We’ve just come across a rather fine book entitled ‘Nowtopia’ (AK Press, 2008); written by Chris Carllson one of the founders of the worldwide Critical Mass cycle movement. Subtitled How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today! this book takes a look at the people who are pioneering a ‘new politics of work’. Where some people see the commons as a possible part of the future of capitalism, Carlsson explores those who have embraced the commons in order to live away from wage slavery in the here and now, or as Carlsson puts it “They aren’t waiting for institutional change from on-high but are getting on with building a new world in the shell of the old.”

This is a highly accessible book – which is important because ideas of ‘access’ versus ‘ownership’ are central to the growth of the commons - the reader is presented with a series of real-world projects rather than dry economic theories. This approach really captures what the commons is all about and inspires the reader to get on their feet and build their own ‘nowtopia’. But that’s not to say that this book ignores theory all together, in fact the author raises some very important questions about class, professionalism, expertise and hierarchy and although we don’t share all the author’s views (just around 99% of them!) we warmly welcome the debates that this book will no doubt throw up. The balance between practice and theory is best summed up in Nowtopia’s own blurb…

Outlaw bicycling, urban permaculture, biofuels, free software, even the Burning Man festival, are windows into a scarcely visible social transformation that challenges politics as we know it. As capitalism continues its inexorable push to corral every square inch of the globe into its logic of money and markets, new practices are emerging that are redefining politics. In myriad ways, people are taking back their time and technological know-how from the market and in small under-the-radar ways, are making life better right now. In doing so, they also set the foundation—technically AND socially—for a genuine movement of liberation from market life. The social networks thus created, and the practical experience of cooperating outside of economic regulation, become a breeding ground for new strategies and tactics to confront the everyday commodification to which capitalism reduces us all.

Nowtopia uncovers resistance and rebellion amidst fractions of a slowly recomposing working class in America. Rarely self-identifying as mere ‘workers,’ people from all walks of life are doing incredible amounts of work in their “free” “non-work” time. This unpaid work is creating immediate practical improvements in daily life. More interesting still, these myriad initiatives constitute a more thorough-going refusal of politics and economics as usual. In Nowtopia, Marx’s concept of the General Intellect is freshly applied to the disparate initiatives that are percolating largely out of public sight. Building on the investigative methodology developed by autonomist Marxists in Europe and the U.S.A., Carlsson recontextualizes the so-called “middle class” as an example of working class recomposition. The practical rebellions outlined in this book embody a deeper challenge to the basic epistemological underpinnings of modern life, as a new ecologically-driven politics emerges from below to reshape our assumptions about science, technology and human behavior.

Nowtopia is all about what people can do (and, in fact, are doing…) to change their lives right here, right now. The DIY nature of the book instils a sense of optimism and hope for the future, it shows hat change is not only possible, but do-able – and do-able with our own hands.  Our only real criticism is that AK Press and Carllson didn’t practice what they preached when it came to the production of this book, it would have been nice to see some kind of Creative Commons license as rather than the outdated, and frankly non-Nowtopian copyright symbol on the book’s title page.

Get yourself a copy of this book (US click here) – now! And while you’re waiting for delivery check out the Nowtopians blog spot.

Bike lift at Heroes’ Square, Budapest, April 22, 2006

You can find a commons in the most unlikely places. Case in point: the clan of surfers at the Banzai Pipeline beach on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii. A motley tribe of musclemen maintain order and respect among the crowds of surfers vying to catch the big waves there. This social community based around a shared resource even has a name, “The Wolfpak,” and has been the subject of a documentary film, Bustin’ Down the Door, recently released on DVD.

Why would a commons form around legendary surfing waves? Because top surfers from around the world make pilgrimages to the Pipeline to test themselves against the waves. The Pipeline has been likened to the Mount Everest of surfing – a place where the best go to prove their mettle and talent. Not surprisingly, there is enormous competition in the water over who is entitled to ride which waves…. and resentment against outsiders who don’t respect the social protocols that the local surfing crowd has developed over time.

Photo by Kanaka’s Paradise Life, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

“It’s a dangerous environment, and without a self-governing control pattern, it would just be chaos out there,” Randy Rarick, executive director of the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing competition, told Matt Higgins, a reporter for The New York Times. Another surfer pointed out that “there are serious consequences if you drop in on somebody and they got hurt, or if you wipe out and hurt yourself.”

The Wolkpak constitutes a commons because it is a social collective that manages usage of this scarce local resource that its members cherish and use themselves. They are protective of it and each other, and have evolved their own rules for the orderly, fair use of the resource and community stability. According to Higgins’ article in the New York Times sports section (January 23, 2009), members of the Wolfpak “determine which waves go to whom, and punish those who breach their code of respect for local residents and the waves.”

The Wolfpak formed about ten years ago when surfers using the beach, particularly Kala Alexander, realized there was a dangerous void of self-governance in the water. “It was crowded when I came here,” he said. “A lot of people in the water, not much respect. Where I grew up on Kauai, you respect everybody in the water, especially your elders. Don’t step out of line. We just brought that mentality over here….The code is to respect other people. People come over here and don’t respect other people. You’re going to run into problems if you do that.”

Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, a history professor who has written about the surfing culture on North Shore, noted, “For the Hawaiians, respect is an important concept, particularly when it comes to being in the ocean.” When surfers from Australia and South Africa arrived on the beach, boasting of their prowess, the locals at the Pipeline didn’t take it very well.

It is here – in the enforcement and sanctions to protect the commons – that controversy arises. Who is the more legitimate steward of the Pipeline, the local surfing fans or the state authorities who legally have the authority to manage the beach? Should the concerns of local surfers be allowed to trump those of outsiders? Whose commons is it, anyway? And what means can be used to protect the commons?

According to one surfing trade publication, a professional surfer from California came to the Pipeline and cut off a local surfer while riding a wave. The Wolfpak banished him to the beach and one of them reportedly hit him in the head. The enforcement mechanisms have at times gotten a bit out of control, with outside surfers claiming that they’ve been physically threatened and punched. “It’s kind of like mafia control in the surf,” said Randy Rarick.

In recent years, according to reporter Higgins, the Wolfpak has cleaned up its act. It has hosted an annual beach cleanup day and visited children in a nearby hospital. It apparently does not want to revel in violent episodes of its past. The Wolfpak has apparently found a way to peaceably manage usage of the Pipeline while respecting the interests of visiting surfers and conventional law and police enforcement. One might even consider the Wolfpak, in its grownup stage, as an example of how the commons and law can work together to their mutual advantage.

In every corner of the globe, communities (not just human, but flora and fauna as well) are in a pitched battle against thirst. Thank you for your interest in learning more about the principles of the water commons and in joining an international movement to support equitable, community-based water management.

One clear lesson emerges from the struggles of the world’s water warriors — water management remains a leaky endeavor unless it adheres to the principles of the commons — the gifts of society and nature that are shared by all, for generations to come. Effective water management must be based on such water commons principles as community control, democratic participation, ensuring the earth’s right to water, public water delivery and accessibility for all. Download the report (PDF)

When Jimmy Wales, a refugee from options trading, set out to create an encyclopedia online, he thought first of the Britanica model, except with volunteers. He assigned articles to professional experts, and established panels for peer reviews. Then he started to write one himself – on options trading – and realized it was a drag.

It was like “handing in an essay at grad school,” he said later. So Wales shifted gears. He kept the volunteer model; but made it an open and social experience rather than a hierarchical one. Anyone could write an entry, on anything. The peer reviewers would be the readers themselves, who could correct factual errors and omissions, and challenge biases.

To a conventional manager it might sound like a recipe for chaos. Yet within two weeks, the project had generated more articles than it did in two years of the top-down model. The result is Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that now has over 10 million articles in 253 languages and over 2.6 million in English alone. Users have made well over 150 million edits since July 2002.

To an economist it doesn’t make sense. People don’t work for free. Readers are “consumers,” not producers; and consumers do not produce what they consume. Yet they are doing so; and this kind of social co-production is flourishing not only on the Web, but in the society at large.

In the U.S. and elsewhere, people are turning their backs on everyday low prices and choosing the social cohesion and productivity of their local Main Streets instead. Researchers and software designers are foregoing property rights – i.e. patents — to their work and are releasing it over the Web for free. So doing they are enriching the public domain that sustains their own work and also that of others.

All of this – and more – defies the supposed “laws” of economics. In terms of the prevailing model it is as though someone dropped a ball and it went up instead of down. People aren’t supposed to work for nothing. They aren’t supposed to resist low prices and patent lucre. They aren’t supposed to but they are – and not because they are saints, or “altruists;” but rather because something in their nature wants to be engaged this way with other people. Sometimes, it’s just because it’s fun.

Not long ago it was possible to dismiss such behavior as alternative and eccentric – the phantasms of the fringe that, like ‘60s communes, eventually would come crashing down to earth.. But now, through the Web, it is taking root at the core of the emerging economy The result has been a kind of Western version of the fall of the Berlin Wall – an enlarged range of economic possibility, and a challenge to central assumptions of conventional economic thought.

In cancer research, as in many other fields, the trend has been to seek truth in ever-smaller pieces. As the focus has narrowed from the body to the cell and then to the gene, the social and environmental context has tended to fall off the radar. We get stories of heroic researchers and survivors, but the pollutants that might trigger a genetic disposition are mentioned little if at all.

Something similar has happened in economics. A human economy is a social system, and by definition. It revolves around relationships and interactions, and the people who actually make the economy work understand this. The copious management literature dwells on such things as teamwork and corporate culture. Advertisers, who must deal with people as they are, play to the social cravings for acceptance, esteem, belonging and the like.

It seems so obvious. Yet for most economists, context barely exists. Where the cancer researcher fixates on the individual cell or gene, the economist does so on a hypothetical molecule of economic action called homo economicus. This is the character that inhabits the economics texts, and the computer models that are the silent dictators of analysis and policy. Econ, as I will call him, is a myopic integer of self-seeking, who goes through life with a relentless and unfailing calculus of personal loss and gain. He has no social affinities, is oblivious of social context, and has no capacity or inclination to think of anyone besides him or her self.

Basically he represents the psycho-emotional development of a three year old, only with better math skills. And this notion of human nature frames both the desired ends of policy and the means deemed possible for attaining them. Success is when he gratifies his supposed desires by spending more money. Failure is when he spends less. Either we can try to bribe this slug to be more responsible, through tax breaks and the like. (This is called “market-based” policy.”) Or else we impose rules and regulations to whip him into shape.

Both are necessary of course. But necessary is not sufficient. It is not possible to create a tax bribe for every good thing that needs to happen, nor a regulatory cudgel to stop everything that is bad. There’s a need for new ways to activate human energies to meet human needs, without resort to bribery or fear, and independent of Wall Street and the financial casino generally.

But that can’t happen if human nature really is as economists have assumed. Much has been written on the obsolescence of the old model in terms of finite material resources. Now we need to look at how that model is disconnected from the realities of human nature as well.

Homo economicus was not born of dispassionate inquiry into human nature, or for that matter, inquiry of any kind. It is rather a polemical construct, designed during a particular era in history to achieve particular political ends. Basically, the story began with the efforts to shed the secular authority of the Roman church, especially in matters that today would be called “economic.” Jesus had said we have to choose between God and Mammon, “He who loves God” St. Augustine said “is not much in love with money.” The qualifier added a bit of wiggle room but not much.

This was inconvenient for the emerging commercial class. The concept of virtue had to be made more business friendly. Over time, greed became the more genteel interest, the kind of trait a gentleman might cultivate. The indulgence of it became a calling, and pecuniary success a sign of election. Then came the notion that truly turned the old moral universe upside down. Things were so arranged, in this new view, that the pursuit of interest, rather than the overcoming of it, was what really worked to the benefit of all.

The Creator, in his eternal wisdom, had thus aligned unredeemed human nature with the general good. The greedy could have at it without criticism or remorse. Adam Smith did not invent the “invisible hand.” The notion had been in circulation for more than a century. But in The Wealth of Nations. Smith cast it in terms of a compelling economic narrative that meshed neatly with the aspirations of his day. What Freud did for the sexual appetites, Smith and others did for the acquisitive ones.

Yet there were lingering residues of social affinity, which Smith himself had developed in his previous (and in his view superior) book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. These non-market concerns were implicit in his concept of the invisible hand. Smith envisioned a market of individual entrepreneurs – not corporations – rooted in communities in which the “moral sentiments” – as he called them — would come fully into play.

It was the profession that claimed Smith’s legacy, that stripped away this essential part of his scheme. Throughout the 19th century, economists sought the stature and respectability of science; and this required a shrunken focus on things that could be easily quantified in terms of price. Social context had to go. The appearance of science required also an elemental molecule of economic action that was uncomplicated and predictable. Thus was born homo economicus, the hypothetical character created for the pre-existing script.

Math became the lens that determined what could be seen; economists defined humanity to fit the theory, rather than the theory to describe reality. Economic debate has been in the thrall of this strange construct ever since.

The construct seemed to work for a while. There was lots of room for error — space and resources aplenty, and human needs that seemed as inexhaustible as the resources with which they would be met. Milton Friedman, an evangelist of the new gospel, argued famously that it made no difference whether or not homo economicus was an accurate portrayal. The economy worked as though it was, and so what difference did it make?

But Friedman was a little like the man who falls blindfolded from a tall building and thinks he’s flying. The apparent success was based upon depletion and exhaustion that the evangelists conveniently ignored. There also is a missing social valence that people experience as chronic loneliness and craving, and hungers that can not be filled. Some twenty-five percent of Americans told USA Today that they have no one they can confide in, despite our collective immersion in technology of “communication” that supposedly brings us closer.

Research has confirmed moreover what most of us knew already – which is that beyond a certain point, more stuff doesn’t make us happier to begin with. Often it makes us miserable – as compulsive eaters and shoppers could readily attest. Yet for all this, most of us depend upon the machinery that depends in turn upon this misery. And besides, what is the alternative? Homo economicus typically has been posed against the other extreme, the “altruist” who seeks to help others without regard for him or her self. Adam Smith put the question this way in one of his most quoted passages.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love.

Selflessness or selfishness — either work with the gravitational pull of ordinary human nature, or else rely on a temporary suspension of it in the form of “altruism.” Given those alternatives, most people would choose to assume that the dropped ball eventually comes down. This is especially so considering how the altruistic model can degenerate into the statist coercion of the former Soviet Union, when human goodness fails as it often does.

Smith’s formulation is rhetorically effective. But what if it does not present all the choices? What if there is something else in ordinary, human nature that likes to be engaged with other people — not because it is virtuous or altruistic but simply because it’s the way we humans are? And what if this something can provide the basis for a new way of thinking about a human economy – both the work it does and the satisfactions it provides?

I have an in-law who does rural development work in the Philippines. One project involved a water system for a mountain village, and proceeded in two stages. In the first, the water was piped to a common containment pool. In stage two it went from there to individual houses.

The assumption was that people would appreciate the convenience and do their wash at home, the way we Americans do. Yet even after stage two was completed, women in the village continued to use the common pool in the morning to wash clothes, as is the tradition in that country. For these women the washing was not just domestic work. It was a social occasion; and the new system produced not just water, but a setting for that sociability as well.

Water wasn’t just a commodity. It had social content. The women were not just passive consumers. They also were co-producers of the social interaction that the water provided the occasion for. This social productivity couldn’t have happened in the “convenience” of their homes; because convenience in that case would be another word for loneliness and isolation. It would be what happens in an economy when the social content is stripped away.

Traditionally, economies have abounded in this invisible (to us) social dimension. Commerce and exchange served to generate human interaction as well as stuff. The first markets in Western history arose in courtyards that surrounded churches; the social event came first; commerce glommed on later. The barn raisings and harvest bees of the American frontier showed the same social productivity in the context of private property. Traditional Main Streets did the same.

Economists typically dismiss this phenomenon as a remnant of a primitive, pre-market time. We have moved up the scale of being from social cohesion to the liquidity of the market, and from human interaction to engagement with stuff. Yet the cohesion was central to the emergence of the modern market in the first place. Renaissance Florence long has been regarded as the Petri dish for this new economic world, but the businessmen there were not the competitive integers that economists long have supposed. The place was, rather, abuzz with commercial networks, the members of which helped one another on a reciprocal basis.

Even today, for all the touting of competitive rigors, most of the actual work of the economy is done in settings that are cooperative and social.
Peter Holt, a successful businessman and owner of the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association, told Sports Illustrated that he came out of Viet Nam with a “grasp of how the collective good keeps people alive.” Applied to business – including that of the Spurs – this means operating on the principle that “none of us are as smart as all of us,” he said.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Healthy economies work this way because it’s how life works. As Peter Kropotkin pointed out a century ago in his classic study Mutual Aid : A Factor of Evolution, survival among both animals and humans has depended more on cooperation than on heroic efforts of isolated individuals. More recently, evolutionary biologists have confirmed Kropotkin’s insight, from genes and microbes on up. The old Darwinian drama of each against all has yielded to one that is more like the women at the water hole.

Even economists are starting to come around. At long last, a new branch called “behavioral economics” has begun to observe how humans actually behave, as opposed to how the model says they should. It has found what most of us knew already – namely, that we humans aren’t just calculating machines of self-interest. (Often we aren’t very good at that to begin with.) The research has demonstrated social instincts where economists before saw only pecuniary ones. We care about the fairness of transactions, for example, and not just whether we ourselves come out ahead.

Being social creatures, moreover, we act differently in different settings. We don’t have a fixed economic nature. When a local merchant makes a change mistake in our favor most of us will point that out. If a credit card company makes such a mistake, we are more likely to think of all the times the company has gouged us, and consider it rough justice. Ditto with vending machines. What’s the point in showing fairness to a shark?

The implications are large. If we humans are disposed to favor reciprocity and justice; and if historically, economic settings were such as to reinforce that disposition; and more, if the sociability that once resulted answers to a real human need, then the economy is failing today in a way that goes almost entirely unnoticed. That people are trying to revive such things as traditional main streets, and neighborhoods with front porches and shared common spaces, becomes less surprising.

These aren’t just the hobbyhorses of a nostalgic rear guard. They are about an economy worthy of the name. More broadly, they suggest the emergence of a kind of parallel economy that meets needs the corporate market doesn’t, and gives expression to the energies that market tends to repress.

The World Wide Web has been more than a boost to “the economy.” It has begun to change the nature of the economy. What Pittsburgh was to steel and Detroit to cars, the Web has been to social productivity – a setting that brings the factors together in a new and generative way.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says that most of the operating expenses for his project come from donations. He has transferred ownership to a foundation, thus forsaking, potentially, some $2-3 billion dollars. Still, it is not saintliness or “altruism” that drives this engine, but rather whatever it is that makes Filipina villagers want to wash clothes together, and neighbors want to share stories on a front porch or stoop.

This dynamic does not parse readily through the conceptual apparatus of economic logic. There is no rationing of supply via a system of scarcity and price, nor activation of it through the prospect of reward. Instead, production and consumption – which are iron categories in the texts — have turned into something that has elements of both. Wikipedia users are co-producers of that which they “consume.” They are producing socially, through their interaction with one another – and for the sake of that interaction, not because it gives them money with which to buy something else.

The reigning economics is concerned with settings and incentives that activate the “me” side of human nature. The next economics will study the activation of this “we” side as well. “What we are seeing now,” writes Yochai Benkler, in his book The Wealth of Networks, “is the emergence of more effective collective action practices that are decentralized but do not rely on either the price system or a managerial structure for coordination.” In other words, social co-production.

It would be fatuous to suggest that an entire economy could operate on commons principles any time soon. Among other things there is the matter of cash. The devotees who contribute to Firefox, Wikipedia and Linux have the time because they get money from the market somehow. The two realms are symbiotic, for the present at least, and perhaps necessarily so. Much as managers have rediscovered the importance of social productivity within their corporations, we are relearning that same lesson outside the corporation as well.

Publishing can’t thrive without a free English language, technology without a free culture of science, baseball without the basic format of the box score that is available to all news outlets and fans. Just so, a corporate market generally cannot thrive without a parallel economy that operates on principles different from its own. Nor for that matter can the government. Police alone can’t make a neighborhood safe, schools alone can’t educate, without something else going on that probably is more important.

What does seem clear is that the commons economy is likely to keep growing. It does what the corporate market can’t, and that increasingly is what most needs to be done. We need, increasingly, clean air and water, more than the stuff that results in foul air and water. We need functioning communities more than the centrifugal energies of the global market that have tended to rip communities apart. Not that we don’t need markets and stuff. But the balance needs to shift back; and the countervailing energies of commons productivity – both natural and social – will be central to that shift.

This is something that most economists today don’t know even how to think about, let alone encourage. It is off their mental maps, which are out of synch with the new terrain. At least now we know that this terrain is not a fantasy of New Age idealists. It does not require heroic acts of human generosity – what the economists call “altruism” – in order to exist. It is, rather, grounded in the ordinary, mundane human nature upon which an economy operates. We are social creatures. We like to be engaged with other people, in one way or another, just as we like to experience monetary gain.

The proof lies in the way this is happening now, spontaneously and without central direction. Together it represents the start of what is likely to become the next big turn of the economic wheel, and puts the most basic questions about an economy back on the table. What is it, really? What is it for? Most importantly, what is the model of human nature on which it is based? In the face of financial and ecological conundrums that defy solution within the old frameworks, the answers presents the possibility of a new way out that draws from one that is centuries old.

Jonathan Rowe is part of a group making his hometown of Point Reyes, California a test case for applying commons thinking on the local level through the West Marin Commons. (www.westmarincommons.org) He has recently analyzed key commons-based issues in national and international sources such as Harper’s Magazine, World Watch Institute’s State of the World 2008, and The National, an influential Middle Eastern newspaper published in Abu Dhabi.

The following is an excerpt from Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back it originally appeared on the On The Commons website.

by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, published by the New Press, 2008.

Technological progress … has provided society with what economists call a “free lunch,” that is, an increase in output that is not commensurate with the increase in effort and cost necessary to bring it about. — Joel Mokyr, Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1990)

Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest men in the nation, is worth over $60 billion. Does he “deserve” all this money? Why? Did he work so much harder than everyone else? Did he create something so extraordinary that no one else could have created? Ask Buffett himself and he will tell you that personally he thinks that “society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned.”

But if this is true, doesn’t society deserve a very significant share of what he has received?

Buffett may not know it, but he has put his finger on one of the most explosive issues developing just beneath the surface of public awareness. In recent decades researchers working in a broad range of economic, technological, and other fields have clarified much more precisely than in the past the many ways “society” contributes to the creation of “wealth” — and, accordingly, how relatively little any one individual can be said to have earned and “deserved.” Their research, in turn, raises profound moral — and ultimately political — questions that are becoming increasingly difficult to avoid. At the heart of this revolution in understanding is a fundamental reconsideration of the extraordinary role of knowledge in economic growth — and of how ever-increasing knowledge, accumulating across the generations, is central to the creation of all wealth.

The distribution of income and wealth in the United States is more unequal today than at any time since the 1920s. The following study shares with Buffett a fundamental scepticism toward the belief that the nation’s extraordinary inequalities are simply a natural outgrowth of differences in individual effort, skills, and intelligence. “We didn’t rely on somebody else to build what we built,” banking titan Sanford Weill tells us in a New York Times front-page story on the “New Gilded Age.” “I think there are people,” insists another executive, “who because of their uniqueness warrant whatever the market will bear.”

The new research findings suggest that such views are profoundly wrong — but for reasons that go well beyond Buffett’s general view and, indeed, beyond the understandings that until recently have been common among specialists concerned with these matters. Often in history something dramatic is brewing in the quiet work of scholars — something the public doesn’t know about or understand until much, much later. Einstein’s famous E = mc equation meant absolutely nothing to most people when it was first published in 1905 — but it hit the world literally as a bombshell when atomic weapons exploded in 1945. The sophisticated mathematics Claude Shannon worked out in the 1940s laid theoretical groundwork for the digital communication that today ramifies into every corner of domestic and global life. The structure of DNA was deciphered by scientists in 1953, but the public is only now beginning to realize just how radically genetic engineering may revolutionize medicine, food production, and many other important fields.

“Unjust Deserts” suggests that something at least as portentous as these extraordinary developments is silently emerging among scholars studying the sources of wealth, and that once the implications are fully grasped, it too is likely to have dramatic implications — in this case for the distribution of income, wealth, and power throughout society. It suggests, moreover, that this new understanding and the steady evolution of the knowledge economy, combined with growing social and economic pain and set against a backdrop of ever-worsening inequality, are likely to contribute to potentially massive political change as the twenty-first century unfolds. Consider the following truth: a person working today the same number of hours as a similar person in 1800 — and working just as hard (and no harder) — can obviously produce many, many times the economic output. Recent estimates suggest that national output per capita has increased more than twenty fold since 1800. Output per hour worked has increased an estimated fifteenfold since 1870 alone.

Consider further that the modern person on average is likely to work with no greater commitment, risk, or intelligence than his counterpart from the past.

What is the primary cause of such vast gains if individuals do not really “improve”? The answer is obviously more productivity — more output from the same level of input. And self-evidently what this means is that we are more productive as a society. But how does a society become more productive if individual effort and intelligence remain relatively constant? Clearly, it is largely because on the whole the scientific, technical, and cultural knowledge available to us, and the efficiency of our means of storing and retrieving this knowledge, have grown at a scale and pace that far outstrip any other factor in the nation’s economic achievement. “The central phenomenon of the modern age,” economic historian Joel Mokyr observes, is quite simply “that as an aggregate we know more.”

A half century ago, in 1957, the future Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow calculated that nearly 90 percent of productivity growth in the first half of the twentieth century (from 1909 to 1949) could only be attributed to “technical change in the broadest sense.”

The supply of labor and capital — what workers and employers contribute — appeared almost incidental to this massive technological “residual.” Subsequent research inspired by Solow has continued to put a spotlight on “advances in knowledge” as the main source of growth. Another highly respected economist, William Baumol, argues that “nearly 90 percent … of current GDP was contributed by innovation carried out since 1870.” Baumol judges that his estimate, in fact, understates the cumulative influence of past advances: even “the steam engine, the railroad, and many other inventions of an earlier era still add to today’s GDP.”

Looked at another way, if today’s high earners are typically highly educated, this is clearly not primarily because they are more intelligent or work harder, and it is not mainly because they were lucky in the “birth lottery,” as some argue. Above all, they are highly educated because there is more knowledge for them to obtain and more opportunity to do so. “A college-educated engineer working today and one working 100 years ago have the same human capital,” Stanford economist Paul Romer observes. But the engineer working today is far, far more productive. The reason, again, is self-evident: “He or she can take advantage of all the additional knowledge accumulated as design problems were solved during the last 100 years.”

Today a society’s “stock of knowledge” and its “technological state” are the subject of intense discussion by scholars and policy makers. An obvious truth that emerges from their work is also clear and lies at the foundation of the following study: All of this knowledge — the overwhelming source of all modern wealth — comes to us today through no effort of our own. It is the generous and unearned gift of the past. In the words of Mokyr, it is a “free lunch.”

An obvious question arises from these facts: if most of what we have today is attributable to advances we inherit in common — what another economic historian, Nathan Rosenberg, has termed a “huge overhang of technological inheritance” — why, specifically, should this gift of our collective history not more generously and broadly benefit all members of society? Once the modern understandings are fully grasped, today’s distributive realities become much harder to ignore: the top 1 percent of U.S. households now receives more income than the bottom 120 million Amercans combined.

The richest 1 percent of households owns nearly half of all individually owned investment assets (stocks and mutual funds, financial securities, business equity, trusts, non-home real estate). The bottom 90 percent of the population owns less than 15 percent; the bottom half of the population — 150 million Americans — own less than 1 percent.

If America’s vast wealth is mainly a gift of our common past, how, specifically, can such disparities be justified? Although a great deal of research has been done on knowledge and economic growth — and although one can find related moral reflections scattered throughout the work of many writers — very few have dealt directly with the equity issues posed by our scientific and technological knowledge inheritance. We seek to remedy this large-order gap in public understanding. We hope thereby also to contribute to shaping new policies appropriate to the era of the knowledge economy.

Copyright New Press, 2008.

Gar Alperovitz is the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland. His previous books include The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and America Beyond Capitalism. He lives in Washington, D.C. Lew Daly is a senior fellow at Demos and the author of God and the Welfare State. He lives in New York City.

There is a thread of social justice that is so central to the human condition that we can find it everywhere and everywhen. It is an idea that resurfaces throughout history in times of turmoil and oppression – one such time was 12^th Century England just after the Norman invasion…

Years of abuse by those in power had brought waves of unrest and uprising which did not settle until Magna Carta (a pair of charters - The Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest) was forced upon King John in the 13th Century and the inalienable rights of the people were guaranteed under law. The Great Charter is the more famous document; it’s legacies include the right of habeas corpus, which arises from what are now known as clauses 36, 38, 39, and 40 of the 1215 Magna Carta and guarantees against unlawful detention – a right that has been abused by British and American governments in recent years. But it is the lesser known Charter of the Forest that points the way to a new (and in some ways, ‘age old’…) model for our global society.

The Charter of the Forest guaranteed the right of the commoner to subsistence through the use of the world’s natural resources. But over time commonly held resources have been expropriated to create power and wealth for the privileged few. We are now at a point in history where everything, from water to knowledge, has a price tag and laws have been created to ensure that we pay. We take it for granted that the rich and powerful are somehow entitled to what was once held in common, but no matter how deep we delve into the pages of history we can find no justification for any claims of ownership. Put simply, we were robbed.

As an early 20^th Century poem about British Colonialism in India puts it…

Three hundred years back

Company man descended

You have kept quiet

He robbed the whole nation

He claims all forests are historical

Did his father come and plant?

(cited in The Magna Carta Manifesto by Peter Linebaugh: University of California Press, 2008 – this book is one of the main inspirations behind this blog)

In the same vein we might also ask who planted the prehistoric forests that would become the coal and oil that fuelled the industrial revolution? In fact the deeper we look into claims of ownership the more obvious it becomes that wealth is a product of the commonly held knowledge of our species and the natural resources of our planet – who then should reap the rewards? All of us, that’s who.

This blog will look at ‘the commons’ in all it’s splendid forms and, more importantly, it will focus on ways to live in common, here and now, for ourselves and future generations.

In order to understand the importance of ‘the commons’ we must first understand the nature of the commons. The best introduction we could find was at On The Commons.org…

While “the commons” is an evocative term, sparking images in our minds ranging from English peasant revolts to a park in downtown Boston, the full scope of its meaning is not always clear to people upon first encountering it.

That’s part of our mission at On The Commons—to make the idea of the commons and a commons-based society as familiar to everyone as the winner of last year’s American Idol competition. That’s why we’ve partnered with the New Press publishing house, filmmakers Laura Hanna, Gavin Browning, Dana Schechter, Molly Schwartz and the band Frosted Ambassador to produce an entertaining, enlightening 4-minute introduction to the whole host of ideas connected to the commons. See it here on You Tube: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090126/commons_video