No I haven’t been in hibernation – well not a conscious decision and there has been lots I could happily sink my teeth into over the past year, but maybe it was time to take a break and mellow a little – or not. Your call.

But I have been catching up on a little bit of reading. The book I’m talking about today I actually read nearly two years ago and I admit I’ve had to reread it for this blog, but it was no hardship. It’s about property rights. Wake up! It’s not a dry read at all. Maybe because it’s written by a couple of lawyers not economists. But therein lies part of its allure to this nerd. Lawyers think about ownership differently to economists.

“Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives”, by Michael Heller and James Salzman takes the reader on a fascinating journey about who gets what and why. Heller is a professor at Columbia University and Salzman is professor with joint appointments at UCLA and UCSB.

One drawback of this book for a non-US reader is that naturally, given their clearly biggest intended audience, pretty well all the stories are sourced for the US experience. Although to give them credit, they do allow themselves to make some international comparisons, which are mostly not flattering. As a result I will resist the temptation to roll my eyes and consign some stories as less relevant because – only in America!

I won’t be going into most of the stories here but note that I was particularly ‘fond’ of the story about the Maine lobster catchers and the futile attempts to stop the plunder of this resource and the biffo that ensued. Many fisheries all over the world exhibit (or exhibited) some pretty cowboy traits and it took the good fisher folk of Iceland to demonstrate that Individual Fishing Quotas, while they had some downsides both in their introduction (eg often gifting existing fishers quota for no cost – which they could then lease or trade) and also often result in diminished local fishing presence, generally over time get the biffo to cease, have excellent sustainability outcomes and improve the safety and efficiency of the fishing effort. As far as I can ascertain though, the Maine lobster fishery remains immune from these quotas. (This from that reputable(?)news sheet – USA today – on 30 October 2023 – “A federal court and Congress recently blocked federal regulators’ efforts to limit lobster fishing in the Gulf of Maine and gave lobster fishers until at least 2028 to operate without changes.”)

Why I found this book so interesting in the first instance is because in much economic theory, property rights are assumed as a given. While some areas of economic thought do probe deeper and try to work out how to assign (or reassign) property rights, these discussions are often not had more generally. Economics is mainly concerned with changes in ownership. Heller and Salzman concentrate of how initial ownership is decided. If the Heller-Salzman stories do nothing much else they provide insight to the options available in choosing who gets what and the implications for winners and losers from the choices made.

They posit six ways scarce resources can be initially allocated:

• First come first served
• Possession is nine-tenths of the law
• You reap what you sow
• My home is my castle
• Our bodies, ourselves
• The meek shall inherit the earth – it’s mine because it’s in my family

I think most of these are pretty self explanatory but I’ll give a short example of each just to be sure.

First come first served is pretty basic – I was here first and claimed it so it’s mine.

Possession is nine-tenths of the law says that if I have control of it it’s mine.

You reap what you sow means I worked for this so it’s mine. In other words I made, crafted or grew this so I own it and it’s mine to decide how it is used.

My home is my castle is a bit more complex and is best explained through the concept of attachment. This is the idea that something is mine because it’s attached to something that’s mine. So maybe a very relatable example is the space on the aircraft between the seats in adjacent rows. It is a source of some dispute as your boarding pass grants you access to your seat but is silent on whether that space between the rows belongs to you or does the person with the seat in front of you who reclines into this space have property rights too?

Our bodies ourselves means that individuals have autonomy over their bodies, that they are not enslaved for example, and that they have equal worth. But does it mean they are free to sell body parts?

The meek shall inherit the earth is the idea that something is mine because it’s been in my family. These matters most often arise in cases of divorce or inheritance.

While it might seem these principles are pretty straightforward the authors argue that they are becoming increasingly complex and lines are no longer particularly binary. As noted above, who “owns” the space between airline seats? The airlines themselves have been particularly adept at failing to address the question and leave it up to passengers to negotiate. By the same token, I suspect we’ve all fallen prey to the belief that I paid for the book, music or software therefore it’s mine. But that is so often not the case when it is an electronic form of ownership – a kindle, online music or a software program. All you’ve bought is a license to use and that can be rescinded at a moment’s notice. And it gets even more opaque when you consider that your new car can be totally disabled remotely by the manufacturer and the software needed to run it may require regular updates or even be hacked. Or, as was shown most not so long ago in Canberra when a certain well-known tennis star’s car was stolen, it can be used by the police to track the whereabouts of the car. It puts a whole new slant on ownership.

Ownership is a slippery beast and it’s getting harder and more complex to nail it. Deciding what’s right or not is curly and seemingly often there is no “right” answer. But there are considerations we can invoke such as ideas about winners and losers, how to think about possible innovative solutions and also raise awareness of how we can influence who owns what.

One area that I’m a bit passionate about is data. Bear with me. I’m not going to launch into a detailed statistical discussion. I’m talking about all the personal data we generate everyday. Things like our online searching, medical histories or energy use. Who owns this? Is the loss of autonomy over our internet-related data the price we pay for the convenience offered by using the internet? How do privacy provisions impact this and what are our rights to security over that information? Who owns the detailed notes our doctors make during consultations? It’s our information but collated by and for the medical professionals.

Some of these issues have been resolved to an extent. So that for example, my medical history is mine in as much as I can request it be made available to other doctors etc and indeed, in Australia, there is a system where it can be more generally available to treating doctors through the My Health system should I choose.

My energy data is now available to me from my smart meter although not seamlessly. But while I may have the ability to access this data, it is not exactly private as my utility company can also access the data.

Oh and don’t even get me started on what AI might mean for ownership. That is such a tangle it might take years to sort through. But one thing this ancient economist is sure about, where’s there’s money to be made there will be much action in the ownership stakes.