To overview briefly about the idea of ownership. Nowadays, especially in the developed countries, we own lots of ‘stuff.’ Some people have so much stuff that they cannot store it in their home and rent storage space at specific rental facilities (the 11th largest growth industry at this time). Now that in itself if quite telling. In the USA in the 1950s, homes used to be small and compact – less than a 1000 sq feet (93 sq M). This grew to an average of 1500 sq feet (139 sq M) in the 1960s and to about 2700sq feet (251 sq M) in the 2020s. Affluent people can have homes reaching 10,000 sq feet (929 sq M). In the rest of the world, on average smaller homes (95 sq M or less) are still normal. I mention this only to emphasize that despite home sizes being larger, for many people, the space to store excessive stuff still requires external commercial storage units.
When I was young, if you did not have ready cash to buy ‘stuff’ you could do hire-purchase, an installment plan, a lay-away plan, or rent-to-own. How these payment plans worked varied. It usually involved some variation of putting down a deposit to secure the item, then either getting the item and paying it off in installments (with interest) before you own it or have the ownership legally transferred to you. Or, it was stored by the seller until you paid in full (plus interest) and was finally given to you. The benefit of this was that you could buy expensive items by spreading the cost of expensive items over a longer time frame that was more affordable on a limited income. A down side was that if you defaulted on any of the payments, or after a few defaults (depending on the system), you might lose the item after having already paid a lot already lot for it. Also called reprocessing for items received up front prior to payments starting and then being legally ‘reacquired’ by the seller by Repo agents working for collection agencies.
The big transition was in the 1950s when credit cards were introduced. People with good credit could readily obtain these cards. Poor working-class people had to wait until the 1970s when living in debt suddenly became in-vogue. The cry of ‘Just Charge it’ became the norm (e.g., see earlier posts 1 and 2). Thus, was born the growth of the extensive nuevo-middle-class. People who regularly maxed out their credit-card credit-limits, paying only the required small minimum payment, were literally living on the financial edge. Bankruptcy was but an unexpected non-payment away. People who acted as though they owned their own homes, cars (usually 2-3), and lots of expensive ‘stuff’ found modern affluence both illusionary and also transitory. Living in high luxury to living under a bridge is an all-too-common story, especially here in the USA without its extensive social safety nets common in many other countries.
After that depressing introduction to the debt society, a curious observation about property ownership in the modern era. Most of that expensive stuff was really a form of ‘affluenza’ (see link) about the psychological need to appear affluent through acquisition of stuff and extensive debt. While the USA is typical of my observations, I have also observed this a lot throughout Europe and Australia. Stuff – most expensive stuff is unused most of the time!! Before you say Bullshit, think about it for a minute. Unless you are in a job requiring you to be on the road all the time, your car is parked for 95% of any given day. If you own a home with any garden, then your lawnmower (it is a ridiculous given that there probably be a lawn – a sign of affluence) is active maybe once a week from late-Spring to late-Autunm and sit unused for months. Your water-toy (boat, Wave runner/Jet ski, paddle board, etc.) is used occasionally during good weather only. Even in the kitchen I see people with the latest expensive gadgets that they use when they host a party – like, twice a year. I can go on, but hopefully you get my drift about how much of the time our cherished stuff sits unused! Having stuff that we rarely use is a sign of affluence and a costly one at that. As we approach yet another financial crisis, maybe another way of thinking about stuff seems relevant.
Money isn’t the root of all evil, it is greed of money. As social psychologist Fromme points out, “Greed has no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome” Erich Fromm. And as I have said several many times, “Money is a tool, not a symbol for power and control.” What has made greed even worse today is how the uber-rich are hoarding it instead of investing it for social projects. I mention this last piece because, as bad as were the robber-barons of the late-1800s, they invested in the building of society and technology even if they did f**k everyone while they got rich.
We are transfixed by our current global market-driven economy and don’t even fathom just how artificial it is really. The reality is that non-market economies exist everywhere, and they are largely ignored by the system. How do you factor in how much a ‘housewife’ actually generates in financial benefits for her family? Or an unpaid family caregiver looking after an ailing relative. Or even a local gardener who freely spreads wildflower seeds along a canal embankment to beautify it for the community.
Now consider ownership and the Commons. (Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values (social practice) employed for a governance mechanism. Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates – Wiki (see link for more detail.) Before 1604, ‘the commons’ were resources shared by a community such as grazing fields or timber forests. After that time there was a consolidated push by the uber-rich with governmental support to ‘enclose’ the commons by selling them off, thus depriving common people access to what had always been a shared resource.
There ae other types of commons we usually do not think about. One example is the public library. A library holds books for use by everyone (modern libraries also have shared public computer terminals as well). In a library you sign up with a library card and then borrow books to read, or listen to, for a specific short period of time, and then return back to the library. Of course, there are minor penalties for not returning on-time or for failing to return, but the point is that all the books (and computers) are owned and shared by the community. This is also akin to a cooperative in which the members share all the cost and benefits of the goods and services with any profits being shared equitably according to purchases. Usually at the end of any specific fiscal period.
Several years ago, some social activists in the U.S. began a parallel economy built on this library idea, but greatly expanded to encompass all the basic daily goods and services we need. It was an idea I had already lectured about since the late 1990s as a possible new economic future that could succeed based on cooperation, compassion, and shared access. Visual story teller and social media consultant Chris Agnos came up with the same idea and lent his on-line savvy to promote the idea of ‘The People’s Library’ – A Sustainable Human Gift Economy. The greatest resistance to this idea comes from the global market-driven economy proponents who have pulled out the stops to discredit and ridicule it from growing. That in itself is telling of how the peoples library idea threatens the system.
As Chirs Agnos says, “After years of exploring the root causes behind inequality, environmental destruction, social upheaval and disconnection, he came to the realization that it’s the market itself—with its foundations in competition, ownership, and profit— that is driving the very crises we’re trying to solve. Whether it’s high food prices, war, corruption, housing affordability, it all goes back to market design.”
So, why does the Economic Library idea not catch on if it helps so much? And more importantly, how do we implement any better economic system within the existing economic market-design system?
To Be Continued …………………….
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