academics

I always find it refreshing when people decide to investigate the commons from new angles and in transdisciplinary ways.  So it is a treat to learn about the web journal Lo Squaderno devoting its entire December 2013 issue (#30) to “Commons – Practices, Boundaries and Thresholds.”  The entire issue is available as a pdf file under a Creative Commons BY-ND-SA license.  

Lo Squaderno is “a free web journal devoted to exploring and advancing research movements…. [that] collects original short features by people committed to research in various fields.  Each issue is structured around a thematic focus around the topics of space, power, and society.”  This commons issue, edited by Giacomo DAlisa and Cristina Mattiuci, along with guest artist Andrea Sarti, consists of nine essays in English and three in Italian.   

Below, provocative excerpts from three of the essays.  In “Show Me the Action, and I Will Show You the Commons!” Helene Finiori, building on Silke Helfrich's observations, points out that the conventional ways of identifying common goods, based on their “rivalry” and “excludability,” is unreliable: 

Types of goods are traditionally distinguished based on their degree of rivalry (the extent to which the use of a good by one diminishes the availability for others) and excludability (the extent to which access to a good can be denied or limited). This perspective ignores for a large part the contextual and variable nature of goods in time and under the ‘stress’ of repeated activity. It does not take into account the fact that rivalry can be a matter of perception (a good may be categorized non rival because perceived as abundantly available irrespective of whether self-renewable or not, such as water in ‘wet’ places), of congestion (a good may be non rival up to a point of saturation, such as roads before they get jammed) or of yield point (a good may be non rival up to the limit beyond which there is no more resilience under stress and therefore no more self-regeneration, such as a savannah before desertification).  It does not acknowledge that low rivalry goods can also be depleted and made unavailable as a result of toxic outputs of activity (externalities). Neither does it consider the fact that property and access, in other words excludability, create artificial boundaries that businesses for example are constantly seeking to expand by inventing new property rights or business models, as part of their ‘natural’ quest to extend the perimeter in which they can generate and capture value. The examples of patented seeds and attempts to patent the human genome are the most striking.

A fairly new group of leading heterodox economic thinkers and activists has come together as Econ4 to pioneer some new forms of popular education about economics. Their work focuses both on the fallacies of conventional economics and the promise of a new economic paradigm.  Check out Econ4’s series of intelligent and engaging short videos which explain the economics of healthcare, housing, jobs, and more.  A just-released video, “The Bottom Line:  A New Economy,” provides a terrific overview of the new types of peer production, cooperatives and other distributed, local, hybrid initiatives that are already taking root across the US. 

The basic mission of Econ4 is to change the study of economics and how we publicly talk about economic choices.  As the project states on its website:  “The economic crisis we face today is not only a crisis of the economy. It is also a crisis of economics. The free-market fundamentalism that attained ideological dominance in the final decades of the 20th century has been discredited by financial collapse, global imbalances, mass unemployment, and environmental degradation. To confront these challenges, we need an economics for the 21st century.”

The term “Econ4” refers to the four central conditions that the economy must meet in meeting people’s long-term needs and protecting the planet.  This chart provides a shorthand overview of the four conditions, which are elaborated in a longer statement on the Econ4 website:

Besides its great videos, Econ4 has a variety of resources for those who wish to explore alternative economics further.