UMass economist Nancy Folbre has an excellent post, “Taking Responsibility for the Commons,” on the New York Times Economix blog today. Folbre detects “an accelerating attention shift toward the commons,” citing the Newsweek cover story, “We Are All Socialists Now”; the growing support by some conservatives for nationalization of American banks; and the statement by New York Times columnist David Brooks that we need to stabilize our “communal landscape” because we are “all in this together.”
Folbre writes: “Markets can be engines of economic development. But they represent only a portion of our economic system. The net financial wealth of the world is small compared to the value of ecological services produced by natural assets like our oceans. Most of us in the United States work for a wage, but we devote about as much time overall to work on behalf of our families and communities. Economists and policy makers should pay more attention to the links between private wealth and social wealth.”