Our Hidden Wealth: How the commons makes everything else work

[marmar]

from OnTheCommons.org:


Our Hidden Wealth
How the commons makes everything else work

By Jonathan Rowe

This is the first chapter from the book Our Common Wealth: The Hidden Economy that That Makes Everything Else Work, a collection of writings from Jonathan Rowe (1946-2011). Rowe was a co-founder of On the Commons and a co-editor of On the Commons.org.

My wife grew up in what Western experts, not without condescension, call a “developing” country. The social life of her village revolved largely around a tree. People gathered there in the evening to visit, tell stories, or just pass the time. Some of my wife’s warmest childhood memories are of playing hide-and-seek late into the evening while adults chatted under the tree.

The tree was more than a quaint meeting place; it was an economic asset in the root sense of that word. It produced a bonding of neighbors, an information network, an activity center for kids, and a bridge between generations. Older people could be part of the flow of daily life, and children got to experience something scarce in the United States today—an unstructured and noncompetitive setting in which their parents were close at hand.

In the United States we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on everything from community centers to kiddie videos to try to achieve those results, with great inefficiency and often much less positive effect. Yet most Western economists would regard the tree as a pathetic state of underdevelopment.

They would urge “modernization,” by which they would mean cutting down the tree and making people pay money for what it provided. In their preferred vision, corporate-produced entertainment would displace local culture. Something free and available to all would become commodities sold for a price. The result would be “growth” as economists understand that term. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/magazine/our-hidden-wealth

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[Johonny]

2. The elite liked the commons when they were reserved for them

the more common people got to use the commons the less the elite wanted the commons.

[Fantastic Anarchist]

3. Kicked, Recced and Bookmarked.

Thanks for posting.

[annabanana]

4. k&r ! . . .n/t

[niyad]

5. k and r

[TheKentuckian]

6. Damn, that is good.