Peter Barnes provides a simple and straightforward solution for valuing the atmosphere, ecosystems, and intellectual and cultural assets that now go unaccounted. Corporate leaders will find his book a breakthrough. And it will spark every reader to think afresh about our most urgent problems.
David Olsen, former CEO, Patagonia
Reinventing the Commons
Thus far I’ve argued that Capitalism 2.0—or surplus capitalism—has three tragic flaws: it devours nature, widens inequality, and fails to make us happier in the end. It behaves this way because it’s programmed to do so. Neither enlightened managers nor the occasional zealous regulator can make it behave much differently.
In this part of the book I advance a solution. The essence of it is to fix capitalism’s operating system by adding a commons sector to balance the corporate sector. The new sector would supply proxies for unrepresented stakeholders: future generations, pollutees, and nonhuman species. And it would offset the corporate sector’s negative externalities with positive externalities of comparable magnitude.
If the corporate sector devours nature, the commons sector would protect it. If the corporate sector widens inequality, the commons sector would reduce it. If the corporate sector turns us into self-obsessed consumers, the commons sector would reconnect us to nature, community, and culture. All this would happen automatically once the commons sector is set up. The result would be a balanced economy that gives us the best of both sectors and the worst of neither.
To be sure, building an economic sector from scratch is a formidable task. Fortunately, the commons sector needn’t be built from scratch; it has an enormous potential asset base just waiting to be claimed. That asset base is the commons itself, the gifts of nature and society we inherit and create together. These gifts are worth more than all private assets combined. It’s the job of the commons sector to organize and protect these gifts, and by so doing, to save capitalism from itself.
Common wealth is like the dark matter of the economic universe—it’s everywhere, but we don’t see it. One reason we don’t see it is that much of it is, literally, invisible. Who can spot the air, an aquifer, or the social trust that underlies financial markets? The more relevant reason is our own blindness: the only economic matter we notice is the kind that glistens with dollar signs. We ignore common wealth because it lacks price tags and property rights.
It’s time to notice our shared gifts. Not only that, it’s time to name them, protect them, and organize them. One way to do this is through common property rights.
I recognize that, for some, turning common wealth into any kind of property is a sacrilege. As Chief Seattle put it, “How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land?” I empathize deeply with this sentiment. However, I’ve come to believe that it’s more disrespectful of the sky to pollute it without limit or payment than to turn it into common property held in trust for future generations. Hence, I favor propertization, but not privatization.
