I've recently found myself a copy of Adrienne Buller's and Mathew Lawrence's Owning the Future, which is subtitled "a radical manifesto for the transformation of post-pandemic politics." In it, the authors reveal the range of inequities that materialize from our conceptions of property rights.
A foundation that nearly all of society rests on, systems of property have been swirling around my head for the better part of the last few years. I'm not quite sure where I land, but it's somewhere between a Proudhonian stance, viewing property as theft, and a utilitarian recognition of its usefulness as a tool, illustrated by political scientists and economists like Robert Bates and Ronald Coase.
This piece focuses on the latter, highlighting a chunk from the introduction of Bates' 1989 Beyond the Miracle of the Market. Within the introduction to his analysis of development in Kenya I found a compelling thought experiment (for which Bates uses the German term, Gedanken) revealing the critical locus that systems of property rights occupy within our economies.
The state's approach to property determines whether economic flows concentrate at their center, or disperse themselves across their peripheries.
Bates illustrates this by recreating an example from "one of the canonical texts in contemporary social science:" Ronald Coase's 1960 article on "The Problem of Social Cost."
The technical term here is externalities, which tend to be ignored by market actors unless their inclusion becomes required by law. For the railway, the pollution delivered to the farmers is simply an externality to their decision of running trains. It is a cost, but not one they ever have to pay for directly. In order to produce the "socially efficient outcome," that externality must be internalized into this transaction, usually via state-enforced fees.
Coase emphasizes that, to reach this optimal outcome, a system of property rights is required, but that which system is economically irrelevant - at least, to the transaction at hand. There are multiple configurations that enable our desired outcomes, and Bates lays out two possibilities.
Two property regimes, based on nearly opposite underlying value sets, result in what appears to be identical outcomes. However, Bates clarifies a few paragraphs later that this is not the case:
Of course, anyone familiar with the collective action problem will recognize it here in the task of achieving that power; the smaller group with more concentrated wealth and power is more likely able to mobilize to further entrench their wealth. That scenario is the one we see replicated across all facets of our economy. The effects are far-reaching, and the images Bates provides are particularly illuminating:
I appreciate Bates' use of the term radical here; literally a fundamental, core difference. Property rights exist at the root of the many issues that are continuously bubbling up. And while our current scenario more closely resembles one of the two outcomes illustrated here, Bates demonstrates that a parallel configuration exists almost within reach.
With that, I'll return to the radical manifesto that brought to mind this tangent. There are many threads I'd like to pull, but I'll leave that exercise for future pieces.
Bates, R. H. (1989). Beyond the miracle of the market: The political economy of agrarian development in Kenya. Cambridge University Press.
Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups. Harvard University Press.
Buller, A., & Lawrence, M. (2022). Owning the future: Power and property in an age of crisis. Verso.