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Property rights aren't primary; ideas are

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 November 2022

Bart J. Wilson Open the ORCID record for Bart J. Wilson [Opens in a new window]
Bart J. Wilson*
Affiliation:
Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy & Economic Science Institute, Chapman University, Orange, USA
*
Corresponding author. Email: bartwilson@gmail.com
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Abstract

The current approach to the study of property cannot distinguish the causes of human action from the consequences of human action. It also cordons off morality thereby opening a hole in how property rights work. The scientific difficulty is that our analysis must constantly shift between the individual, their local community, and the larger polity in which both are embedded, in order to explain simultaneously different levels of consequences with different kinds of causes. The difficulty is made worse when we construct mental models without the human mind. My framework leaves the human mind in. Since Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, the study of property rights has had a decidedly external stance: the institution imposes itself on the individual from the outside. The problem of property rights, however, also calls for inquiry from the inside out of human agency, because in the study of property, ideas are primary.

Keywords

Ideasmindproperty rightspropertyD23D91K11
Type
Comment
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 2023 , pp. 288 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Millennium Economics Ltd.

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Footnotes

*

I thank five commenters for stimulating the ideas in this essay, the Editor for the opportunity to work through them in a response, and Deirdre McCloskey for her helpful comments.

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