I began pondering this dilemma about ten years ago after retiring from Working
Assets, a business I cofounded in 1982. (Working Assets offers telephone
and credit card services which automatically donate to nonprofit groups working
for a better world.) My initial ruminations focused on climate change caused
by human emissions of heat-trapping gases. Some analysts saw this as a “tragedy
of the commons,” a concept popularized forty years ago by biologist
Garrett Hardin. According to Hardin, people will always overuse a commons
because it’s in their self-interest to do so. I saw the problem instead
as a pair of tragedies: first a tragedy of the market, which has no way of
curbing its own excesses, and second a tragedy of government, which fails
to protect the atmosphere because polluting corporations are powerful and
future generations don’t vote.
This way of viewing the situation led to a hypothesis: if the commons is
a victim of market and government failures, rather than the cause of its
own destruction, the remedy might lie in strengthening the commons. But how
might that be done? According to prevailing wisdom, commons are inherently
difficult to manage because no one effectively owns them. If Waste Management
Inc. owned the atmosphere, it would charge dumpers a fee, just as it does
for terrestrial landfills. But since no one has title to the atmosphere,
dumping proceeds without limit or cost.
There’s a reason, of course, why no one has title to the atmosphere.
For as long as anyone can remember there’s been more than enough air
to go around, and thus no point in owning any of it. But nowadays, things
are different. Our spacious skies aren’t empty anymore. We’ve
filled them with invisible gases that are altering the climate
patterns to which we and other species have adapted. In this
new context,
the atmosphere
is a scarce resource, and having someone own it might not be
a bad idea.
In retrospect, I realized the question I’d been asking since early
adulthood was: Is capitalism a brilliant solution to the problem of scarcity,
or is it itself modernity’s central problem? The question has many
layers, but explorations of each layer led me to the same verdict. Although
capitalism started as a brilliant solution, it has become the central problem
of our day. It was right for its time, but times have changed.
When capitalism started, nature was abundant and capital was scarce; it
thus made sense to reward capital above all else. Today we’re awash
in capital and literally running out of nature. We’re also losing many
social arrangements that bind us together as communities and enrich our lives
in nonmonetary ways. This doesn’t mean capitalism is doomed or useless,
but it does mean we have to modify it. We have to adapt it to the twenty-first
century rather than the eighteenth. ... read
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