This Times piece by Jad Mouawad , a very good one, about the rise of Dubai fascinates me because it illustrates something I talk about in all three of my books: that cities are political enterprises first. The are not “natural.” They don’t arise in some sort of organic way, a small group of settlers on the banks of a river engaging in a bit of trade and so forth. That’s a myth. The story of Dubai reminds me of the story of New Amsterdam (now a city called New York), which only existed in the mid 1600s because the Dutch West India Corporation decided to settle and invest in this money-losing operation for a half century because it decided, for strategic reasons, that it was worthwhile.  Or of my native city of Norfolk, Va, which King Charles II commanded to be set up and have trade go through it, so the tobacco planters could less easily escape taxation. That Norfolk had a great natural harbor probably figured into Charles II’s decision, but it’s not like the city arose on its own there. It needed a king to command it into existence.

As for Dubai, there’s no reason for a city to arise in the middle of a desert. You have to hand it to Dubai’s leaders. They saw an opportunity – air travel as a tool for inventing a city – and so subsidized it heavily for a few decades. Now they are reaping their harvest.

This is basically a book review, so get ready.

David Carr’s essay this week in the New York Times about the pleasures and problems of free music, and free everything else, brings to mind the new book by Jeremy Rifkin, which I got a review copy of recently. The book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things and Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (Palgrave 2014), posits that, as Carr grapples with, we are going to a society where many things can be free or close to free. Rifkin describes and identifies the big change, which is the technology that makes it essentially free to produce one more copy of so many things, whether that be music, a book, a newspaper or even things that aren’t media related. This is a game changer, in terms of conventional economics.

Rifkin, who has written books advocating socially and economically progressive ideas such as The European Dream (2004), calls this new free world “the Collaborative Commons.”

Rifkin astutely describes the weird bind we are in now, or paradox. Things are getting free, but this very process is delivering us into monopolies that have great control over our lives. It turns out that when the marginal cost of producing one more thing is zero, then the only people who can make money off of it are monopolies or semi monopolies who can be the go-to source, and thus make money selling advertising, or devices or charging for the thing that costs them nothing to make one more copy of. Thus we have Apple, Google as well as Time Warner and Comcast.

Rifkin would like us to move to a world, and think we are moving to such a world, where we have a more conscious, Collaborative Commons, where the state and its citizens “break the monopoly hold” of large companies, and set up more democratic organizations. This jibes with an issue I have written about and supported, which is the movement to  establish municipal broadband networks.

I’ve not finished the book, so this is just my thoughts as of right now, and I may add to them later with subsequent posts. But Rifkin is certainly onto something here, and he is an incredibly insightful analyst of our politics and economics. But Rifkin invents a new term, Collaborative Commons, and does not use a simple and familiar term – in fact it’s not even in the index – that describes quite well what he is talking about: Socialism.

The term Socialism generally means the state owning all or some of the essential services and infrastructure, and collaborating with citizens on these. How this term got so loaded, I don’t know. We in the United States already live in an economy that is socialistic in many ways. Libraries are socialism. So is our road system. And that’s all good. As I talk about in my own recent book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies, adding some more socialism can be a good thing, whatever you call it.

Clearly there is some common thinking going on here. While Rifkin is talking about the Collaborative Commons, see my essay in In The Commons magazine that lays out my theory of socialism – although like Rifkin, I avoid using the term!

Why don’t both Rifkin and I say that we are and should be moving to a more socialistic economy, because when you can make and distribute stuff for free, it makes sense to have government be the owner and provider? Okay, maybe that doesn’t always mean the state has its name on the title. It could be encouraging say, cooperatives that own and operate say, broadband networks or retail distribution networks like Amazon. But Socialism is an old word that describes these types of setups well, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t still use it.