An important option
Over the past decade, the debate on the commons has faded away. Blame the political and ideological radicalization that has invested the public conversation around the world. Yet, we are in an increasingly polyphonic economy where private, public, third sector, cooperatives and the new economic forms of the network coexist and operate. In this type of economy the commons can be an important option. Indeed they can be a decisive option in the management of strategic resources for the future of the planet.
They are also an important option at a political level because common goods, precisely because of their collective nature, bring citizens closer to institutions and involve them directly in actions of public interest. In times of detachment between institutions and civil society, the type of association produced by sharing responsibility for a public good would be a great action of civic communion.
The debate on the commons concerns precisely the governance of great natural resources: forests, oceans, water, the sky, space. Resources that risk being plundered if the way they are administered today in the public sphere and not only in the public sphere does not change.
Let's take stock
Two recent books published by goWare have tried to take stock of the studies and debate surrounding the commons. The first, Common goods diversity, sustainability, governance. Writings by Elinor Ostrom, offers some reflections of the Nobel prize for economics. The Indiana University economist has made "a decisive contribution to the analysis of governance in the economy, in particular of the common good". So says the motivation of the Nobel to Ostrom.
The book also contains Garret Harding's essay on the tragedy of the commons, quoted in the article below. An important essay that has somewhat crystallized the opinion on the scarce sustainability of this form of collective ownership. An opinion that has become mainstream.
The second book is Omnia sunt communes. The international debate on commons and common goods. It aims to offer an overview of the main theoretical and disciplinary positions in the international debate.
The reader can find a dozen essays, often unpublished in Italian, by authors who study the phenomenon of commons in different fields. These are David Bollier, Massimo de Angelis, Silvia Federici, Garrett Hardin, Michael Hardt, Naomi Klein, Lawrence Lessig, Peter Linebaugh, Donald M. Nonini, Elinor Ostrom and Vandana Shivaan. These specific contributions therefore help to orient oneself within a theme that is beginning to affect many fields of activity of common living.
We return to speak authoritatively of common goods
Bringing the lost discourse on the commons back to the surface and proposing it again with a certain force is a rather unexpected, but undoubtedly authoritative and listened to source. It is one of the major think-tanks of modern capitalism, the London magazine "The Economist". The prestigious magazine has long been seriously concerned by the crisis facing the capitalist system. A crisis to which the London magazine, generally rather assertive, fails to outline a plausible outlet if not refounding it from the roots. A path that frightens its own supporters.
Well, in this possible re-foundation there will be an important role for the commons, affirms the “Economist”. It so happens that the Economist and Elizabeth Warren are converging on a common position. It is no coincidence that the London magazine is half tempted to offer the famous Massachusetts senator the battle endorsement. Mica will be the famous parallel convergences of Aldo Moro? In the end many things are invented in Italy.
Below we publish the Italian translation of the Economist article, The alternatives to privatization and nationalisation, published in the issue of September 12, 2019.
Enjoy the reading!
The Forest Charter
It sounds vaguely elvish, like something straight out of Tolkien's pages. In fact, the Charter of the Forest is one of Britain's founding policy documents. It dates back to the same period as the Magna Carta, known as the "Great Chart" precisely to distinguish it from its sylvan namesake.
While the Magna Carta interested, at the time, a few privileged nobles, the Forest Charter was intended to safeguard the standard of living of ordinary citizens. In particular, he wanted to honor their right to make a living from the bountiful riches of the common resource of forests.
As an economic institution, the commons today seem as antiquated as the wax-sealed documents of the Charter era. For many economists, the spread of private property law underpins the modern world. The fact is that the ineffectiveness of the commons has been greatly overestimated. Today these could find an important space in public policies.
The tragedy of the common good
An American ecologist, Garrett Hardin, coined the expression "tragedy of the commons" in an essay (foolishly eugenic) published in "Science" in 1968. In reality, the problem of the free-rider, which has always afflicted everyone's , has been known to economists for over a century.
Consider a pasture on which the flock can be fed. Each user is driven to use it as intensively as possible. Since it is open to all, a shepherd's moderation in letting it be grazed by his flock is an incentive for another to make it used more intensively by his animals. The grass spared from the first shepherd's flock will be the supplementary food for the free-rider's flock. Those who contain themselves in the name of common sharing end up having the worst not only in relative terms, but also in absolute terms. The common pasture will inevitably end up in ruins.
Many other precious public resources are, likewise, subject to plunder by free-raiders. Roads become congested, waterways overexploited and polluted, and the electromagnetic spectrum needlessly overcrowded. All this at the expense of the collective interest.
The two possible remedies
There are generally two remedies. Governments can legally regulate access to the commons, such as airspace. Or, they can give control of it to private individuals, thus establishing a property right where it did not exist before.
Economists tend to prefer this second remedy. It seems the easiest and the most performing. Private owners have an objective economic incentive to use the resource sustainably, in order to maintain its value as long-term as possible.
Privatization should also encourage investment and innovation, as the resulting profits would accrue to the owner.
Le fences of the XVI-XIX century
Many economists see the diffusion of property rights as an essential factor in determining the birth of modern economies. Between the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries in England and Wales common land was enclosed and given to private owners.
Economic historians have long believed that fences, while unjust and brutal, spurred progress and created the conditions for subsequent industrialization.
Land cultivation improved considerably, and the factories of the cities received the workforce they needed from the countryside. Increased agricultural productivity provided the food to feed the urban proletariat.
"The separation of the peasantry from the land was the price England paid to feed its growing population," writes Peter Mathias, an economic historian. And he adds: “the industrial revolution seemed to bury the concept of the commons forever”.
A historical rethink
But that orthodoxy has been widely questioned. The privatization of shared resources does not always lead to a productivity boom. More recent research suggests that fences may not have been the boon they were thought to have been to British agriculture and industry.
Research by Robert Allen, an economic historian at New York University in Abu Dhabi, has shown one important thing. The agriculture of the large capitalist estates, born from the enclosures of the commons, was not much more productive than was the agriculture under the commons regime.
Nor did the landlords, who had gained control of the agricultural lands, channel their surpluses into industry. Most of them lived the good life. Many were debtors rather than savers or investors.
Guy Standing of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in his book The Plunder of the Commons, writes a very sensible thing. Property rights can be an incentive to use resources well, but they can also cause the squandering of the fruits generated by those resources.
The commons are not inefficient
If the privatization of land increased productivity less than might have been expected, it was because the commons were not so much more inefficient than private property. Indeed, many commons were curated assets.
Elinor Ostrom, winner of the Nobel prize in economics, has studied how rural villages manage shared resources such as irrigation systems. The Swiss municipality of Törbel, for example, has been successfully sharing irrigation resources for over half a millennium.
An exclusive focus on public or private, as a way to control the use of the commons, overlooks a diverse set of alternatives that have developed throughout history. The information age provides recent examples.
An example is Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia built effectively by the collective user. No other encyclopedia can stand up to it. Vast swathes of the web that could function efficiently as a commons have been left in the hands of wealthy and relatively unaccountable tech companies.
Development of civic senseco
The decline of the commons has caused some important civic principles to fall into disuse. Medieval citizens expected a benefit from common ownership but we also helped manage the shared social wealth.
Similarly today, prosperity depends on the management of public resources. That is, it depends on the daily behaviors that support the rule of law, on the accumulated scientific knowledge and on the environmental services in charge of keeping the air clean, the waterways and so on.
Some institutional creativity could allow more resources to be managed as commons, reducing concentrations of wealth and power without loss of economic and operational efficiency.
A world that assigns an important role to the commons would be one rich in governance institutions of distributed and interlaced communities.
Pull out the better by people
Developing the commons would be less politically rewarding than privatization. Indeed, this form allows governments to exchange responsibility for money. But, enhancing the commons could repair flaws in the civil fabric, such as leases. It could also ease the common citizen's sense of frustration with elites who have lost touch with the world.
In his Nobel lecture, Ostrom argued that public policies should “facilitate the development of institutions capable of bringing out the best in human beings”. It really seems like something of a great deal of common sense.
