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But it’s income that mostly interests us, not wealth, because income is the currency of the modern economy. Gone are the days when the only way to acquire an upper-class income was to marry into a family fortune.

Being born into or marrying wealth never stopped being the easiest path to acquiring a fortune

A fanatical miser, Getty was ever-fearful that his fortune would dissipate.

The return on capital (r) almost always exceeds economic growth (g).

“a very large share, perhaps a majority, of corporate profit hinges on rules and regulations that could in principle be altered.”

The clearest such pattern is that r really was, at most points in history, greater than g, if only because g was seldom much to write home about, especially back when economies were primarily agricultural. (Inflation, I learned from reading this book, didn’t really exist before the 20th century.)

The big driver of income inequality, Piketty says, isn’t labor income. It’s capital.

Only when you add in capital income does the gap widen to 15 percentage points

really, the 0.01 percent, a cohort Piketty dubs “supermanagers”—to receive much of its remuneration in the form of stock options and other capital holdings.

Typically, r is four to five times g, but the ratio gets larger as capital accumulates across generations

Baker also suggests that the tendency for large amounts of capital to realize a higher return isn’t solely attributable to the superior financial instruments they have access to; it may also have something to do with rampant insider trading, which could be policed more closely.

everything that needs to be made, has to be designed through collaborative innovation in the first place

in a capitalist system, ‘civil society’ is not directly productive of the goods and services that we need to survive, live and thrive

Both civil society and the notion of citizenship can be criticized for being insufficiently inclusionary, and therefore as ‘mechanisms of exclusion’.

democratically governed by all participants and stakeholders in such commons

infrastructures of collaboration, which are managed by a new type of ‘for-benefit associations’

consisting of shared depositories of knowledge, code and design; the communities of contributors and users of such commons

which are not derived or secondary from either the private or state forms.

civil society is the locus of the shared abundance of value creation, and the place for the continual dialogue regarding the necessities of common life.

democratically decide

the ‘common good’ of society as a whole

The difference is that the commons where the immaterial value is created are positioned in a field of abundance characteristic for non-rival or anti-rival goods; while the for-benefit associations are responsible for the sometimes contentious allocation of rival infrastructures.

Whereas the commons themselves are plurarchies based on permissionless contribution, forking and other rights guaranteeing the diversity of contributions and contributors; the for-benefit associations are democratically governed.

true reform of the private sector and the corporate form.

Under conditions of peer production, design and innovation moves to commons-based communitiies, which lack the incentive for unsustainable design; products are inherently design for sustainability, and the production process itself is designed for openness and distribution.

Under conditions of the rule of capital, for-profit corporations are beholden to work for the interests of the shareholders. This format allows for the accumulation of capital, but also indirectly of political power, through the power of money to influence politics and politicians. For-profit corporations are part of a system of infinite growth and compound interest, must continuously compete with other corporations, and therefore, also minimize costs. For-profit corporations are designed to ignore negative environmental externalities by avoiding to pay the costs associated with them; and to ignore positive social externalities, also by avoiding to pay for them. In terms of sustainability, corporations practice planned obsolescence as a rule, because while the market is a scarcity allocation mechanism, capitalism itself is a scarcity maintenance and creation mechanism. Anti-sustainable practices are systemic and part of the DNA of the for-profit corporation.

designed to make the commoners and the commons themselves sustainable, by not ‘leaking’ surplus value to external shareholders

mission-oriented, community supportive, sustainability-oriented corporate forms, that operate in the marketplace but do not themselves reproduce capitalism.

surplus value stays within the commons, allows its autonomous social reproduction, and sustains the commoners

ethical mechanism that subsumes profit making under the social goal of strengthening the commons.

because commons and their communities are themselves specific, and do not automatically take into account the common good of society as a whole .

A Partner State functions center around enabling and empowering social production and abandons some of the paternalistic aspects of the welfare state by focusing on strengthening the possibilities of autonomy.

mobilization of social forces to obtain a new social contract

But notice that to do this, the system had to change, the core logic was no longer the same.

The emergence of the peer model of production, based on the non-rivalrous nature and virtually non-existent marginal cost of reproduction of digital information, and coupled with the increasing unenforceability of “intellectual property” laws, means that capital is incapable of realizing returns on ownership in the cognitive realm.

capital is becoming an a posteriori intervention in the realization of innovation, rather than a condition for its occurrence

1) The creation of non-monetary value is exponential 2) The monetization of such value is linear

What this announces is a crisis of value, most such value is ‘beyond measure’, but also essentially a crisis of accumulation of capital.

more and more positive externalizations are created from the social field

“the core logic of the emerging experience economy, operating as it does in the world of non-rival exchange, is unlikely to have capitalism as its core logic.”

This takes the form both of “intellectual property” law, as well as direct subsidies from the taxpayer to the corporate economy

crisis of realization under state capitalism to capital’s growing dependence on the state to capture value from social production and redistribute it to private corporate owners

The state capitalist system will reach a point at which, thanks to the collapse of the portion of value comprised of rents on artificial property, the base of taxable value is imploding at the very time big business most needs subsidies to stay afloat.

We live in a political economy that has it exactly backwards. We believe that our natural world is infinite, and therefore that we can have an economic system based on infinite growth. But since the material world is finite, it is based on pseudo-abundance. And then we believe that we should introduce artificial scarcities in the world of immaterial production, impeding the free flow of culture and social innovation, which is based on free cooperation, by creating the obstacle of permissions and intellectual property rents protected by the state. What we need instead is a political economy based on a true notion of scarcity in the material realm, and a realization of abundance in the immaterial realm.

Brains and bodies still need others to produce value, but the others they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its capacities to organize production.

The household and informal economies have been allowed to function to the extent that they bear reproduction costs that would otherwise have to be internalized in wages; but they have been suppressed (as in the Enclosures) when they threaten to increase in size and importance to the point of offering a basis for independence from wage labor. “

increasing untenability of property rights in the information realm

there is no more outside.

one of intensive development, to grow in the immaterial field, and this is basically what the experience economy means

Innovation is becoming social and diffuse, an emergent property of the networks

failure of artificial abundance

failure of artificial scarcity

Consider an alternative to syndication. I’ll call it reverse syndication. Instead of selling my content to you, what say I give it to you for free? Better yet, I pay you to publish it on your site. The condition: I get to put my ad on the content. I will pay you a share of what I earn from that ad based on how much audience you bring me.

That model values the creation of the audience

If content could travel with its business model attached, we could set it free to travel across the web, gathering recommendations and audience and value as it goes

She searched Google for “embeddable article” and up came Repost.us, already created by entrepreneur and technologist John Pettitt. Repost very cleverly allowed embeddable articles to travel with the creator’s own brand, advertising, analytics, and links.

First, he found that the overlap in audience between a creator’s and an embedder’s sites generally ran between 2 and 5 percent. That is to say, the embedders brought a mostly new audience to the creator’s content.

Instead, Pettitt found that click-through ran amazingly high: 5 to 7 percent — and these were highly qualified clicks of people who knew what they were going to get on the other side of a link

I call this creditright. We need a means to attach credit to content for those who contribute value to it so that each constituent has the opportunity to negotiate and extract value along the chain, so that each can gain permission to take part in the chain, and so that behaviors that benefit others in the chain can be rewarded and encouraged

Each creator’s ads traveled with its content — though that wasn’t necessarily optimal, because an ad for a North Jersey hairdresser wouldn’t perform terribly well with South Jersey readers brought in through embedding.

key factor in its failure: Repost could find many sites willing and eager to make their content embeddable. It didn’t find enough sites to embed the content.

But the embedders got nothing aside from the free use of content — content that was just a link away anyway

Our ultimate problem in media is that we do not have sufficient technical and legal frameworks for alternate business models.

That formula was the key insight behind Google: that links to content are a signal of its value; thus, the more links to a page from sites that themselves have more links, the more useful, relevant, or valuable that content is likely to be

Silicon Valley’s: Those people are your fans who are bringing value to you by sending you audiences and by contributing their creativity, and you’d be wise to build your businesses around making it easier, not harder, for them to get and share your content when and how they want it.

And so, we came to agree that we need new technological and legal frameworks flexible enough to enable multiple models to support creativity.

Hollywood’s side: People who download our content without buying it or who remix it without our permission — and the platforms that facilitate these behaviors — are stealing from us and must be stopped and punished.

Imagine you are a songwriter. You hear a street poet and her words inspire you to write a song about her, quoting her in the piece. You go to a crowdfunding platform — Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or Patreon — to raise money for you to go into the studio and perform and distribute your song. Another songwriter comes along and remixes it, making a new version and also sampling from others’ songs. Both end up on YouTube and Soundcloud, on iTunes and Google Play. Audience members discover and share the songs. A particularly popular artist shares the remixed version on Twitter and Facebook and it explodes. A label has one of its stars record it. The star appears on TV performing it. A movie studio includes that song in a soundtrack. There are many constituents in that process: the subject, the songwriter, the patrons, the fans, the remixer, the distributor, the label, the star, the show, the studio, and the platforms. Each contributed value.

Each may want to recognize value — but not all will want cash. There are other currencies in play: The poet may want credit and fame; the songwriter may want to sell concert tickets; the patrons may want social capital for discovering and supporting a new artist; the remixer may want permission to remix; the platforms may want a cut of sales or of subscription revenue; the show may want audience and advertising; the studio will want a return on its investment and risk.

I’ve suggested they would be wiser to seek another currency from Google: data about the users, helping build better services for readers and advertisers and thus better businesses

We will need a way to attach metadata to content, recording and revealing its source and the contributions of others in the chain of continuing creation and distribution.

We need a marketplace to measure and value their contributions and a means to negotiate rewards and permissions

We need payment structures to handle multiple currencies: data as well as money

And we need a legal framework to allow the flexible exploration of new models, some of which we cannot yet imagine.

It took many more years for society to develop principles of free speech to balance the economic and political interests of those who would attempt to control a new tool of speech.

We must reimagine the business of media and news from the first penny, asking where value is created, who contributes to it, where it resides, and how to extract it

Thus, we need new measures of value