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It’s no coincidence that the words “commons” and “community” spring from the same linguistic ancestor—which some researchers trace back beyond Latin and Greek to “kommein,” a word that in Indo-European languages means “shared by all.”

Like air and water, our local communities are a form of the commons that sustain us every day. They are the places where our feet touch the ground, where we share lives in common with neighbors in the streets, parks, sidewalks, schoolyards, local business districts, libraries, social events and community organizations. The neighborhood, in fact, is the basic organizing principle of human civilization.

continue reading "The Great American Neighborhood"

In the mid-1990s, my colleague Jonathan Rowe co-author a major piece in The Atlantic about the gross deficiencies of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a way to measure national well-being and progress. The essential point was that our nation’s obsession with economic growth as an end in itself was (and is) trampling on all sorts of other forms of wealth that we must also nurture. We need stable families and communities as much as economic growth — and sometimes the two are in direct conflict. We need time and quiet and open spaces: things that the unfettered market cannot provide.

continue reading "A New Dismal Science -- “Happiness Economics”"

From my reading of history, medical care was once a more intimate and ethical endeavor, a calling that involved a respectful communion between doctor and patient. However, in recent decades, at least in the United States, it is clear that medical care has become a technology-driven market transaction. Doctors who were once skilled at seeing illness in the context of the “whole person” are more likely, in today’s environment, to know how to rush patients through 15-minute assembly-line appointments and game the insurance/Medicare system with the right billing codes.

continue reading "Treating Health Care as a Commons"

When irresistible political fantasies collide with inexorable economic realities, the result is…..abject confusion.

I regard the meltdown now under way on Wall Street as more than a financial crisis. It is a cognitive impairment. An entire generation of Americans and their political leaders has come to believe in free-market ideology so completely, and with such passion, that they literally cannot conceive that government may have a valuable, ongoing role to play in reining in the inevitable excesses of markets. (Some Republican were actually proposing tax cuts as part of the bailout solution.)

continue reading "When Free Market Fantasies Collapse"

In the fight over the bailout, the rhetoric of Main St. vs. Wall Street is politically important in contrasting the real economy with the speculative casino economy. But we should also embrace all financial markets as part of the commons that sustains healthy communities.

Our sophisticated financial markets have been built over several generations and are regulated at taxpayer expense through oversight institutions such as the Securities and Exchange Commission.

continue reading "Financial Markets As Commons"

The commons has surely come of age now that there is a video game to illustrate the political dynamics of enclosure! A hearty commoners’ salute to Molleindustria, an Italian team of artists, designers and programmers who create “radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment.” Their latest creation is the flash-animation Free Culture Game: A Playable Theory.

continue reading "Video Game Pits Commoners vs. Enclosure"

To watch this vlog on “YouTube”:

Commons Moment 2

This is Home

The me-bodies don’t have enough of anything.

continue reading "Commons Moment 2--This Is Home"