The Future of Property

Given the imminent convergence of major impacts on humanity, e.g. global warming, global food shortage, global water shortage and all that these imply for human society, one of the more useful forms of inquiry is to ask what our situation implies for fundamental societal institutions, e.g. governance, marriage and family, social structure itself. In this column I will take a look at the future of property in an era of increasingly reduced resources and increasing population.

Property has had a varying history. Hunter gatherer societies had little property except their weapons and tools. To what extent these may have been held in common for everybody's use I am uncertain. While land was not owned, tribes might by force or tradition lay claim to hunting grounds. In the 21st century the "hunting ground right" is still an issue as the fish population declines. More on this later.

As humans moved to agriculture after the last ice age specific land allocation became more important for survival. Not only did the rise of agriculture result in more stable societies providing the basis for the rise of civilization, it also placed land ownership at the center of the human economy.

In terms of human history it wasn’t that long ago that medieval societies regarded all property as ultimately the monarch's, but in practice much of it belonged to the monarch's aristocracy. In the typical feudal arrangement the lord owned all significant property especially land. Even the so-called commons were owned by the lord and his serfs paid him a portion of the benefit they accrued from its use. At this time the economy was land based and wealth measured primarily in land holdings.

Gradually, with increased commerce, including the discovery of the new world, the European economy began to expand and land was no longer the only measure of wealth. The Industrial Revolution greatly enlarged the European economy, but also provided a new basis for wealth, i.e. manufacturing. Interestingly, at about the same time as the Industrial Revolution the land-based economy was facing a dilemma of its own creation. As families grew larger land holdings were being fragmented by multi-child inheritance, Thus came the practice of primogeniture in which the eldest son inherited all the land. A significant portion of the initial Industrial Revolution entrepreneurs and workers were the children of land holders ineligible to inherit the land.

Writing in the earlier phase of this economic transformation, Thomas Hobbes based freedom itself on property ownership. We find this notion in Jefferson when he envisioned a nation of small farmers as the economic foundation of democracy because their property and the living it provided would make them independent of overlords. I think that one reason for this close association of property ownership and freedom lay in the fact that the property of the monarch and aristocracy had given them power over the populace and that therefore property was necessary to assure freedom of the ordinary citizen. There is, to this day, a strong feeling among some citizens that property is the root of freedom.

However, as the impact of diminishing resources and increasing population make property increasingly scarce, ownership of property will become more problematical. One can easily see this as a source of ongoing violence.

With this brief history in mind what are the prospects for property or for that matter ownership in general? To assess the distance this society has to travel in this matter we need only recall G. W. Bush's 2004 campaign that flaunted the banner of the "Ownership Society." Such a society thoroughly based on ownership would require little government (except for military) and society's major domestic transactions, e.g. health care, education, retirement, employee benefits would be negotiated between "independent" entities. This would promote values such as personal responsibility, economic liberty and owning of property. Interestingly this view, but not Bush's reasons for it, is not too far removed from Jefferson's belief. Jefferson feared that Hamilton's economic view, focused on a manufacturing-based economy, would make employees vulnerable to political manipulation.

But back to Bush and the Republicans. The Ownership Society was little more than an attempt to preserve the wealth of the rich. It was offered as a defense for his wealth-favoring tax cut. It uncritically assumed that property would remain the basis of the U.S. economy, even if the rest of the world moved on.

This conservative effort to impose the wealthy on the rest of us by way of a 400 year old view of property and with mankind's survival in mind, indicates how massive a cultural shift will be required to allow our species to survive. In short, is there a surrogate for property?

One answer to that question is that we should substitute access for ownership.

There is some modest potential in some current arrangements. The fishing industry provides some perspective. While nations have long laid claim to areas of the ocean for fishing purposes they could, of course, not lay claim to the fish themselves, which may or may not enter a given national boundary. It is useful to keep in mind that fishing is the one holdover from the hunter gatherer societies.

Another step in this direction is car sharing instead of car ownership. Two companies, Zipcar and Flexcar, using a combination of wireless, GPS and other computer technologies allow customers to reserve cars online, walk a few blocks to where it is parked in their neighborhood, use it and return it to the parking spot. This form of car use not only avoids the ownership costs of maintenance, insurance, etc., it means fewer cars can provide the transportation needs of metropolitan areas.

Bicycle sharing, especially in Europe, is a going and growing public/private enterprise. Mexico City is trying to clean up its immense smog problem using bicycle sharing in the city's core areas.

Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, has a long and interesting article on access versus ownership in which he sees technology driving a passage from ownership to access. He notes the digitized book as an example. It is interesting to note that Kelley, an avowed libertarian, sees tax-based public enterprise as a vehicle for this change as well as private enterprise. The article may be found at http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all.

But what of land itself, which remains the most basic measure of wealth for much of the planet's population? In this regard it is instructive to note that China, Saudi Arabia, etc. are buying up large tracts of land in Africa to grow food for their own populations. The only large effort at abandoning land ownership was the Soviet Union in which society, through the state, owned the land and farmers were in essence state employees. To many people in the West this was an instance of dictatorship. Farmers, like employees of a corporation, were told what and how much to grow based on the needs of their society. The farm was made to emulate the factory. This feature is currently duplicated, in spades, by American corporate farms, in which animals are raised in very confined space, fed large amounts of medication to avoid easily transmitted disease and hormones to increase the rate of growth and hence saleability. It is not clear whether this form of agriculture is necessary to support the population that the human species has produced and continues to produce.

Finally, ownership may be finding its comeuppance in the developing politics of Latin America, especially Bolivia. Evo Morales has been returning major extraction industries such as oil and minerals to the people by way of nationalization of corporations. Morales, of indigenous extraction himself, is basing this process on what the dominant economies owe Bolivia's indigenous people in recompense for all that has been taken from them. It will not do for a corporation to declare they have a contract with a preceding government that ruled by the power of elitism, not by the consent of the people. Morales in a recent conference in Cochabamba seemed to be calling upon all indigenous people to rise up and demand compensation from those who have plundered their lands and resources. In this connection more than one African government that agreed to sell millions of acres for growing food to China and others has been forced by outraged citizens to withdraw these agreements. China and others are now calling for such countries to supply troops to protect "their interest." If Morales and others focused on the welfare of the population find a significant and determined constituency among the economic victims of this planet, we may have found something of an answer to the future of property. At least in certain areas it will be possessed by society not by individuals. It will, however, place a greater burden on the citizen to insure that government itself is not co-opted by the wealthy and thereby become tyrannical. It may be that humans are condemned by their very nature to repeat Plato's cycle of aristocracy, timocracy (government by those possessed of great honor, usually military), oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny endlessly until the technology of violence overwhelms our species.

Bob Newhard