Jay Walljasper, Senior Fellow at On the Commons and editor of OnTheCommons.org, created OTC’s book All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. A speaker, communications strategist and writer and editor, he chronicles stories from around the world that point us toward a more equitable, sustainable and enjoyable future. He is author of The Great Neighborhood Book and a senior associate at the urban affairs consortium Citiscope. Walljasper also writes a column about city life for Shareable.net and is a Senior Fellow at Project for Public Spaces and Augsburg College’s Sabo Center for Citizenship and Learning. For more of his work, see JayWalljasper....
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Unlikely Ally? The Economist Discovers the Commons
By Jay Walljasper
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The Economist magazine is a tireless—and globally influential—crusader for the free market. Each week it champions privatization and big business in smart, elegant, well-researched articles.
So it’s definitely worth noting when The Economist discovers the commons and declares in a headline, “it still pays to study medieval English landholding and Sahelian nomadism.”
The magazine singles out the work of Syracuse University’s Charlotte Hess in outlining how principles of the commons apply to modern fields such as medicine and information.
It also cites Indiana University’s Elinor Ostrom, who offers “the miracle of the Rhine” as a commons success story for our time—an extensive clean up of the river was initiated by citizens groups and local governments with industry and larger government bodies following their lead.
“The economics of the new commons…,” The Economist concludes, “may yet prove a useful way of thinking about problems, such as managing the internet, intellectual property or international pollution, on which policymakers need all the they can get.”
Posted August 5, 2008
