Think Like a Commoner

"The 20th century economics that I was taught puts markets at its heart. In nearly every talk I give, I ask ‘what is the first diagram that economics students learn?’ The answer is always the same: supply and demand. As if the economy was merely the market and markets were in equilibrium—well that’s two untruths in one sentence. This idea, that to study economics, first of all we must study markets. Really? Is that where we must begin? And once the market is introduced, the idea of market failures soon follows, as if where the markets fail then perhaps there might be a role for the state. But then again perhaps the state won’t be competent enough to do this, so maybe we should just leave it to the market after all. So, there’s an extraordinary dominance of market thinking. The word ‘the commons’ usually comes into people’s economic education just with one phrase—or frame—that you hear which is ‘the tragedy of the commons’. It comes from a paper written by Garrett Hardin in 1968 and the idea is that if you have open pasture land that everyone can use, it will get overgrazed and it will be run down. Therefore, the commons are tragic and they need to be privatised or controlled by the state. But as the work of Elinor Ostrom has shown, there are actually many commons that today are managed and stewarded well by communities. And they are not open access: they are common pool resources that are carefully managed according to a set of rules and practices by their members. So, the commons don’t have to be tragic. They can be a triumph. My economics education began in this typical way, with markets at the centre and then, in the periphery, the state is a sort of backup option which might not always perform very well. That, I think, is a very neoliberal framing that has dominated for over thirty years. I would much rather start economics with the idea that we can produce and distribute goods and services through four fundamental kinds of provisioning. And I’ve drawn it—this is one of the key visual reframings at the heart of my book—which I call the ‘embedded economy diagram’. The economy is made up of four provisioning forms. The first is the household, where we all begin every day. It’s outside the market but it’s the space of care and wellbeing. Of course, it’s the unpaid work of women that dominates in the household and that was forgotten by the founding fathers who wrote the economics textbooks. So, you’ve got the household. You’ve also got the market where people produce goods and services on the basis of price and exchange. You’ve got the state, where goods and services are produced with public funding. But you’ve also got the commons, where people self-organise—get together without the market, without the state—and produce goods and services that they value. “In the 20th century, the ideological boxing match between the market and the state squeezed out space for recognising other forms of economic organisation” GDP reflects production by the market and the state but it excludes value created in the household or the commons. I think those have been massively neglected areas of economic organising which can be very valuable, especially with the potential of the digital commons this century. I’m really struck by the number of people who work in the sphere of economics who’ll ask, ‘what is the commons? I’ve never heard about this’. That’s because in the 20th century, the ideological boxing match between the market and the state—‘are you a free-market capitalist or a state-loving socialist?’—squeezed out space for recognising other forms of economic organisation. Women’s work in the household was just seen as domestic hence dismissed, and the commons were declared to be tragic, and ended up being colonised by markets, thanks to the patenting of traditional knowledge. We need to open this space up again. And the first way to open it up is to name it. As David Bollier says so effectively in this book, we lack words and concepts for naming spaces where markets can’t reach, and spaces where commons organising really does work, and so we need a much richer language around this. He does a great job of introducing in clear and simple terms what the commons are and shows that we all engage in them every day. He gives us the chance to reimagine the commons and recognise their potential as one of the key provisioning sectors in the economy."