Property rights aren't primary; ideas are

Bart Wilson

Journal of Institutional Economics, 2023, vol. 19, issue 2, 288-301

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.

Date: 2023
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