argument for asserting our rights to quiet, community, a drink of pure water, and a breath of fresh air.

Municipal WiFi: It Started on the Farm

My mother’s second husband grew up on a farm in West Texas. He was libertine but not liberal. He railed about the men in town — a summer resort — who spent the winter on unemployment, and he thought criminals had it coming, the worse the better.. He also revered FDR. (Liberals today who don’t grasp the connection are showing why they are the minority party.)

Partly it was the farm programs that rescued many from the depths. But mainly it was public power. In Texas, as in most of the country, private utilities had bypassed rural areas because they weren’t worth serving, in the utilities’ view at least.. Too much cost, not enough potential yield. Yet these utilities guarded jealously their monopolies, and resisted efforts of legislators to serve those in need.

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Heavy Boots at Berkeley

What happens when faculty at a major university raise questions about a multimillion dollar research deal between a corporation and the university? And what happens to science when the search for truth becomes a quest for corporate gain? You could ask Ignacio Chapela. It wouldn’t be a bad idea, because the way things are going, there are likely to be a lot more cases like his.

Chapela, as many readers will recall, was a leader in the opposition to a $25 million deal between U-Cal Berkeley and Novartis, the Swiss biotech firm in 1998. (Novartis since has become Syngenta.) When his tenure application came up, his colleagues in the College of Natural Resources supported him by a 32-1 vote. A special tenure committee backed him unanimously.

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We the Givers

Economics as practiced in the United States is a state of arrested psycho-emotional development. There is an infatuation with mechanisms and statistics — trucks and baseball cards — with little interest in the human realities and complexities that lie beneath them. There is also a solipsistic concern for the self and its desires, to the exclusion of everyone else.

That self-concern is embodied in the hypothetical person who inhabits the economics texts. It is homo economicus, the economic man, who lives according to a closed and relentless calculus of personal loss and gain. Economic man is a slug like Adam in the Garden of Eden, except that he is better at math. He has no conscience and no sense of right and wrong, only a capacity to respond to external “incentives.” His god is self-gratification; and his myopic self-seeking is what the economist calls “rationality.”

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Federated May, Starbucks Will

Boston was tired and a bit grimy when I was a child there in the ’50s. Even Fenway Park was just an old place where the Red Sox played, near the tire outlets and Sears Roebuck store. But then there was Christmas. You’d walk across the Commons in the biting cold, next to your father in his big overcoat. There were reindeer, crèches (butt out, ACLU) cheery Christmas music, a canopy of lights on the bare trees overhead.

You’d cross Tremont Street, and enter the shopping district where the department stores were. There were four or five of them back then: Jordan Marsh and Filenes of course, but also Raymond’s at the low end and, if memory serves, Gilchrist’s and R.H. Sterns at the high. The rest of the year the store windows had boring adult stuff. But at Christmas time they came alive. There were Santa’s workshops with mechanical elves. Little trains chugging merrily through snowy landscapes. All from Switzerland I believe, with loving attention to detail.There even was a real life St. Nick, who waved to us kids as we pushed and yammered for a look.

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Fair Game

Whose woods they are you might not know. So can you hunt in them? The question has new significance in the wake of the recent shooting of six hunters in Wisconsin in a dispute over hunting turf. Encounters like that are likely to increase as sprawl continues and land available for hunting shrinks. Hunters, like the prey they stalk, face the threat of habitat decline.

And that raises an age-old legal issue regarding hunting rights on private land. There’s a general belief that a man’s forest is his castle, to the same extent his house is. “We need to create some incentives and programs” for private owners to permit hunting, Mike Bartz, a Wisconsin game warden told the Associated Press. “But then again, our country was founded on private property rights, so it’s not easy.”

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Sidewalks of the Mind

Sidewalks are one of the greatest human inventions, and one of the most unappreciated as well. They provide a means of walking, meeting, transporting, vending, and disseminating information in the way that is probably is closest to what the framers of the First Amendment actually had in mind. Just about the entire life of a city takes place on or through sidewalks. At any given hour, people are using them to go to shop, gawk, play ball, mail a letter, meet the object of their affections. All this and more for a minimal amount of upkeep and expense.

It would have been possible, I suppose, for the designers of our cities and towns to deem sidewalks a form of socialism, and the first domino in the row. First the sidewalks, then the homes and businesses to which they lead. It would have been possible to privatize the sidewalks, erect toll booths at every block, build walls so people couldn’t sneak on and off through someone’s yard.

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The Demand for the Commons

Since the first steam engine roared into action, people have worried about where the massive new machinery of the market was headed. In the wake of the Second World War, these questions took a new form: what is prosperity for? For the first time in human history, there was enough to go around, and more. So what would come next? Simply more TVs and cars, and their successor items? Or something different?

Probably the most eloquent statement of the question came in John Kenneth Galbraith’s book The Affluent Society, a best-seller for which Galbraith’s colleagues in the economics profession never forgave him. Galbraith observed that the reigning economic orthodoxy was formulated in an age of scarcity. All the gears were arranged to increase output, and this was assumed to promote the greatest good. But after two centuries of output frenzy, the problem no longer was scarcity. Rather it was glut. The challenge no longer was to produce enough stuff for the people; it was to get the people to buy the stuff produced.

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Our Dangerous Distance Between the Private and the Commons

My wife’s village in the Philippines consists mostly of bamboo houses perched on hills that rise gently from the rice fields. The hills are lush, the fields neat and well-tended; one almost forgets how poor these people are, in Western terms at least. My wife’s father gets about $ 750 a year for his crop – a lot compared with sharecroppers who have little besides the rice they eat and clothes they wear.

Life is not easy. Yet there is a sense of sufficiency and contentment that is not much found in the US. There is time; daily life is not a grim march to the metronome of clocks. There is also the abundance of nature – coconut, banana, and mango trees, sweet potatoes and swamp cabbage, the chickens and goats that fill the yards. None of these appear in the stern accountings of Western economists who pronounce upon the poverty of such people.

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