Institute For The Future

Grassroots economies versus privatization

"The shift from traditional private property to non-exculdable, non-rivalrous regimes has been a major subject of this conference, and appears in various other research projects at the Institute.

But is it but one side of a story about the reworking of the lines between private and public property, and the use of new technologies for building systems for managing them? One of my first IFTF articles was a piece on the convergence of environmental thinking and economics. Much of it the piece was about how emissions trading was emerging as a major new tool for managing and reducing pollution: cap-and-trade markets for generating economic value from natural carbon sinks, and assigning economic costs to emissions. These systems create a private, excludable resource out of something that has not been a form of property.

Some economic innovations involving creating new forms of value by creating free goods from what had been private ones. It might be worth doing a comparative study of these two phenomena.

"