In later books -- Capitalism 3.0 (2006) and With Liberty and Dividends for All (2014) – Barnes further developed this idea of stakeholder trusts for a wide variety of common assets. Again, the model was to use charge rent to limit the use of scarce common assets, and then use that pool of money to pay dividends to everyone.

Barnes’ ideas later gained some traction in Congress as “cap-and-dividend” legislation, in part because they had the virtue of being specific, practical, and fostering greater equality. (The Sky Trust would provide a predistribution of benefits from common assets owned by everyone, rather than rely on redistribution by the welfare state, which is routinely criticized by free-market defenders.) Hillary Clinton actually nearly embraced the stakeholder trust idea during her 2016 presidential campaign, before eventually rejecting it.

Now, in Barnes’ latest book, Ours, he takes his analysis to a richer, more developed level. He argues for inventing a broad new class of property rights known as “universal property.” Its premise is that most of today’s wealth is co-inherited from nature and past human efforts, not individually earned.

Why should politically connected corporations and lucky individuals reap the lion's share of benefits from public lands, watersheds and the atmosphere? Why should all of us pay for civic infrastructures like our financial and communications systems even though most of the benefits are privately captured?

If some of this wealth were placed in a trust for all citizens and future generations, it would introduce a new set of institutions that could tame two serious structural flaws in contemporary capitalism – its destruction of nature and concentration of wealth among the few. The lever for this shift would be a new class of universal property rights for common assets such as the atmosphere and ecosystems, for example, which are not protected by property rights. As a result (along with government inaction), industries are able to over-exploit them as “free” resources, with little or no economic penalty. 

Universal property aims to correct this problem by making businesses respect nature’s limits and pay for its resources, while generating new flows of non-labor income for all citizens. You can listen to my podcast interview with Peter Barnes here.

In later books -- Capitalism 3.0 (2006) and With Liberty and Dividends for All (2014) – Barnes further developed this idea of stakeholder trusts for a wide variety of common assets. Again, the model was to use charge rent to limit the use of scarce common assets, and then use that pool of money to pay dividends to everyone.

Barnes’ ideas later gained some traction in Congress as “cap-and-dividend” legislation, in part because they had the virtue of being specific, practical, and fostering greater equality. (The Sky Trust would provide a predistribution of benefits from common assets owned by everyone, rather than rely on redistribution by the welfare state, which is routinely criticized by free-market defenders.) Hillary Clinton actually nearly embraced the stakeholder trust idea during her 2016 presidential campaign, before eventually rejecting it.

Now, in Barnes’ latest book, Ours, he takes his analysis to a richer, more developed level. He argues for inventing a broad new class of property rights known as “universal property.” Its premise is that most of today’s wealth is co-inherited from nature and past human efforts, not individually earned.

Why should politically connected corporations and lucky individuals reap the lion's share of benefits from public lands, watersheds and the atmosphere? Why should all of us pay for civic infrastructures like our financial and communications systems even though most of the benefits are privately captured?

If some of this wealth were placed in a trust for all citizens and future generations, it would introduce a new set of institutions that could tame two serious structural flaws in contemporary capitalism – its destruction of nature and concentration of wealth among the few. The lever for this shift would be a new class of universal property rights for common assets such as the atmosphere and ecosystems, for example, which are not protected by property rights. As a result (along with government inaction), industries are able to over-exploit them as “free” resources, with little or no economic penalty. 

Universal property aims to correct this problem by making businesses respect nature’s limits and pay for its resources, while generating new flows of non-labor income for all citizens. You can listen to my podcast interview with Peter Barnes here.

Hossein is a professor of Global Development at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, in Ontario, Canada. Much of her scholarship aims to decolonize our very conception of “the economy” by showcasing the vital role played by informal, racialized, and feminist systems of commoning in the Solidarity and Social Economies.

For more, see the Diverse Economies Collective website and Hossein's books, such as Politicized Microfinance (2016), The Black Social Economy (editor; 2018), and her forthcoming Community Economies in the Global South (co-edited). 

For generations, Black women in the African diaspora have relied on “do it together” ROSCAs to pay for major expenses and avoid getting implicated in mainstream banking and state regulation. For their troubles, “Black banker ladies” are often harassed by the banking industry and state authorities, who reflexively regard them “terrorists” or drug dealers because they manage large amounts of cash. 

After years of racialized abuse from those very systems, Black banker ladies have little desire to interact with mainstream banks. They turn instead to self-organized groups of ten, twenty, or sometimes dozens of friends, as a more trusted, convivial form of finance.

ROSCAs are more than informal financial institutions. They are forms of personal support and neighborly solidarity. Through casual and flexible means, they perform various types of community development – home improvement, professional training, neighborhood solidarity – that formal banking is not equipped or inclined to perform.

Sometimes, ROSCAs are even sources of seed money for the campaigns of political candidates who wish to be champions for struggling working people. Hossein recalled how ROSCAs have paid for the lawn signs of candidates, for example. It is not surprising that mainstream banking would prefer to neutralize the empowerment that ROSCA-style finance can provide.

Professor Hossein is a big believer in the generative value of informal systems:

“Our primary focus in the West with marginalized groups has been to formalize everyone, and to demonize the concept of the informal. I like to think that Covid has really pushed us to a place where we now understand the value of mutual aid and getting things informally. It’s actually a good thing.  Not everything in the informal is dark and dirty. It is a way for people who have been under persecution to thrive.”

Here is a link to my fascinating conversation with Caroline Shenaz Hossein.

Update: Here is a wonderful profile of ROSCAs and Banker Ladies in The Globe and Mail (Canada), and here is a short piece in Medium by the Post Growth Institute.

Hossein is a professor of Global Development at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, in Ontario, Canada. Much of her scholarship aims to decolonize our very conception of “the economy” by showcasing the vital role played by informal, racialized, and feminist systems of commoning in the Solidarity and Social Economies.

For more, see the Diverse Economies Collective website and Hossein's books, such as Politicized Microfinance (2016), The Black Social Economy (editor; 2018), and her forthcoming Community Economies in the Global South (co-edited). 

For generations, Black women in the African diaspora have relied on “do it together” ROSCAs to pay for major expenses and avoid getting implicated in mainstream banking and state regulation. For their troubles, “Black banker ladies” are often harassed by the banking industry and state authorities, who reflexively regard them “terrorists” or drug dealers because they manage large amounts of cash. 

After years of racialized abuse from those very systems, Black banker ladies have little desire to interact with mainstream banks. They turn instead to self-organized groups of ten, twenty, or sometimes dozens of friends, as a more trusted, convivial form of finance.

ROSCAs are more than informal financial institutions. They are forms of personal support and neighborly solidarity. Through casual and flexible means, they perform various types of community development – home improvement, professional training, neighborhood solidarity – that formal banking is not equipped or inclined to perform.

Sometimes, ROSCAs are even sources of seed money for the campaigns of political candidates who wish to be champions for struggling working people. Hossein recalled how ROSCAs have paid for the lawn signs of candidates, for example. It is not surprising that mainstream banking would prefer to neutralize the empowerment that ROSCA-style finance can provide.

Professor Hossein is a big believer in the generative value of informal systems:

“Our primary focus in the West with marginalized groups has been to formalize everyone, and to demonize the concept of the informal. I like to think that Covid has really pushed us to a place where we now understand the value of mutual aid and getting things informally. It’s actually a good thing.  Not everything in the informal is dark and dirty. It is a way for people who have been under persecution to thrive.”

Here is a link to my fascinating conversation with Caroline Shenaz Hossein.

Update: Here is a wonderful profile of ROSCAs and Banker Ladies in The Globe and Mail (Canada), and here is a short piece in Medium by the Post Growth Institute.

It’s a brave and radical departure for a serious economist to step back from the number-crunching and plunge into the world of culture, philosophy, storytelling, and the human quest for meaning. Jackson doesn’t consider this a self-indulgent diversion, but a critical task for economics as a discipline.

He shares his thoughts about post-growth in my latest podcast episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #16), just released.

Jackson is Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), which he founded in 2016. He is also Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey in the UK. 

While Jackson obviously remains committed to the challenges of economic analysis and policy, he has come to believe that we need to open up some new conversations, especially about our social relationships, ethical beliefs, and spirituality. It no longer makes sense to talk about “the economy” without engaging with these topics.

Jackson surprised me with the observation that capitalism and Buddhism “both start at the same place” – how to deal with suffering. Of course, he quickly added, each offers “almost diametrically opposed routes away from that. Capitalism says, ‘You can’t get away from suffering, you can’t get away from struggle. So you better get good at that struggle by becoming as competitive and individualistic as possible.’”

“Buddhism, by contrast, says that the way out of suffering is compassion. It’s about understanding that my suffering is what connects me to other people. Neglecting that suffering and turning away from it, is actually a neglect of my responsibility as a human being.” The only real solution to suffering, according to Buddhism, “is to work to reduce the cravings for the things that create the struggle” in the first place.

Jackson believes that economics needs to expand its own field of vision. So in Post Growth he invokes the work of such people as biologist Lynn Margulis, philosopher Hannah Arendt, poet Emily Dickinson and spiritual teachers like Lao Tzu and Thich Nhat Hanh. 

Jackson tells a particularly powerful but little-known story about the emotional breakdown of political philosopher John Stuart Mill, the founder of rational utilitarianism that is the philosophical foundation of classical economics.

Rational utilitarianism is built around the idea that the highest good comes from individuals maximizing their personal utility – a central idea of economics to this day. The discipline has the conceit that rationality, when rigorously applied to every aspect of life, will lead to human perfection and happiness.

As a young man, however, Mill had a monstrous epiphany in the middle of the night. He realized that even if his system of rationality became widely adopted, it would not make him happier or more satisfied as a human being. He fell into a depressive angst for two years and only began to recover “when he read the Romantic poets,” said Jackson. Mill “realized that there is a world outside of rationality – that there is a world that appeals to the emotional and aspires to the spiritual. Eventually, that’s what drew him out of his own crisis.”

It’s a nice parable for the psychic traumas of our time. Locked into so many totalizing systems of hyper-rational control – economics, algorithms, artificial intelligence – modern societies are experiencing their own breakdowns for which standard economics as constituted has little to offer. The enduring answers must come from outside the field. 

You can listen to my conversation with Tim Jackson here. 

It’s a brave and radical departure for a serious economist to step back from the number-crunching and plunge into the world of culture, philosophy, storytelling, and the human quest for meaning. Jackson doesn’t consider this a self-indulgent diversion, but a critical task for economics as a discipline.

He shares his thoughts about post-growth in my latest podcast episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #16), just released.

Jackson is Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), which he founded in 2016. He is also Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey in the UK. 

While Jackson obviously remains committed to the challenges of economic analysis and policy, he has come to believe that we need to open up some new conversations, especially about our social relationships, ethical beliefs, and spirituality. It no longer makes sense to talk about “the economy” without engaging with these topics.

Jackson surprised me with the observation that capitalism and Buddhism “both start at the same place” – how to deal with suffering. Of course, he quickly added, each offers “almost diametrically opposed routes away from that. Capitalism says, ‘You can’t get away from suffering, you can’t get away from struggle. So you better get good at that struggle by becoming as competitive and individualistic as possible.’”

“Buddhism, by contrast, says that the way out of suffering is compassion. It’s about understanding that my suffering is what connects me to other people. Neglecting that suffering and turning away from it, is actually a neglect of my responsibility as a human being.” The only real solution to suffering, according to Buddhism, “is to work to reduce the cravings for the things that create the struggle” in the first place.

Jackson believes that economics needs to expand its own field of vision. So in Post Growth he invokes the work of such people as biologist Lynn Margulis, philosopher Hannah Arendt, poet Emily Dickinson and spiritual teachers like Lao Tzu and Thich Nhat Hanh. 

Jackson tells a particularly powerful but little-known story about the emotional breakdown of political philosopher John Stuart Mill, the founder of rational utilitarianism that is the philosophical foundation of classical economics.

Rational utilitarianism is built around the idea that the highest good comes from individuals maximizing their personal utility – a central idea of economics to this day. The discipline has the conceit that rationality, when rigorously applied to every aspect of life, will lead to human perfection and happiness.

As a young man, however, Mill had a monstrous epiphany in the middle of the night. He realized that even if his system of rationality became widely adopted, it would not make him happier or more satisfied as a human being. He fell into a depressive angst for two years and only began to recover “when he read the Romantic poets,” said Jackson. Mill “realized that there is a world outside of rationality – that there is a world that appeals to the emotional and aspires to the spiritual. Eventually, that’s what drew him out of his own crisis.”

It’s a nice parable for the psychic traumas of our time. Locked into so many totalizing systems of hyper-rational control – economics, algorithms, artificial intelligence – modern societies are experiencing their own breakdowns for which standard economics as constituted has little to offer. The enduring answers must come from outside the field. 

You can listen to my conversation with Tim Jackson here. 

In 2005, Philippe published a lengthy essay, Cause Commune, that proposed that we begin thinking about information commons as an alternative to intellectual property, which has so many anti-social, anti-competitive, and politically restrictive effects.The piece was one of the earliest, most thoughtful pieces in any language to develop the idea of the commons with respect to knowledge. He later published Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), which gave a richer development to the whole idea of digital knowledge and culture commons.

What I found so memorable about Philippe was his astute political insight, quiet courage, and his deep well of gracious humanity. As his colleagues at La Quadrature du Net wrote in its appreciation of him:

We admired [Philippe’s] capacity for indignation, the thoroughness and depth of his analyses, the way he could set aside certain activist reactions to size up a situation in all its complexity. When there was a risk of drowning in the details of an issue, he would encourage us to step back and return to the fundamental political issues at stake….Philippe taught us that it is possible to combine a lucid view of the world and a high level of political commitment, while never forsaking either care for others or for oneself, nor indeed joy and poetry.

Philippe’s colleague Jérémie Zimmermann admired him as “a rare being, with a humility that was matched only by the strength and freedom of his thought.”

When I visited Paris with my family in 2005, Philippe and his wife Mirielle went out of their way to invite us to their apartment for a fantastic dinner. We talked long into the evening, and I recalled how his generosity of spirit turned strangers into friends and made the world a more welcoming place.

Much of Philippe’s attention in recent years was devoted to the plight of refugees. He also directed the publishing house PublieNet, and published his first novel Sœur(s) [Sisters], which deals with the issue of surveillance. Some of Philippe’s poems and other writings can be found at Atelier de Bricolage Littéraire. Heartfelt condolences to Mirielle and the Aigrain family.

In 2005, Philippe published a lengthy essay, Cause Commune, that proposed that we begin thinking about information commons as an alternative to intellectual property, which has so many anti-social, anti-competitive, and politically restrictive effects.The piece was one of the earliest, most thoughtful pieces in any language to develop the idea of the commons with respect to knowledge. He later published Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), which gave a richer development to the whole idea of digital knowledge and culture commons.

What I found so memorable about Philippe was his astute political insight, quiet courage, and his deep well of gracious humanity. As his colleagues at La Quadrature du Net wrote in its appreciation of him:

We admired [Philippe’s] capacity for indignation, the thoroughness and depth of his analyses, the way he could set aside certain activist reactions to size up a situation in all its complexity. When there was a risk of drowning in the details of an issue, he would encourage us to step back and return to the fundamental political issues at stake….Philippe taught us that it is possible to combine a lucid view of the world and a high level of political commitment, while never forsaking either care for others or for oneself, nor indeed joy and poetry.

Philippe’s colleague Jérémie Zimmermann admired him as “a rare being, with a humility that was matched only by the strength and freedom of his thought.”

When I visited Paris with my family in 2005, Philippe and his wife Mirielle went out of their way to invite us to their apartment for a fantastic dinner. We talked long into the evening, and I recalled how his generosity of spirit turned strangers into friends and made the world a more welcoming place.

Much of Philippe’s attention in recent years was devoted to the plight of refugees. He also directed the publishing house PublieNet, and published his first novel Sœur(s) [Sisters], which deals with the issue of surveillance. Some of Philippe’s poems and other writings can be found at Atelier de Bricolage Littéraire. Heartfelt condolences to Mirielle and the Aigrain family.

Lent is not just an academic synthesizer sifting through the literature of world history and philosophy. He is on a personal quest, and he comes by his insights honestly. After his wife died an untimely death and the Internet startup company that he founded and led went under, Lent embarked on a deep immersion in a sprawling literature of civilizational history, culture, philsophy, economics, politics, psychology, and religion.

His goal was to clarify for himself the meaning(s) of life. His chapter titles reflect this search -- Who Am I? Where Am I [in the universe]? What Am I? How Should I Live? Why Am I? -- but Lent's book is not a personal memoir, but rather a deep history of various civilizations and their own sense of meaning as lived and expressed through their cultures.

By tracing the origins of the modern worldview and how it has taken humanity to the edge of planetary disaster, Lent wants to suggest how we can construct a new ecologically based civilization. This requires that we absorb lessons that biological and evolutionary sciences are now discovering, seeing how they can transform our perspectives on climate and other ecological challenges, and spur us to rethink our sense of personal meaning and value.

Part of Lent’s goal in the book is to break down the many barriers that modern disciplines and “reason” have erected to deconstruct the world, separating it into parts. “We’re accustomed to thinking of science as existing in a different domain from spirituality,” he writes. “We generally view the intellect as distinct from emotion; the mind as separate from the body; humans as separate from nature; and spiritual insight as separate from political engagement. In the integrated worldview laid out here, each one of these domains is intricately connected with the others in an extended web of meaning.”

This points to the task ahead; Developing a worldview that recognizes our deep interconnectedness will be critical to recognizing how we are personally connected to climate change and to task of building a sustainable world. As Lent notes in his interview, the commons has a role to play in all of this because it is a vehicle for enacting our relationality and stepping away from the transactional culture known as capitalism.

You can listen to Jeremy Lent’s interview on Frontiers of Commoning here. 

Lent is not just an academic synthesizer sifting through the literature of world history and philosophy. He is on a personal quest, and he comes by his insights honestly. After his wife died an untimely death and the Internet startup company that he founded and led went under, Lent embarked on a deep immersion in a sprawling literature of civilizational history, culture, philsophy, economics, politics, psychology, and religion.

His goal was to clarify for himself the meaning(s) of life. His chapter titles reflect this search -- Who Am I? Where Am I [in the universe]? What Am I? How Should I Live? Why Am I? -- but Lent's book is not a personal memoir, but rather a deep history of various civilizations and their own sense of meaning as lived and expressed through their cultures.

By tracing the origins of the modern worldview and how it has taken humanity to the edge of planetary disaster, Lent wants to suggest how we can construct a new ecologically based civilization. This requires that we absorb lessons that biological and evolutionary sciences are now discovering, seeing how they can transform our perspectives on climate and other ecological challenges, and spur us to rethink our sense of personal meaning and value.

Part of Lent’s goal in the book is to break down the many barriers that modern disciplines and “reason” have erected to deconstruct the world, separating it into parts. “We’re accustomed to thinking of science as existing in a different domain from spirituality,” he writes. “We generally view the intellect as distinct from emotion; the mind as separate from the body; humans as separate from nature; and spiritual insight as separate from political engagement. In the integrated worldview laid out here, each one of these domains is intricately connected with the others in an extended web of meaning.”

This points to the task ahead; Developing a worldview that recognizes our deep interconnectedness will be critical to recognizing how we are personally connected to climate change and to task of building a sustainable world. As Lent notes in his interview, the commons has a role to play in all of this because it is a vehicle for enacting our relationality and stepping away from the transactional culture known as capitalism.

You can listen to Jeremy Lent’s interview on Frontiers of Commoning here.