Category - Books

[See part one]
Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, CPE Staff Economist

It’s worth remembering that commons already exist, lots of them, in various places and parts of the world’s economies. Most often, however, they are informal arrangements—holdovers from before the rise of modern market capitalism. In general, commons are not recognized formally by governments as a type of property arrangement deserving protection, the way conventional private property is legally protected.

It is this lack of protection that enables the famous “tragedy of the commons.” Barnes argues that, contrary to the standard perception, commons aren’t undermined by internal tragedies—they are victims of infringement from the outside. Marx described the enclosure of common land into private land as “the primitive accumulation of capital”; today, Barnes is primarily concerned with the ability of corporations to horn in on remaining commons as they seek new resources to exploit for private gain. A recent example is with the digital TV broadcast spectrum, with an estimated value of $70 billion but which the U.S. government gave away for free in 1996 to media conglomerates, even though the airwaves are supposed to be the shared property of all Americans.

Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, CPE Staff Economist

A few weeks ago, CPE Staff Economist Jerry Friedman wrote an Econ-Atrocity reviewing Bill McKibben’s new book, Deep Economy. Though he says McKibben “has written a clear attack on much of what ails us,” Friedman nonetheless criticizes McKibben for approaching the environmental and social problems of the day from an individualist perspective. For all that McKibben wants to promote and revive “community,” he has the attitude (says Friedman) of a “personal Salvationist . . . [who thinks that] the enemy [is] ourselves: we use too much, waste too much, want too much; and the only salvation for the environment is to change our preferences, use less, recycle more, and choose to live simply.” What McKibben misunderstands or ignores, Friedman argues, is the power of social institutions to drive behavior, regardless of the desires and seemingly free choices of individuals.

I think that Friedman will find solace in Peter Barnes’ recent book, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons, since Barnes’ approach is definitively institutional. The problem, according to Barnes, is that the structure of the economy and society leave too much power in the hands of corporate capitalism. Even if all the CEOs and boards of directors and politicians were replaced with kind-hearted souls like McKibben, we would still face pretty much the same issues of environmental decay, economic inequality, and other social ills—the logic of capitalism and the legal structure of private property rights force the leaders of corporations to do what they currently do. He learned this from personal experience as co-owner and manager of several business ventures, most famously Working Assets (a telephone and credit card company that donates one percent of gross revenues to progressive charitable organizations). “I’d tested the system for twenty years, pushing it toward multiple bottom lines [that consider social and environmental impacts in addition to profit concerns] as far as I possibly could. I’d dealt with executives and investors who truly cared about nature, employees, and communities. Yet in the end, I’d come to see that all these well-intentioned people, even as their numbers grew, couldn’t shake the larger system loose from its dominant bottom line of profit.” (Ironically, Bill McKibben is quoted on the front cover of Capitalism 3.0 helping to promote Barnes’ book.)

By Gerald Friedman, CPE Staff Economist

At the time of the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, the Environmental Movement straddled two approaches to addressing environmental problems, approaches rooted in two alternative theories. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin proposed the first Earth Day to “force this issue onto the political agenda,” to promote changed government policy to protect the environment. But many of the 20 million Americans who took part in this first Earth Day were deeply suspicious of organized politics or state action. “Personal salvationists,” they blamed environmental troubles on our weaknesses as individuals. Instead of failed social policy, the enemy was ourselves: we use too much, waste too much, want too much; and the only salvation for the environment is to change our preferences, use less, recycle more, and choose to live simply.

Twenty seven years later, the Environmental Movement confronts the same division between personal salvation and political action, a division nicely illustrated by a new book, Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy. A prominent environmentalist, McKibben has written a clear attack on much of what ails us; but he misses the underlying cause of these ills and, therefore, his prescription for remedial action is necessarily off. In many ways, a pleasure to read, the book also left me so frustrated that I threatened to throw it against the wall.

Two weeks ago, after complaining to my daughter about how much I would dislike it, I bought Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy (New York, Henry Holt: 2007) from my local Amherst book store. Already familiar with his ideas from his various other writings (including The End of Nature; Staying Human in an Engineered Age; and various New Yorker articles), I suspected that his new book would be well written, an effective attack on much that ails us as a society, and would miss the point. It is this last that led me to threaten to throw the book against the wall in frustration. And that frustration led me to write this note. (Actually, it was my wife who wanted me to write this so that I would stop ranting to her.)

What could be wrong with a book that criticizes the Bush Administration, big oil, Cargill, Monsanto, and the Economics profession (among many many other villains)? Especially when the author has such good heroes: including farmers’ markets, urban gardens, organic farmers, Heifer International, and the Indian state of Kerala. Among economists, environmentalists like Herman Daly and Bob Costanza get most of the Kudos but a few, like Amartya Sen, make friendly cameo appearances. Individualism is bad; society is productive; and I agree that would all be better off, and the world a lot better off, if we listened to Bill McKibben.

The problem I have is that McKibben not only reads orthodox economists but believes them.

Any present or past President has got to be used to being scorned, so the hue and cry now erupting over Jimmy Carter’s new book on the Israeli-Palestinian misery can’t be terribly surprising for him. I haven’t yet had a chance to read the book and so am not in a position to endorse or reject or somewhere-in-the-middle it. Still, some of the reaction is so clearly based on attacking Carter himself, rather than the content of his book–indeed it seems to be attacking Carter instead of attacking his arguments–and that’s just plain wrong. An example.