Featured Article
Sweat Voltage: How to Turn Consumption into Production
It is the perverse genius of the corporate economy to constantly find ways to sell us what we used to have for free. In nothing is this more evident than in the realm of bodily exertion. For decades – centuries really – this thing called “the economy” has been stripping away the physical activity from daily life. Eventually exertion itself became scarce, and something we had to buy. At the same time, corporations were turning food into oral entertainment and arterial junk, and pushing it at us constantly, thus making the activity deficit all the more pressing.
Ergo the need to buy from “health clubs”, the activity that once was built into daily life. The farmer’s plough became a Cybex machine, the walk to the station a treadmill. Where once we produced we now consume; and we internalize this process to such a degree that the ersatz version becomes more legitimate than the original. I once belonged to a YMCA in Manhattan where people would take an elevator to the 4th floor to use a Stairmaster. The strange alchemy of market culture had made the commoditized substitute more real somehow than just walking up the stairs.
Commons
Pre-Distributive Economics and Sufficiency for the Long Haul
Part I: Inequality, The Iatrogenic Spiral, and Systemic Diminishing Returns The problem is that the explosive growth of the global economy has not brought a corresponding increase in global well … More
The Missing Sector
Enlarging Our Sense of “the Economy”
Meet Us at the Zocalo
We humans like to gather, and to be around other people in informal and unstructured settings. For time out of memory, places in which to do so were built into … More
Economic Indicators
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Looking Backward: Economics and the Cult of Yesterday
GDP and productivity don’t measure what’s really going on in the economy—or in people’s lives. Jonathan Rowe on measuring what matters.
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The Gross Domestic Product
Testimony of Jonathan Rowe Co-director of the West Marin Commons Before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce, Trade and Tourism March 12, 2008 … More
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Is Happiness a Commons?
Gunnar Myrdal, the late Swedish economist, once noted the strange tendency of his profession to barricade itself against human reality. In true sciences, such as biochemistry and physics, hypotheses are … More
Economics
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Pre-Distributive Economics and Sufficiency for the Long Haul
Part I: Inequality, The Iatrogenic Spiral, and Systemic Diminishing Returns The problem is that the explosive growth of the global economy has not brought a corresponding increase in global well … More
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The Missing Sector
Enlarging Our Sense of “the Economy”
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Looking Backward: Economics and the Cult of Yesterday
GDP and productivity don’t measure what’s really going on in the economy—or in people’s lives. Jonathan Rowe on measuring what matters.
About
Jonathan Rowe was a writer who wrote about the commons, diseconomy, economics, economic indicators, corporations, and many other subjects.
Jonathan was an editor at the Washington Monthly magazine and a staff writer at the Christian Science Monitor. He contributed to Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, Reader’s Digest, Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, American Prospect, Adbusters, and a host of other publications.