My “roots of property, exchange, and the division of labor” lecture. It tries to make novel and strange the idea people think that they "own" things: to impress students with how just plain weird...
I'm a lawyer, not an economist. The concept of property is unbelievably elastic in lawyer-land, and I'm not sure is a useful analytic tool for anybody. A commons--inalienable and mostly inexcludable--is a form of property. Dogs have no sense of alienation and exchange, but they definitely have a sense of property: both real and chattel. About the best the lawyers have come up with is that property is a relationship between people and things, including space. Technical legal talk--the kind that actually determines property rights--refers to specific kinds of property, each with their own rules of attribution and alienation: chattel, realty, IP, securities, debts, etc.
The uniquely human concept, I think, is exchange over time: a concept closer to obligation than property. (It's hard to distinguish spot exchange from cooperation, which nonhuman animals do all the time.) This includes things that are not considered property. Politicians' favor banks are created by exchange. The politician may "owe" the donor, but you generally can't say that the donor "owns" the politician. (There are exceptions.) You feed the neighbors' kids lunch enough times, and your own kid gets babysitted. Etc.
A lot of predators have territories that they defend, usually against their own kind, but also against other species predators. Wolves, for example, mark their territory by pissing an array of markers. You might trespass, but that will get a strong reaction if you get met by the owner on patrol. If nothing else, the territories are a way of avoiding conflict since once claimed, they tend to be respected. This has proven a problem in species relocation efforts. If you just dump an animal down in suitable habitat, there's a good chance that the local owners will kill him or her.
It isn't just mammals. I saw some ravens enforcing their claim on a field when a red tailed hawk nearly caught a heron but was knocked off course by a raven who hassled the hawk and called for reinforcements. Two other ravens joined in to defend the turf.
There are cases where the males and females have separate overlapping territories which is probably useful if anyone is going to have cubs.
I read an account of a journey upriver in Borneo where the local hunters, the Ukit if I remember correctly, defended their turf. If you were passing through and hoped to live, you'd let them know by damaging certain ferns in a certain matter. They didn't mind in that case, but they'd kill interlopers.
To my eye and ear, this piece makes property sound both weird and natural, actually -- with most of the weirdness lying in our human cognitive capacity, so really more natural than weird. It also makes me wonder if there isn't a scale factor at play, in both directions. Once the world was human-populated enough, wasn't a sharp concept of property inevitable? And once we hit our billions, how could we hope to survive without revisiting the limitations of that foundational idea, without heightened "vigilance about the distributional consequences" and species-level needs?
Excellent - goes to the roots. I'm not sure if Smith's view was all that different from Rousseau's - when he speaks, as he often does, of the original “appropriation” of property or of “flocks and herds” it sounds like an act of violence. “Till there be property, there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth and defend the rich against the poor”. [lecture on jurisprudence, “on the nature of government*.
On a separate point, markets only guarantee efficiency if agents are able to forecast accurately the amount of satisfaction they will get from a purchase. Price depends on expected satisfaction; value on experienced satisfaction. A large advertising industry exists mainly to distort people's forecasts of satisfaction.
I was just about to quote Aristotle to you, about how when women are treated as slaves, "it is meet for Greeks to rule over Barbarians." Except, I have watched a young woman attempting to roll a pie crust elbowed away by an older lady resentful at the younger's social usurpation. I know Engels and them thought the tribe was democratic and leadership was granted willingly to the best at a task. Having been best at a lot of things, and worst at others. Fie on truck and barter, for there is jostling!
I'm a lawyer, not an economist. The concept of property is unbelievably elastic in lawyer-land, and I'm not sure is a useful analytic tool for anybody. A commons--inalienable and mostly inexcludable--is a form of property. Dogs have no sense of alienation and exchange, but they definitely have a sense of property: both real and chattel. About the best the lawyers have come up with is that property is a relationship between people and things, including space. Technical legal talk--the kind that actually determines property rights--refers to specific kinds of property, each with their own rules of attribution and alienation: chattel, realty, IP, securities, debts, etc.
The uniquely human concept, I think, is exchange over time: a concept closer to obligation than property. (It's hard to distinguish spot exchange from cooperation, which nonhuman animals do all the time.) This includes things that are not considered property. Politicians' favor banks are created by exchange. The politician may "owe" the donor, but you generally can't say that the donor "owns" the politician. (There are exceptions.) You feed the neighbors' kids lunch enough times, and your own kid gets babysitted. Etc.
A lot of predators have territories that they defend, usually against their own kind, but also against other species predators. Wolves, for example, mark their territory by pissing an array of markers. You might trespass, but that will get a strong reaction if you get met by the owner on patrol. If nothing else, the territories are a way of avoiding conflict since once claimed, they tend to be respected. This has proven a problem in species relocation efforts. If you just dump an animal down in suitable habitat, there's a good chance that the local owners will kill him or her.
It isn't just mammals. I saw some ravens enforcing their claim on a field when a red tailed hawk nearly caught a heron but was knocked off course by a raven who hassled the hawk and called for reinforcements. Two other ravens joined in to defend the turf.
There are cases where the males and females have separate overlapping territories which is probably useful if anyone is going to have cubs.
I read an account of a journey upriver in Borneo where the local hunters, the Ukit if I remember correctly, defended their turf. If you were passing through and hoped to live, you'd let them know by damaging certain ferns in a certain matter. They didn't mind in that case, but they'd kill interlopers.
To my eye and ear, this piece makes property sound both weird and natural, actually -- with most of the weirdness lying in our human cognitive capacity, so really more natural than weird. It also makes me wonder if there isn't a scale factor at play, in both directions. Once the world was human-populated enough, wasn't a sharp concept of property inevitable? And once we hit our billions, how could we hope to survive without revisiting the limitations of that foundational idea, without heightened "vigilance about the distributional consequences" and species-level needs?
Excellent - goes to the roots. I'm not sure if Smith's view was all that different from Rousseau's - when he speaks, as he often does, of the original “appropriation” of property or of “flocks and herds” it sounds like an act of violence. “Till there be property, there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth and defend the rich against the poor”. [lecture on jurisprudence, “on the nature of government*.
On a separate point, markets only guarantee efficiency if agents are able to forecast accurately the amount of satisfaction they will get from a purchase. Price depends on expected satisfaction; value on experienced satisfaction. A large advertising industry exists mainly to distort people's forecasts of satisfaction.
I was just about to quote Aristotle to you, about how when women are treated as slaves, "it is meet for Greeks to rule over Barbarians." Except, I have watched a young woman attempting to roll a pie crust elbowed away by an older lady resentful at the younger's social usurpation. I know Engels and them thought the tribe was democratic and leadership was granted willingly to the best at a task. Having been best at a lot of things, and worst at others. Fie on truck and barter, for there is jostling!
Pedantic note: Diana Gabaldon's series is Outlander, not Highlander.