Jonathan Rowe - Our common wealth : the hidden economy that makes everything else work

Praise for Our Common Wealth

Jonathan Rowes work offers a stunningly original vision that brings new depths of common sense and moral vision to the economic and social crises of our world. Who knew that there could be such a marriage of hope and hard-hitting clarity!

Jacob Needleman, author of An Unknown World

Read this book as though you were opening a treasure chest. It transcends our stale left-right debates and reveals the wealth available to all of us if we just recognize and protect it.

Sarah van Gelder, Executive Editor, YES! Magazine

Ive met a lot of people in my life but none quite like my friend Jonathan Rowe. He was a unique and original thinker who constantly challenged our prevailing ideas of progress.

Byron Dorgan, former US Senator

This brilliant book by a wonderful man we lost too soon illuminates the essential question of our politics going forward: are we all in this together? Jonathan Rowes answer is a resounding and convincing yes!

Jonathan Alter, NBC news analyst and author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One

Most journalists leave behind nothing more than ephemeral news clips about forgotten but overhyped crises. Jonathan Rowe bequeathed to us a provocative concept that could unite left and rightthe fostering of places and institutions outside the realms of business and government that can protect us from twenty-first-century avarice.

Walter Shapiro, veteran political columnist

Jonathan Rowe maps out a vast swath of our economy that few of us have considered and conventional economists have persistently failed to account forthe cooperative realms of family, neighborhoods, and civic society. The relentless colonization of these realms by the market explains much that has gone wrong with modern society.

Paul Glastris, Editor in Chief, Washington Monthly

If there is any way out of the squeeze that afflicts todays economy, it will partly be through the ideas held in this book. And Rowe delineates them with both a philosophers eye and a poets touch. Rarely has the potential of the commons been explained so clearly.

Todd Oppenheimer, author of The Flickering Mind

Jonathan Rowe was a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, happily planting practical ideas that others missed or dismissed. In Our Common Wealth, he shows how we can share, rather than destroy, the varied bounties of our earth and our own communities.

Russ Baker, Editor, WhoWhatWhy

Jonathan Rowe creates a whole new entry in the tired national debate between state and market: the commons. His thinking is neither liberal nor conservativethe commons must be protected from the state as well as from corporations. This is a beautiful little book.

Mickey Kaus, author of The End of Equality

Our Common Wealth is a vitally important book that lights the way to putting economics in the service of human needs.

Gregg Easterbrook, author of The Leading Indicators

Our Common Wealth delivers a jolt of common sense. This book is Jonathan Rowes legacy as Small Is Beautiful is E. F. Schumachers.

Jay Walljasper, author of All That We Share

Many modern readers still appreciate Montaignes timeless essays. I fully expect citizens of future centuries to discoverand similarly appreciateJonathans remarkable insights and wisdom, too.

Phil Keisling, Director, Center for Public Service, Portland State University

Jon Rowes genius lay in understanding the nature of shared wealth and the taking of that wealth. Pure air is wealth we share; air pollution is a taking of that wealth. Contemplative quiet is shared wealth; noise pollution is a taking of it. What makes life worth living is common wealthpublic health, community, nature, privacy, access to knowledge, the joys of childhood, thousands of things we hardly notice. There is an economics of common wealth. Common wealth can and must be managed. That is Jon Rowes message to us.

George Lakoff, Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Dont Think of an Elephant

No one understands the depth and beauty of the commons better than Jonathan Rowe did, and none have expressed it as clearly. The best of his writing on the subject is in your hands. It will change your take on just about everything.

Mark Dowie, investigative journalist

Jonathan Rowe had an enviable gift for stripping complex ideas down to their essence. No idea mattered more to him than preserving the things we all share free of charge against the encroachments of capitalism. This jewel of a book describes how the commons sustains and enriches our lives and what we can do to save it.

Timothy Noah, author of The Great Divergence

Jonathan Rowe has bequeathed a book to us that does nothing less than make the invisible visible. After reading its crystal-clear pages, you will redouble your efforts to protect the things that matter most.

Alan AtKisson, author of The Sustainability Transformation

This profoundly sensible and humane book is the perfect antidote to selfishness, greed, and the mindless pursuit of profit that endangers even the air we breathe.

Charles Peters, Founding Editor, Washington Monthly

In both his writing and his life, Jonathan Rowe was the explorer, cartographer, and defender of the commons. This book illuminates the ways in which the commons provides a framework for all of economics.

Edgar Cahn, founder, TimeBanks USA

Jonathan Rowe never shied away from an idea because it was too big, too new, or too unlikely to be taken seriously. He believed the world could be changed for the better if we look beyond clichd notions.

Sam Smith, Editor, The Progressive Review

Jonathan Rowe was an artist with words, a craftsman who wrote with the kind of care he saw disappearing from our hurried, consumer-centered society. While no book can do full justice to his life and thought, this one gives us a wonderful glimpse into them.

John de Graaf, coauthor of Whats the Economy For, Anyway? and Affluenza

OUR COMMON WEALTH

ALSO BY JONATHAN ROWE

Time Dollars

(with Edgar Cahn)

The Hidden Economy That
Makes Everything Else Work

JONATHAN ROWE

Edited by Peter Barnes

Foreword by Bill McKibben

Afterword by David Bollier

Our Common Wealth

Copyright 2013 by Jonathan Rowe

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.