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. ...
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