Solveig Singleton

David Schmidz of U. of Arizona on Property Rights

An excerpt from David’s excellent paper on property rights. He’s got to win the award for most awesome former mailman:

According to Martin Bailey (this volume), the pattern observed by Rose and Ellickson also was common among aboriginal tribes. That is, tribes that practiced agriculture treated the land as private during the growing season, and often treated it as a commons after the crops were in. Hunter-gatherer societies did not practice agriculture, but they too tended to leave the land in the commons during the summer when game was plentiful. It was during the winter, when food was most scarce, that they privatized. The rule among hunter-gatherers is that where group hunting’s advantages are considerable, that factor dominates (Bailey, this volume). But in the winter, small game is relatively more abundant, less migratory, and evenly spread. There was no “feast or famine” pattern of the sort one expects to see with big-game hunting. Rather, families tended to gather enough during the course of the day to get themselves through the day, day after day, with little to spare.

Even though this pattern corroborates my own general thesis, I confess to being a bit surprised. I might have predicted that it would be during the harshest part of the year that families would band together and throw everything into the common pot in order to pull through. Not so. It was when the land was nearest its carrying capacity that they recognized the imperative to privatize.

May 2, 2006 | Comments |

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    Actually, it makes perfectly good sense. There was something on TCSDaily.com talking about an "egalitarian instinct" in these societies. It would make sense that when there was plenty, they would share, but when scarcity becomes a real factor they would assert private property rights. It's just a way of preventing free riding.


    I am curious to know whether he had the chance to critique their nuances in their views of property. Is it possible that they might have always asserted property rights in principle, but simply not enforced them because of other cultural factors during good times? That would seem more likely to me, but I'm just guessing and don't even pretend to know the answer to that one.

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    This really isn't surprising at all -- scarcity is a fundamental attribute of "property," and where there is not scarcity, there is no need for property.


    So the key question is, then: are ideas scarce? I would argue that they are not, in fact, that it is impossible for them to be scarce.

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    Well my original post ended up in the wrong place, my bad, I was in a rush to leave work. Now I am home and doing some further thinking.

    First, I am on your side that abstract ideas cannot be patented and hence do not possess a "property right".

    Second, my point of concern is the use of a "real property" property right as an analogy. You wrote: "Historically, property rights only arise in the presence of scarcity and conflict. For example, during our ancestors' hunter-gatherer days, there was no concept of land as a property right. This is largely because land was not scarce, and there was little conflict over its use." While this statement is loosely true, it leaves out a crucially important concept. A property right does NOT arise out of scarcity.

    The "correct" logical process is that scarcity creates VALUE, this value is then perceived by some entity (an individual, tribe, king) who then asserts it belongs to them because they control it. David's paper recognizes the concept of "Original Appropriation". David stated: "There must have been a time when no one had a right to exclude. Everyone had liberties regarding the land, but not rights."

    Possession, over a long period of time, along with the invention of law, converted appropriated land and other real resources into being "owned" with the owner poseessing "property rights".

    The abusuridy of patenting ideas was an unintended consequence of an article that appeared in Discover Magazine. Evidently a person obtained a patent for an antigravity device (Whatever happened to Antigravity Research?, April 2006). It didn't work. Suppose now that someone does get an antigraivty device to work, is that inventor and all of society going to have to pay royalties someone for an idea that failed?????
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