Back when I was an undergraduate at Yale I used to tell my friends that it was all a sham. Then I was usually talking about grades or the system. Today it’s just the system.

Via Dean Baker I read that America is abandoning the twenty-five year dream of the free market.

Through this uniquely American lens, saving businesses from collapse was the sort of thing that happened on other shores, where sentimental commitments to social welfare trumped sharp-edged competition. Weak-kneed European and Asian leaders were too frightened to endure the animal instincts of a real market, the story went. So they intervened time and again, using government largess to lift inefficient firms to safety, sparing jobs and limiting pain but keeping their economies from reaching full potential.

There have been recent interventions in America, of course — the taxpayer-backed bailout of Chrysler in 1979, and the savings and loan rescue of 1989. But the first happened under Jimmy Carter, a year before Americans embraced Ronald Reagan and his passion for unfettered markets. And the second was under George H. W. Bush, who did not share that passion.

So it made for a strange spectacle last weekend as the current Bush administration, which does cast itself in the Reagan mold, hastily prepared a bailout package to offer the government-sponsored mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The reasoning behind this rescue effort — like the reasoning behind the government-induced takeover of Bear Stearns by J. P. Morgan Chase just a month before — sounded no different from that offered in defense of many a bailout in Japan and Europe:

The mortgage giants were too big to be allowed to fail.

I could go through all the nostrums - corporate welfare, class warfare, middle class aspirations - and I could go through all of the evidence - that markets fail as often as they succeed, that no one has ever lived in a completely free market society, that 20% of the population thinks it’s in the top 1% of the income distribution - but what’s the point.

The evidence I see is different from the evidence that others perceive. I read part of “True Enough” by Farhad Manjoo last week and it reaffirmed my bias that bias will never be overcome.

So what went well at PublicRadioCamp last Saturday?

Back in February Dan Gillmor stopped by Minnesota Public Radio to talk about the future of journalism. The setup was standard interview fare - two people at microphones in front of a crowd sitting in an auditorium. The reaction to the event was immediately negative - people complained about the lack of interaction with the audience and the back channel chat on Twitter was devastating.

Last Saturday a smaller group of people met in the same location for Public Radio Camp. The setup was completely different. Butcher-block paper on the walls, ubiquitous wi-fi, tables, movable chairs, and about thirty people who were interested in improving media not just talking about it.

So which one of these events was more successful? As usual it depends on your goals, audience, and perspective.

I felt the Gillmor event covered material I already knew. There was minimal interaction with the audience in a conversation that was ostensibly about how the audience is becoming more powerful than journalists. The journalists in the audience seemed to mostly be fearful about the future of their profession.

At Public Radio Camp everything was turned around. People were enthusiastic about public radio and the information they hoped to get from it. They were interested in expanding participation and bringing more people into the conversation. Finally the format was based on open space and left people alone long enough to let them self-organize.

The people that brought us MinneBar hosted a Public Radio Barcamp at the offices of Minnesota Public Radio today. Bob Collins, one of MPR’s star bloggers, liveblogged the conference on News Cut. I won’t duplicated his efforts by describing what happened but it was an exciting experiment in opening the black box of journalism up for the public, or at least for those interested enough to act.

There was a lot of synergy between the two groups working on user-generated content and Nuevo Radio. So what I’d like to see next is another event like today’s. But instead of just brainstorming ideas we should get together to produce a news story.

Here’s how I think it could work.

Everyone arrives in the morning and things are setup as they were today, a bunch of white boards or paper on the walls, a few tables, and chairs. There’s a brief introduction where we explain what we’re going to do - create a news story in a day. For the first hour everyone brainstorms story ideas: who can we interview, what media do we want to use, how do we research the idea?

Then we divide the tasks up into teams and go out and do it.

This would work really well for a significant event, like the upcoming Republican National Convention. The drawback is that everyone else is going to be covering the convention. I don’t know if there is much more that an ad hoc group of citizen journalists will add to the cacophony.

An even better event might be the opening of the state legislative session in January.

Once we’ve pulled off a couple of citizen media camps then we can start looking for a permanent place to produce new media.

Published late on 7/14

Reading

• Enclosure
• Public Goods

both from Wikipedia

• Discussion - does a historical perspective add anything to our definitions of the commons, how about the possible ways of managing the commons. On enclosure - note the changing dynamics of the economy in England - the shift toward sheep farming; the importance of historical particularity - it’s clear that many different forms of enclosure were pursued and many forms of commons governance as well.
• Public goods - key concepts - non-rival, non-excludable; the idea of inalienability - some things should not be sold, children, organs; 4 part matrix of rivalry and excludability; common pool resources are rivalrous but non-excludable, thus leading to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ because people can access the goods easily and benefit from being a free-rider.

Class discussion

How does the historical enclosure movement relate to current issues?

1. It shows that the problem of the commons has been around for a long time and that various solutions have been tried in the past.
2. Two central actors threatened the commons in the past: private landowners and the government. At various times their interests have overlapped and diverged. When acting in concert they can have a profound effect on the economic and social structures of the commons. In the case of the enclosure movement, they worked together to transform Britain from a medieval, agrarian culture to a mercantile/industrializing nation.

Both of these actors continue to play a large role in modern commons. States and governments have often been called upon to protect common resources, especially the environment. Private corporations continue to enclose the commons for their benefit. Some examples from intellectual property law are: copyright extensions, patent extension and litigation, etc.

How are the distinctions between rivalrous and non-rivalrous / excludable and non-excludable goods worked out in practice?

Case study: food policy and markets. Wikipedia treats food as a private good. Could there be a situation where food is a public or commons based good? Our default position in modern society is to analyze goods through the lens of markets. For food to be a public or commons good society would have to be structured very differently than it is now. Perhaps food was a common good in hunter-gatherer societies in the past. It may also have been treated as a gift by other cultures. But the transition to sedentary agriculture probably ended any food commons that might have existed in the past. The crucial factor may be the transition between abundance and scarcity. In a world of abundance it is easy to treat a good as held in common, but when scarcity arises then people are likely to start hoarding and or attempting to privatize the good themselves. An example of this comes from a case study in “Making the Commons Work.”

I heard two workers say, "This chaos
Will soon be ended."

This chaos will not be ended,
The red and the blue house blended,

Not ended, never and never ended,
The weak man mended,

The man that is poor at night
Attended

Like the man that is rich and right.
The great men will not be blended...

I am the poorest of all.
I know that I can not be mended,

Out of the clouds, pomp of the air,
By which at least I am befriended.

My friend Eric invited me to come to an Isaiah meeting at Westwood Luthern church last night. He’s been working with the group for the past few years on a bunch of different issues, including affordable housing.

The meeting began with two introductory presentations about the problem of affordable housing. The message is pretty simple to state: the current median home price in Minnesota and the nation is significantly higher than the 30% of income that is the threshold for affordability. Anyone working in a service job - nurse, teacher, retail clerk, janitor, food services - makes, on average, less than needed to afford a home or, in some cases, an apartment rental. The only way for a contemporary family to continue to afford housing is for them to have dual incomes, and even then it’s not easy. No wonder so many people feel harried by work and the constant struggle to achieve that modern euphemism of work/life balance.

After the presentations we broke for 30-minutes of small-group discussion. I was at a table with a couple of city staffers, a woman who works for a local land trust, and two people from Isaiah.

I listened to the discussion and was struck by how it wondered in circles around the “complexity” of the problem. Someone would throw out a potential solution to the problem and then another person would say that it’s all more complicated than that. The person who proposed the solution would agree that it really is complicated and then move onto another thread in the discussion.

I tried to steer the question to ask what the barriers to action were. The responses were simple: people’s attitude, money, recalcitrant contractors, and lack of political will. Again the specter of “complexity” was raised.

As a sometimes complexity scholar I have to wonder whether this is really a true description of the problem or a subtle cop-out. To me the problem doesn’t seem that complex at all. The market fails to provide housing. Local governments can act to alleviate this by altering their building codes and requirements. We can all agree on the nature of the problem and the most likely solution. So what is the real problem here?

One suggestions was money. At a deeper level I agree, greed is always a problem in a market economy. But the requirements for affordable housing that set the model across the nation are not onerous. They’re only onerous to those who have been brainwashed to believe that all government action is bad. If you believe that the government can intervene for a collective benefit then the argument should be practically won.

So what stops us from acting?

I am a strong proponent of complexity. A lot of major problems and issues in the world are complex. But this isn’t one of them. It’s pretty simple and straightforward microeconomics. Give builders an incentive, through regulation, and they will build affordable housing. Builders are already regulated so this shouldn’t be hard. We just have to actually do it.

Reading Notes

About the commons

The commons is a new way to express a very old idea—that some forms of wealth belong to all of us, and that these community resources must be actively protected and managed for the good and all.

The commons are the things that we inherit and create jointly, and that will (hopefully) last for generations to come. The commons consists of gifts of nature such as air, oceans and wildlife as well as shared social creations such as libraries, public spaces, scientific research and creative works.

e.g. * biopiracy * cap and dividend * common assets * commons movement * copyleft * corporation * enclosure * externality * gift economy - blood and organ donation, open source, wikis * inalienability * land trusts * open source software * public goods - non-rival, non-excludable: lighthouses, city parks, broadcast programming, global atmosphere * public space * public trust doctrine * tragedy of the commons * trust or stakeholder trust * value

Discussion Topics

• gather examples of the commons from personal experience
• what traits or properties do these examples share
• what is the origin and history of these commons
• how are these commons controlled or governed
• are any of these commons at risk - why, from whom, how

Class Discussion

FM - two examples of the commons

1. the gay rights movement of the past 30 years has transformed the social commons that is available to gay people in the United States. Activities that were once unthinkable have become possible, see gay marriage amendment in CA.
2. Nicollet Island in Minneapolis. FM told some anecdotes about working with the people on the island to preserve it against development of various kinds. “Ask permission after it’s done” as a key community activist nostrum.

K - environmental studies. Garret Hardin’s classic essay on the “Tragedy of the Commons” is required reading in multiple classes. The environment presents lots of challenges for the commons.

Some more examples - the atmosphere, City of Lakes land trust, senior housing in S Minneapolis, common areas for use in apartments or other living spaces, ExCo as a commons, the public domain vs. copyright extension, the Internet.

Possible traits -

1. societal responsibility between generations - intergenerational ethics
2. critical mass
3. stewardship
4. indivisible
5. no or low cost to reuse - especially for cultural commons, and digital artifacts
6. justice and the environment
7. ownership
8. volunteerism - e.g. distributed proofreaders, project Gutenberg, Wikipedia

From geography - the converging influence of site and situation. Both need to be conducive for a commons to arise. Thus a small group can protect a small space, like Nicollet Island, and reach across multiple generations. For a larger site, like the atmosphere, the situation may be more difficult or require different participants. e.g. the Kyoto treaty or other international agreements (CFCs)

Other ideas that need development - gift economy, work around restrictions/barriers, Native American spirtuality and ethics.

So why are commons threatened? Because people are “as dumb as rocks,” see the Nicollet Island whirlpool. Another mill run seemed like a good idea at the time but proved disasterous. Greed and stupidity make people do things that destroy the commons. Lack of belief in the commons, lack of awareness about the commons, or too encultured to see the commons. Need to design solutions that emphasize the commons and make people part of the experience.

A week or two ago I posted a question about Open Courseware to the LinkedIn Q&A forum.

What’s your personal experience with Open Courseware?

Open courseware is a growing phenomenon among colleges and universities throughout the world. Itunes U, MIT OpenCourseware, the Open Courseware Consortium, and a bunch of other institutions show the growth of the this movement over the last few years. Have you taken a free course online through one of the open courseware portals? What was it like? How well did it work? What would you do differently next time?

I got five responses over a week and here’s a summary of the responses.

Sheila mentioned the knowledge benefit to those who want to learn but don’t need the degree. I’m intrigued by the “don’t need the degree” quote. Are the people accessing Open Courseware really in a position to choose whether to get a degree or not? From outside the U.S. it’s less likely a matter of not needing the degree than being unable to get the degree, even if a desire for the degree exists. Sheila added that OCW gives peope the opportunity to “brush up on courses” before returning to school.

Gerry used the MIT courses as an aid to learning theory, but the labs were lacking. This is where the difference between distance learning and in-the-classroom experience becomes critical. New technology, especially easy video production, may alleviate some of these problems in the future. I should look up some studies on the successes and failure of distance learning over the past 30 years. I know we’ve met this problem before but I don’t know if there is anything we’ve learned from the experience.

Freek observed the disparity in course quality at the MIT site. Some courses have extensive material online — syllabi, recorded lectures, readings, slide presentations, and videos — other courses are bare bones, a syllabi and not much else. I wonder if there is a difference among subject areas. Are the humanities less likely to have online materials because there are fewer labs or experiments and more classroom discussion? This might make an interesting research project.

I wonder just how useful is it to have a recording of a classroom discussion that you didn’t personally attend? I’ve listened to a few examples from Chris Lydon on his radio program Open Source. His interviews are often recorded in classroom audiences at Brown and followed by questions from students. The questions are often very good but only take up 10% of the total program. Lydon’s experience is in radio so he brings a different flavor to a classroom presentation than most teachers. The benefit of his radio experience is in the production values - the audio quality is good, everyone can be heard during the discussion period, there isn’t any annoying background noise. For this to work well in an education session there either needs to be a support staff that records and produces the audio or else teachers need to learn yet another skill.

Manu confirmed the opinion that the courses at MIT still need time to mature in order to be really useful for remote learners.

Christine said she used the courses at Itunes U as benchmarks for comparison with her own courses. I like this hybrid approach that combines the best of OCW with the local knowledge of instructors. This model seems like an ideal target market for the OCW people; don’t claim to replace instructors, instead become a supplement to what they are already doing.

I volunteered at the Push 2008 business conference earlier this week. Overall I give it a mixed review. Some things went well, others were less impressive.

Some of the good things.

• Good speakers and performers. There were few flameouts, everyone knew their stuff and presented well. I really appreciated the musicians and performers that were on the program; it helped to liven up the days.
• The venue. The Walker Art Center rules. The Sculpture Garden is beautiful. The restaurants and evening spots were great. I just wish they’d used more of the Walker gallery spaces.

My criticisms

1. For me the overall signal to noise ratio was low. Maybe I’m just not part of the intended audience. I felt like a lot of what the speakers said was old news. The environment is in trouble, the poor are all over and their condition is not improving, America’s economy is in trouble, global brands are spreading around the world by focusing on personalization, digital literacy is a valuable skill. When I hear people saying this conference changed their life I worry. Are these people living in the same world that I am?
2. This wasn’t an “unconference.” The core of an unconference is audience participation. Push 2008 had zero audience participation, except for short question and answer sessions at the end of the day. I’d recommend ditching half of the speakers involved and using the time to do an Open Space style meetup. This could amplify the really useful parts of the conference - meeting other people - and help the audience to create solutions in addition to learning about problems.
3. Get out of the auditorium. We’re in the middle of a beautiful new museum. Let’s get into the galleries and look at the art. Or start talking about the issues we’ve been hearing about. The galleries could serve as spaces for people to meet in smaller groups based on topics coming from the open space ideas.

What I’d like to see in a half hour media news program, or even ten minute news program.

First, if the story is being reported on by any other major news outlet than we ignore it, for the most part. Fighting in Israel, earthquake in China, cyclone in Myanmar, are all stories we leave to others.

Second, focus on summarizing the international news for an American audience. What happened in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America today, each and every day. What are the big stories in India, Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, Philippines, Australia, etc.

Third, forget about scoops. Do the best with the resources we can get to. Rely on local coverage as much as possible to understand the situation.

Fourth, avoid the talking head roundtable. The News Hour is great but little television children die every time they cut away to another talking head roundtable of experts to explain what just happened.

Fifth, regular and consistent focus on science.

Sixth, no celebrity news. None, zip. Never.