by Kate Raworth
That model could work for robots too but, thanks to current tax loopholes and a culture of privatised returns, many nation states – the US included – currently earn surprisingly little direct revenue from the multibillion-dollar digital economy, despite having invested substantial public money in the research, development and infrastructure underpinning it. That needs to change, argues the economist Mariana Mazzucato: when the state takes a risk, it deserves a return, which could be collected through royalties from co-owned public–private patents, or through state banks owning significant equity in businesses that use robot technologies based on publicly funded research.77 Given the extreme disruption to work and hence incomes that is anticipated by the rise of the robots, more such innovative proposals are needed to ensure that the wealth generated by their productivity is widely distributed. That said, it is also time to look beyond the traditional binary choice of market versus state when it comes to controlling technology. Turn instead to the innovation taking place in the collaborative commons, which have the potential to transform the control of knowledge.
Who owns the ideas?
The international regime of intellectual property rights has significantly shaped the control and distribution of knowledge for hundreds of years. It’s a story that began innocently enough in the fifteenth century, when Venice started awarding its famed glass-blowers 10-year patents to protect their novel creations from imitators. Show us how you made it, promised the law, and no one is permitted to copy you for a decade. It was a clever way for the city state to reward ingenuity, but as Venetian artisans emigrated, they took their demands for patents with them, so spreading the practice across Europe and across industries.78
The rise of patents, followed by copyright and trademarks, created intellectual property regimes that initially spurred on the industrial revolution but then began colonising the commons of traditional knowledge, with a growing number of patents seeking to monopolise know-how that had been collectively developed. With great irony, the intensive overuse and abuse of intellectual property law today is widely acknowledged to be stifling the very innovation that it was originally created to promote. Patents now last 20 years and are granted for a wide array of spurious inventions – ranging from Amazon’s US patent on ‘one-click’ purchasing to the medical firm Myriad Genetics’ patents on cancer-related genes.79 And in many high-tech industries patents are frequently acquired tactically with the specific aim of blocking or suing competitors. ‘We have designed an expensive and unfair intellectual property regime,’ writes economist Joseph Stiglitz, ‘that works more to the advantage of patent lawyers and large corporations than to the advancement of science and small innovators.’80
Mainstream economic theory claims that without intellectual property protection, innovators lack the incentive to bring new products to market because they cannot recoup their costs. But in the collaborative commons, millions of innovators are defying this received wisdom, co-creating and using free open-source software, known as FOSS, as well as free open-source hardware, or FOSH. It’s a spirit embodied by Marcin Jakubowski, physicist and Missourian farmer, who – frustrated by the extortionate cost of farm machinery that kept breaking down – decided to build his own, while sharing his ever-improving designs online for free. His idea soon grew into the Global Village Construction Set, which aims to demonstrate step-by-step how to build from scratch 50 universally useful machines, from tractors, brick makers and 3D printers to sawmills, bread ovens and wind turbines. The designs have so far been recreated by innovators in India, China, the US, Canada, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Italy and France. Based on these successes, Jakubowski and his collaborators have since launched the Open Building Institute, which aims to make open-source designs for ecological, off-grid, affordable housing available to all.81 ‘Our goal is decentralized production,’ he explains. ‘I’m talking about a business case for efficient enterprise where the traditional concept of scale becomes irrelevant. Our new concept of scale is about distributing economic power far and wide.’82
Open-source design also promises large social benefits and vast cost savings for state-funded institutions in every country, says Joshua Pearce, a leading academic and engineer in free open-source hardware. His research into the economics of FOSH manufacturing finds that using open-source 3D printers and designs to produce essential scientific equipment – like the precision syringes used widely in labs and hospitals – slashes costs, making such equipment far more affordable and accessible worldwide. ‘The inescapable conclusion,’ says Pearce, ‘is that FOSH development should be funded by organizations interested in maximizing return on public investments particularly in technologies associated with science, medicine and education.’83
It is clear that the digital revolution has unleashed an era of collaborative knowledge creation that has the potential to radically decentralise the ownership of wealth. But, argues the commons theorist Michel Bauwens, it is unlikely to reach its potential without state support. Just as corporate capitalism has long depended on the backing of government policies, public funding, and pro-business legislation, so now the commons need the backing of a Partner State whose aim is to enable the creation of common value.84 How can the state start helping the knowledge commons to realise its potential? In five key ways.
First, invest in human ingenuity by teaching social entrepreneurship, problem-solving and collaboration in schools and universities worldwide: such skills will equip the next generation to innovate in open-source networks like no generation before them. Second, ensure that all publicly funded research becomes public knowledge, by contractually requiring it to be licensed in the knowledge commons, rather than permitting it to be locked away under patents and copyright for private commercial gain. Third, roll back the excessive reach of corporate intellectual property claims in order to prevent spurious patent and copyright applications from encroaching on the knowledge commons. Fourth, publicly fund the set-up of community makerspaces – places where innovators can meet and experiment with shared use of 3D printers and essential tools for hardware construction. And lastly, encourage the spread of civic organisations – from cooperative societies and student groups to innovation clubs and neighbourhood associations – because their interconnections turn into the very nodes that bring such peer-to-peer networks alive.
Going global
Despite the importance of tackling national inequalities, global inequalities are still of great concern. Since 2000, global income inequality has narrowed slightly – largely thanks to poverty reduction in China – but the world as a whole still remains more unequal than any single country within it.85 And that extreme skew in global incomes helps to push humanity beyond both sides of the Doughnut. For several centuries we have been encouraged to identify ourselves foremost as nations, each one with its own economy, looking over the border or across the water at ‘others’. If we take the inevitable twenty-first-century step and each consider ourselves as part of a global community too, connected in a multi-layered but interdependent economy, what possibilities for globally redistributive design might emerge?
The traditional tool for international redistribution has been overseas development assistance, ODA, but the history of its rich-to-poor transfers is nothing short of a myopic failure in global action. In a 1970 UN resolution, high-income countries pledged to contribute 0.7% of their annual income to ODA, and to do so by 1980 at the latest. But by 2013 – over 30 years beyond that deadline – the total stood at just 0.3%, less than half of what was promised each year. Well spent, that missing finance could have delivered decades of progress in maternal health, child nutrition, and girls’ education in the world’s poorest communities: it would have empowered women, transformed livelihoods, boosted national prosperity, and helped to stabilise the global population at the same time.86
Where high-income countries have broken their promise of financial redistribution, global migrants have stepped in. Out of their earnings, the remittances they send to their families back
home are now the single largest source of external finance in many low-income countries, outstripping both ODA and foreign direct investment. Those worker remittances constitute around 25% of GDP in countries like Nepal, Lesotho and Moldova, and are a vital source of resilience during domestic economic and humanitarian crises.87 That makes migration one of the most effective ways of reducing global income inequality. But its long-term success hinges on preventing wide income inequalities within the host countries themselves, and on building community connections and social capital. Without these, local communities that have been left behind economically often resort to blaming immigrants, instead of welcoming the diversity and dynamism that their presence can bring.
High-income countries have often justified their meagre record on ODA by arguing that, rather than being well spent, too much aid gets embezzled by corrupt leaders or wasted on poorly designed projects. Rigorous evaluations show that much overseas aid is in fact highly effective in tackling poverty, but there is no denying that it is sometimes abused. What if, then, a portion of that promised ODA were channelled directly to people living in poverty in those countries instead? It would act as a basic income, giving every person access to the market as a means of providing for their needs. What’s more, for the first time in history such a scheme could actually work, thanks to the rapid worldwide spread of mobile phones and the proven success of mobile banking.
Kenya has been a trailblazer in mobile banking since launching its M-PESA mobile money service in 2007. Within six years, three quarters of all Kenyan adults had used the service, including 70% of those in rural areas, and – astonishingly – over 40% of Kenya’s GDP was passing through M-PESA.88 Worldwide, 5.5 billion people are expected to be using mobile phones by 2018, and mobile banking will come as part of the package.89 In essence, it will soon be feasible to create a phone book of the world’s ‘bottom billion’ and to text digital cash directly to them. Contrary to concerns that a guaranteed basic income would make people lazy or even reckless, cross-country studies of cash transfer schemes show no such effect: if anything, people tend to work harder and seize more opportunities when they know they have a secure fallback.90 When it comes to delivering a basic income to the world’s poorest people, the question is no longer ‘how on earth?’ but ‘why on earth not?’91
The biggest and longest experiment in piloting such a scheme is getting under way in Kenya, set up by the US-based charity GiveDirectly. For the next 10–15 years, 6,000 of the poorest people in Kenya will regularly receive a guaranteed income that is enough to meet their family’s basic needs, sent via their phone. By running such an extended pilot scheme, the charity hopes to give recipients the security needed to take longer-term life-changing decisions – and to prove that a universal basic income is an idea whose time has come.92 There’s only one caution: that private incomes are no substitute for public services. The market works best in tackling inequality and poverty when it complements, rather than replaces, the state and the commons. Accompanied by free-at-the-point-of-use provision of education and primary healthcare, such a basic income would be a direct investment in the potential of every woman, man and child, significantly advancing the prospects of achieving the Doughnut’s social foundation for all.
How could additional funds – on top of 0.7% ODA – be raised in the spirit of global redistribution? Through a global tax on extreme personal wealth, for starters. There are now more than 2,000 billionaires living in 20 countries from the USA, China and Russia to Turkey, Thailand and Indonesia.93 An annual wealth tax levied at just 1.5% of their net worth would raise $74 billion each year: that alone would be enough to fill the funding gap to get every child into school and deliver essential health services in all low-income countries.94 Match that with a global corporate tax system that treats multinational corporations as single, unified firms, and closes tax loopholes and tax havens, so boosting public revenue for public purposes worldwide.95 Supplement these with taxes on destabilising and damaging industries, such as a global financial transactions tax to curb speculative trading, and a global carbon tax levied on all oil, coal and gas production. Yes, some of these tax proposals sound unfeasible now, but so many once-unfeasible ideas – abolishing slavery, gaining the vote for women, ending apartheid, securing gay rights – turn out to be inevitable. In the century of the planetary household, global taxes will too.
If universal access to markets is to become a twenty-first-century norm, along with universal access to public services, then so too should universal access to the global commons – particularly to Earth’s life-giving systems and to the global knowledge commons.
Given what we now understand about planetary boundaries, the integrity of the living world is clearly and profoundly in the common interest of all: clean air and clean water, a stable climate, and thriving biodiversity are among the most important ‘common pool’ resources for all of humanity. ‘The great task of the twenty-first century,’ writes the ecological thinker Peter Barnes, ‘is to build a new and vital commons sector that can resist enclosure and externalization by the market, protect the planet, and share the fruits of our common inheritances more equitably than is now the case.’96 One way of achieving this, he proposes, is to create an array of Commons Trusts, each one endowed with property rights enabling it to protect and steward a particular realm of Earth’s commons – be it a local watershed or the global atmosphere – to the benefit of all citizens and future generations. In order to keep the use of these commons within local or planetary ecological boundaries, each trust would cap overall use and charge its users – such as companies extracting water from aquifers or offloading greenhouse gases into the sky – and share the benefits widely.97 Some national trusts similar to these already exist but it will be a challenge to design global-scale ones, given the vast inequalities between rich and poor people and countries: who would be required to pay, who would share in the benefits, and how could historic ecological debts be repaid? These tough issues are the very governance questions to take on once we recognise Earth’s life-giving systems as humanity’s common heritage.
Creating a global knowledge commons, in contrast, is more immediately feasible, in good part because it is already under way. But its potential has barely been tapped. Imagine what a worldwide network of free open-source design might mean for the community innovators who have the most to gain from it. Back in 2002, William Kamkwamba, the 14-year-old son of drought-stricken Malawian farmers, had to drop out of secondary school because his parents could no longer afford to pay the fees. He went to the local library instead, read a textbook on energy, and set out to build his own windmill, in spite of his friends’ and neighbours’ ridicule. A local scrapheap was his only hope for materials so, using an old tractor fan, PVC pipes, an old bicycle frame, discarded bottle tops, and a dynamo, he rigged up a 16-foot windmill and connected the wires. It actually worked, generating enough electricity to power four light bulbs and two radios in his family home. Soon there was a queue of people at the door wanting to charge up their mobile phones, and a string of journalists reporting his remarkable invention. It was five whole years later, when invited to Arusha in Tanzania to give a TED talk, that William got to use a computer for the first time. ‘I had never seen the Internet,’ he later recalled. ‘It was amazing … I Googled about windmills and found so much information.’98
Kamkwamba’s ingenuity is clearly exceptional, but there are already innovators and experimenters in every community who, with access to the Internet, the knowledge commons, and a makerspace, could copy, modify and invent technologies for tackling their own communities’ most pressing needs, from rainwater harvesting and passive solar housing to agricultural tools, medical equipment and, yes, wind turbines. What’s still missing, however, is a dedicated global digital platform enabling them to collaborate with researchers, students, enterprises and NGOs worldwide to develop free open-source technologies.
William Kamkwamba and his windmills.
Imagine such a peer-to-pee
r platform built on all the features that make for top-quality collaborative networks: ‘resource recipes’ listing the tools, materials and skills required to replicate each item; user ratings and reviews of every design; photographs and diagrams tracking how those designs evolve; and portals for similar communities – such as solar-rich urban slums or drought-prone villages – to learn alongside each other’s errors and successes.99
Creating such a platform will be disruptive because, says Joshua Pearce, ‘it will become a true rival to the paradigm of technology development that has dominated civilization since the industrial revolution’.100 But it needs start-up funding, be it from foundations, governments, the UN, or via crowdsourcing. And it needs new forms of open-source licensing too, to ensure that old-style intellectual property claims – patents, copyright and trademarks – do not encroach upon the resurgent knowledge commons.
William was offered a scholarship to study at a US university and is now a 28-year-old graduate with plans to set up a makerspace and innovation centre in Malawi for school and university students. ‘Many young people are talented and have brilliant ideas,’ he explains, ‘yet they don’t exploit the full potential of these ideas because of a dearth of organizations that can incubate them.’101 I asked him what he thought such a digital platform for the knowledge commons might do for those future innovators back home. His answer was immediate. ‘It will allow them to get creative in solving problems across Africa,’ he told me, ‘because they will be able to learn from one another and keep on improving the designs that they make.’102 Widening such access to the global knowledge commons will be one of the most transformative ways of redistributing wealth this century.
