OUR COMMON WEALTH

THEORY

There is a body of thought surrounding the commons, and there are efforts in the real world to strengthen the commons. The first part of the book focuses on the former, the second on the latter. In short, theory and practice.

Rowe begins by painting a picture of the commons in the twenty-first century. This picture goes well beyond the familiar one from medieval Europe; it is shared wealth writ large. It includes innumerable gifts of nature and society, from the atmosphere to the Internet, science to children’s stories, soil to community strength. We inherit these assets jointly and hold them in trust, morally if not legally, for those who come after us. These assets are essential to human and planetary well-being as well as to the functioning of our modern economy. Yet to economists and others, they are stunningly invisible.

Economists fail to see the commons because its contributions are difficult to monetize. They also don’t believe that humans can act on impulses other than self-gain. Disregard of the commons was also spurred by biologist Garrett Hardin’s essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which holds that commons are inherently self-destructive. Rowe shows that, to the contrary, commons are quite capable of sustaining themselves when protected from predatory forces. The real tragedy is not that commons self-destruct but that they are devoured by outside profit-seekers.

Rowe offers a new story of the commons not as tragedy but as shared wealth under siege. The story identifies both the value of the wealth and its foes. The value of the commons lies not only in the services it provides—a stable climate, a sense of belonging, a vast store of knowledge—but also in its ability to temper the market’s mindless profit-maximizing that distorts so much around us. The foes of the commons change over time, but nowadays are mostly privatizing corporations.

To protect the commons against privatizers, Rowe suggests we deploy a toolset not usually associated with the commons: property rights. At the moment, property rights protect private wealth much more than common wealth, but that could change. New common property rights—and common property-owning institutions such as trusts—could defend the commons against incursion and ensure that they are preserved for the long term.

In the last chapter of this part, Rowe notes that traditional conservatives understood that markets need limits, just as the state does. He laments that in recent decades, that kind of conservatism has been displaced by a more cynical kind that believes it is okay to waste our patrimony so long as somebody makes money doing it.

—Ed.