Bart Wilson tells us why property is a universal and uniquely human custom, and why all of those words are important.

Timestamped Episode Transcript

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Hello and welcome to ideas, having sex with chris Kaufman, I'm Chris Kaufman and today I'm talking to professor of Economics at chapman University.

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Bart J.

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Wilson about his book, the property Species Bart and I talk about the foundations of property and just how deeply embedded that concept is into human society and human behavior.

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This is my interview with Bart Wilson, how old is experimental economics as like a discipline or a sub discipline?

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Well, so Vernon Smith started in the 60s running his first experiments um and he kind of converted all over to experiment economics by the time, by the 70s, I think It was probably the late 80s where they started to meet for the first time as a group.

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Um and it was just really taking off in the 90s, it was um diversifying into testing game theory and looking at um fairness and those kind of considerations which was really new for economics and the laboratory was a way to study that.

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And so it really kind of came into its own in the nineties, I would I would say, but it had its roots in the sixties, seventies and eighties, it sounds like most of your work in experimental econ involves virtual worlds.

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Is that the mostly what it is these days?

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Or is there or is there a lot of diversity in the field?

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I would say.

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That's actually probably rare.

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Okay, the virtual or part, I also kind of stumbled into um vernon smith and I were designing a class to teach kind of the basic principles of economics through experiments and reading the classical economists like Adam smith and we didn't have an experiment on exchange and specialization, like there were no research experiments on it, so we thought we'd build one and we wanted to see what they would build and that was kind of the first idea of like, let's rather than really constrain the action space, let's open it up and see what they do with it.

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And so the virtual world is something that I kind of kept on with that after that, because I wanted to see what the subjects were trying to tell me and by making the access space wider, I gave them more freedom to say this is what we want to do and what we think it's about.

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Has experimental economics been hit much by replication crises, or is it pretty solid in that sense?

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So, relative to psychology were faring quite well.

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Um and there have been studies out there that have been attempting to look at that question and I don't, I think the number was 60% were replicable in on a major study, which is much higher than psychology, but still leading a lot of room on the other side that would make us not be too comfortable with that.

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And so that is been economists have been very responsive to trying to understand that and to be careful about those kind of questions, what kind of things do you do to be careful about something that like, like preregistration or Yes, so a lot of people are doing pre registration studies.

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Um I I like the idea that there's an intention to that, but there's also a sense that that what you can only learn from experiment comes out of what you started with.

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And that is also I think has its downsides because it's gonna choke off ideas of branching off and following different lines and so it's a, it's a fine tradeoff there of sticking to what you plan to do.

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But also following the question where it leads you.

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Uh and you you kind of have to do that as well.

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You mean like if you if you had started off with a certain assumption, you don't want to manipulate the experiment part way through to get the result you want.

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But you also don't want to fail to pursue an interesting question because you've preregistered a particular methodology right?

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If you learn something new, um you should be exploring that.

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In fact, that's what good science is being surprised about what comes what you learned from it.

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And then every experiment I've run, I've always been kind of surprised by some feature of it that I wasn't expecting um to happen and that's actually where the world learning is.

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So in that sense, I haven't, I had personally haven't done the pre registrations because I wanna be, if I'm creating this virtual world, I want to let it take me and the trade off for that is I just have to be very careful when I present their experiment to make sure everyone follows how I got to where the design the final design was.

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I think that's the real slippage in these studies is experimenters come in knowing a lot of things, having a, I would say a feel for how stuff works and that never gets put into the paper.

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And so the person comes try to replicate it and they don't have that same history of what kind of what they know and as a result, um, they might not implement something exactly the same way that's left out of the details.

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I've heard a term for that in different fields.

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I forget what it is.

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I feel like I've heard bryan Caplan mention something along those lines.

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Like you have to, you have to learn that by having lunch conversations with the faculty, learning all the things that don't get that don't make it into the papers or textbooks.

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Yeah.

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And experimental sciences.

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That's true for a lot of things because there's a lot of details about how you run the actual procedures, um, from how the people show up in the room before you put them in the laboratory.

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Can matter, which you don't see in papers.

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Uh, because there they're checking the subjects, know what's going on there.

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They're getting a sense of feel what's different when they normally do it versus when they're doing it this time and all of those kind of things could potentially matter.

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Um depending on what you're studying, you are also in the tradition of economics and law.

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I am an economist who is very interested in the important foundations that law provides for economics.

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And in particular also how economics can inform kind of way law spontaneously arises.

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And so that's my interest is in kind of the foundations of law for economics.

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And what's the distinction between that and kind of the law and economics tradition proper?

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Well, a lot of economics would be about the costume benefits kind of of analysis of laws.

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Um whereas I'm interested in what how law comes about, what does it mean and how does that provide support for undergird economics?

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You know, I think that comes through in the book a lot.

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So the property species mine, yours and the human mind.

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So what's the capsule version?

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Well, my thesis is on the first page of Chapter one is that property is a universal, a uniquely human custom.

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And every one of those words is important.

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I am speaking to biologists in the sense that um humans are the only species that have property, so name your other animal that you think might have property.

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I'm gonna argue that that's um different in a very important way from what humans are doing with things and what we would call property.

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But at the same time, I'm going to make, I want to argue that it's um it's a custom in the sense that we have to learn this and it could differ in its forms from society.

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So there's something universal to all human beings and only human beings, but the form it takes could be very different.

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And so the people who are concerned about that different cultures may not have property or some.

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So I'm arguing you will have it, but in every society will will use it in some way.

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But what things count as property and how you go about looking at property could be very, very different.

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And that set of things can be very small for some people and some groups of people are very large for others.

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I feel like any time I've ever heard someone claim that some human societies don't have property, it seems to boil down to something much more narrow like that.

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They don't practice widespread land ownership.

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If you drill down to personal artifacts and tools and things like that, does are there any cyr sociologists or anthropologists that would claim that some human societies don't have property norms now and that is distinction.

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I think there's a modern sense where we think property and the first thing we think about is land or buildings and then we think, well not everyone has property in land and that's true.

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And so right, if you drill down to tools, then I'm pretty sure people are not going to disagree that, oh, human societies have property in some tools and is that just, is that just an artifact of the the fact that land is not valuable in this.

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Like we don't have many property norms in like air or the ocean.

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Maybe we have some, but it's it doesn't play the same economic role for us as you could imagine.

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A seafaring society where it did or an air faring society where it did and hunter gatherers that are nomadic are gonna see land differently than a settled civilization.

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Yeah, exactly.

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It depends on what the people do and what their resources and and where they live and so that's what the problem that needs to be proper property is a problem that needs to be solved locally.

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And so that's why if you're a hunter gatherer society, you're not gonna stay place in land.

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There's no reason to to make claims and property in the same way you mentioned your your thesis and like you said, every word in there is um carefully chosen, I just was wondering if we could kind of go through bit by bit and dive into it in a little bit more detail but but to start with it's probably worth saying what you mean by property because you you have someone, you know it's obviously there is something common with the way you talk about property in the way other people talk about it, but you take a particular approach in your book.

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So I mean that it is someone can say about something, this is mine, that no one else can say that this thing is mine and other people can know that what I say about this thing is true.

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So it's a speech act kind of from beginning to end.

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And it involves then when people can say that and not say those kind of make those kind of claims.

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And so is you also have to learn that then from each generation.

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And so I can I learn from when I'm a kid that when I go to a grocery store, I can't pick something off the shelf and call it mine.

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Um and that's what I internalize that feedback from from parents.

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And then we learn when we can make those claims and when we can't make those claims.

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So I'll derail us a little bit more and I think I have an idea of how you're going to respond to this.

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Um but what does it mean to say that something is mine or how how how would one know whether such a statement was true.

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So they they've learned from experience.

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So they've learned from their mentors when those circumstances are met and then there are people around them because they know that's true, that they would agree with them.

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And so part of that comes from understanding that there are things about which I can say this is mine and there are things about which you can say this is mine.

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And those two things are tied in the sense of that.

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If I want you to respect my claims and we're equals, you're gonna have to expect, I want to have to respect your claims.

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And so that's how we know um from experience, when those claims are true.

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If I was to say this thing is mine, it's gonna involve something like my intention to use something exclusively or a warning that I might tell you to stop it or defend its use or something like that.

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I was early on really influenced by Bob Ellison's work on whaling norms and understanding how property works.

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So whalers all know they're out in the open sea in, you know, in the 18th and 19th century.

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And so they all kind of a sense of how it works and they're gonna figure out making claims of who gets that particular whale when they're when they're hunting it.

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And so they if if your whaling off the coast of the north atlantic, the prey were right whales because they were the right whale to go hunting their baleen, they didn't sink when they died and they just, they floated, they swam to the surface.

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So they're just they're sitting ducks in to mix my metaphors of there.

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And so it's the first harpoon that got in the attached to the whale and attached to your boat, no one else went after it because they all recognize they're all a bunch of a whole bunch of whales out there.

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So we're just gonna take our, put our part poon in it and, and attached to the boat.

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And so that was, that worked well.

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But he noticed that when whaling moved off the coast of North America, the prey were different prey with sperm whales, which have teeth and they will fight back and they will even dive when they're harpooned and take the boat with them.

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And so they evolved the rule for determining who gets to claim a whale as as theirs.

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And that is if your harpoon was in the whale and attached to a drogue to keep it from diving and you were in pursuit of it.

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It was your whale.

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And so they learned that from the experience of what worked and didn't work.

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And they recognize that, um, that, oh well if you're respecting that whale is yours and you respect this one over here when I take this one as mine.

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And so it was basically to maintain the peace among this.

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So they can maximize their efforts towards collecting the whale oil.

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I just wanted to clarify what we're talking about when we talk about property.

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Sounds like there's a lot of diversity, but it involves saying something that's mine in a way that's reciprocal.

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You say that all humans have property in things.

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You mean it's found in every society or literally every human being in every society, there is some group of things, some set of things about which someone can say this is mine, and in every society, in every language, you can say this is mine.

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And it means the same thing in the sense of you can translate this into whatever language you want, and you can can translate mine into whatever language you want to convey that same basic state.

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There's no there's no difficulty in translating those concepts across any known language.

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Exactly.

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Uh, and so the language who have studied this and found it in, you know, very diverse languages and they're hypothesizing and I think they have good reason to believe that this would be true for all human language of all time.

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There wouldn't be any reason why that would not be the case.

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And so it's that ability to universally say this is mine, that you can communicate across any two individuals on the planet if you can find that way to communicate that.

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And so that's why I would argue all human beings have it.

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We have those, those prime abstract concepts, kind of built into who we are as a species that you can bring out at any time now, when and how you do that, that could be different.

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And that can lead to this.

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People not understanding that and having having misunderstandings of when you can make those claims.

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Uh, and that's the part that needs to be worked out, but you can communicate the idea of this is mine.

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And the question is whether people agree with you or not, only humans have property and things.

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So this is where you're butting up against maybe biologists or primatologists, animals use make use of simple tools or even sometimes compound tools, they make nests, they defend territory.

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So tell us why those aren't examples of property.

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So the temptation is in comparing humans and non humans is that we're gonna look at the same effects.

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So if you have a dog has a toy and it's in its mouth, you're trying to pull it out.

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They're gonna resist in the same way that any two year old who has their toy in their hand is going to resist trying to pull pulling it out.

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And that's and I'm arguing that's not property and the effect of what we want to resist being dispossessed, What are you is that we want to think about property in its origin.

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How is it that I think and perceive the world is different than I would argue any dog or any other non human things, and more importantly about the things about which we will do this.

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So when we make common claims of humans and non humans and property, and you look at territory, I know lots of animals have territory, humans have territory, but is that what is the foundation of property?

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I'd argue.

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No, because because we want to look at it at things basically moveable things and we do things in the world differently.

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Like I guess it's not quite showing up here with this blurry thing with like my phone and we perceive those things differently.

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And so I want to get away from looking at territory, looking at mates, you know, and it's true, you know, baboons have different harems and the males will not go after the females in another harem, presumably they did, it would create a fight.

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So they kind of recognize those females in in the biology language as property, but again, that's all built into their biology of how their social structures are organized and to recognize mates and not as our potential mates as ones that cause fights if I were to try to claim it.

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And also, lastly, food and food is, you know, you're in the moment you have your food, you want to defend, It makes you less fit if somebody tries to take it from you.

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So all of those things that marketing humans would also have as well.

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But what other non humans don't really about think about is things that persist into the future.

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And that is a tools of some sort that I've invested or like a spear taking, taking a shaft, putting a point gluing it together.

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So you have a have to have a handle for it.

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That is a different kind of thing that is not like food because it has a future because when I'm done it's still gonna be around for someone to use at another point in time.

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And that is what you don't see any other animals.

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Um So they may make make tools, but when the chimpanzee is done with its hammer and anvil tools and put it down, they could care less if another one picks it up and uses it.

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And same thing with any kind of these sticks, they're used to withdraw food.

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But we do something different when I have a spear and I made this thing and I put it down, I'm still going to have a claim to that in a way that when other people come up to it and that's different.

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Why?

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Because I argue we perceive the very thing itself as different.

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It's mine and that one over there is yours.

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I I understand, I think some of the examples you gave and why, why there's a pretty sharp distinction between human property customs.

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The main example is maybe the most morally fraught, but it seems like maybe the closest, I don't know if I'm fully understanding why that wouldn't be considered a property norm.

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Um you know, putting aside the obvious moral issues there.

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The important part is in the origins of thinking male property is that I abstract the thing itself with a particular quality.

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And so I don't need to be taught that a chimp or a baboon doesn't have to be taught that to recognize like another mate, another baboon says, look, don't go after the females in another harem.

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They don't have to learn that from there.

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It's built into simple cause and effect.

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Or just or just an instinct like you know, someone attacks me when I do that.

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If I go into this other baboons territory or try to take his mate, perceiving this made as part of a group or not part of the group is pure association.

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I'm arguing.

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Calling something property in humans is an abstract process that has this idea of the thing itself has a particular quality to it.

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So let me ask you this, what do you what do you think?

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What would it look like for a species to like start making those first timid steps into the world of property norms.

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So the key is you would have to have some kind of vocalization to distinguish.

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This is mine and that is yours.

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And so you would have it's a speech act that that that gives abstract properties to the very thing itself and all you have to do is basically say it.

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So or some some kind of doesn't have just like symbolic communication broadly.

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Right.

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Right.

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Right.

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And that.

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So what do I mean by that and compare it to?

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So like I a a mother bear and her cubs you come across it?

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She's gonna growl at you and in which case you're in trouble and she doesn't want you to get between two that cub but that growling is not telling me this is mine.

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That growling is a natural biological response of I'm protecting my young and I'm gonna try to scare you away or I'll attack you myself.

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That isn't making a claim of this is mine.

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But more importantly, no bear's gonna go around and say to me, this is yours.

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Yeah.

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And no, if that's what you would be looking for, another animal that reciprocal understanding that some things are mine and other things are yours.

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And so property is property because you have both of those things, you have to have mine and you have to have yours.

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I suppose you could have a proper species that had property, but in a very narrow sense, like maybe only shared with uh you know close kin networks.

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I mean, is that probably how property norms started in humans and like closer kin networks and then starting to expand outwards?

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Or I don't know this.

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I guess that's the bigger question is, you know, what are the what are the kind of paleolithic prerequisites for humans to gain this norm?

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You you said, you know, symbolic communication of some some kind.

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Um I guess having a, having a brain big enough to formulate that I don't know what else.

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Well, I I argue in the book that it's this idea of abstract thought is necessary to make to make that work.

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And so you when do you start seeing trade?

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You don't see starting trade until 100,000 years ago.

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Do you start seeing seashells moved and and things like tools being moved that are way too far from the coast on the point of origin for that to be, you know for the tribe to go grab it and take it back and right, I think it probably happens right around the same time.

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Right?

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So in the sense of once you get this abstract idea of of mine, it's not that hard to create yours.

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Uh because now you just say this, you can say this is yours.

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And so um so my you know abstract certainly came first because you also have this have to have this idea of true to the concept associated with words because property is uh its origins and oral claim.

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It's something that studying words and you have to be able to verify those words.

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But once you have true in that abstract sense then you can get to mine and then the properties off off to the races.

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And I agree it probably starts with the group.

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But how do you get groups to trade who don't even speak the same language?

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You have minds that I can understand the world in the same way.

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And there are many examples of groups of people who can't speak the same language but they can still trade.

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They the the stories of people coming with ships onto the shore putting stuff down.

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Yes.

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And then they move stuff around to agree on how much stuff they're putting into trade this this pile for that pile.

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Uh, and none of them have to say anything about.

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They're not actually putting into words, they're just implying.

200

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And we all know each other's thoughts that I can understand.

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This pile is gonna be yours and this pile is gonna be mine.

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Can you say something about why it would why the custom would arise just because we have the capacity?

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Well, so that gets into the questions of where the symbolic thought come from.

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And that's quite contentious among linguists about that, that theory, I am partial to the one that asked the question in terms of what would be the evolutionary pressures to get those first concepts that would be separate separated from the here and now.

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So from a pure association.

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So like you teach your dog things that it's all association, right thing, this thing to tie to that thing.

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And even some really smart dogs can you can utter out a new a new vocalization and they can pick out well, it must not be one of these things that must be the one that doesn't have a prior association.

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So, you know, there's but it's all in its group, still road associations.

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And so that is the pressure that somehow what can we do to get that?

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And so this linguist Derek Bickerton argues that food in humans is collected in thinking about things that are not right in front of your eyes, not right here right now, and there's really only three animals that we are for sure know.

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They communicate outside the here and now about food ants who lay little Farum trails, that kind of point you point the success of ants in the direction of where they get food and these who do a little uh dances, waggle dances to point the other bees in the direction of where to go get pollen.

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And so what is it in human history?

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That might be the sense of getting food that's outside right here right now.

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And his example is you go back two million years and you see prior to that early hominids going around knocking on bones and cracking them open to get the marrow inside.

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But big cats have gotten to it first and then the little hominids are breaking things open, so the claw marks are on on their first.

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But then something switches in some groups.

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You see that the hominids are getting to the bones first, and then the cats.

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Now the hominids don't have claws, they don't have big teeth.

219

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So somehow they're working together to keep these paths a way to get to these dead carcasses so they can scout him and his argument is well, in order to kind of convince your group to go in that direction, see the other dead card, because you have to be able to communicate ideas outside right here in front of you, Let's go around the hill over there, there's a dead one over there.

220

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And so that's his kind of theory of what would food searching for food outside the here and now, becoming your specialty would be that pressure to get those first concepts off the ground.

221

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The 4th chunk in your in your thesis that we brought up earlier is that property rests on custom, not rights.

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So the modern were really wants to explain property most things in terms of rights.

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And if you're looking up towards origins where properties can write, you have to go to something that's prior to, I would argue big, big political organizations, uh, millions of tens of thousands of people all trying to live together.

224

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That concept of rights has to somehow we want to go back and say, what is it about?

225

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All human beings, Even the ones who didn't have big polities who lived in groups of, you know, a few 1000 or a few 100 what kind of ideas would make property get off the ground there?

226

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And this is important because um, in non humans, again, anything dealing with stuff, um, can be socially taught.

227

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But most of the stuff that we think about property among the non humans is going to be instinctual, it's going to be built into their genes, but primates are the only kind of order of animals that tends to use tools a lot and very flexibly and tool use is going to be that I think the really the interesting way to get into why humans have property because primates teach the prior generation how to use tools.

228

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So there's that social part that I think is important to understanding custom that it has to be taught.

229

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And so um and lots of animals do this like, like dolphins will teach their calves how to go forage for food.

230

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And different dolphins groups do it differently.

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Um So it's not unique to teach young how to acquire stuff, but it is going to be important for what we call property.

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That what we do is we teach our young how not to get stuff and that's different.

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Yeah.

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So the dolphin doesn't teach them how not to, They only teach you how to.

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You.

236

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You talk a lot about it.

237

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Kids don't need to be taught to say this is mine.

238

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Give me that I had it.

239

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It's mine.

240

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It looks like mine.

241

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So it's mine.

242

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It's all the it's all the ways not to take things they have to learn.

243

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And it's abstract, right?

244

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So I have to learn the abstract when I can't take something well in a grocery store.

245

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I learned.

246

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No, I can't take stuff here.

247

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But I'm out on the sea shore.

248

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I can pick up the show and we learn that.

249

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Oh, these are whole totally different situations.

250

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Um One thing is a created thing.

251

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Another thing is just lying there in in in nature and and we learned those categories without being explicitly taught those things and we will we learn from our parents and oh, abstract things that people have made.

252

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Maybe I can't just take those things.

253

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So the language of rights is part of this, a semantic issue.

254

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I mean, you talk about the custom of property, predating large polities and governments and stuff.

255

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And certainly that's a common way that people use the word rights.

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But there's certainly a tradition that talks about rights as a moral category, not tied to.

257

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You know, the whole natural rights tradition is distinguishing between man made and God made laws.

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Some other kind of rights without taking a position on that.

259

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Do you do you object to that use of property rights as a term?

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Well, rights carries with it a whole lot of very Western ideals that I would argue might not be universal to all humankind.

261

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And so it could be as a concept in the West.

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We think about what people do is we set up writes about how to act and to not act, But I wouldn't argue that's how people universally would think about it.

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That if you're going to talk to the different groups of people in Australia, uh, different people in South America that they would think of it.

264

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They would have the notion of rights in the same way that we would and so, but what you would see this comment that every generation of humans are going to teach their young how not to get stuff and that's the common part.

265

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So I would argue rights builds on top of this customary way of thinking about property.

266

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Are those two things separable?

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Like on the one hand, what is anthropologically common to all peoples in the way they think and talk about property?

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And there's some answer to that question.

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And then I think the right question is maybe, you know, that's less than the domain of anthropology and moral philosophy and maybe it is Western, but certainly the people who espouse that are going to say, well, you know, tough luck it happens to be true.

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And I believe in universal human rights for this reason.

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Are you just saying, are you just not kind of weighing in on that question?

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Or or are you objecting to it in For some reason?

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I would object to people making claims that all human beings think about terms of um say for example right and wrong, because right and wrong carry with them a very anglo sense of how to think about the world right is different than good in the sense of you can also it can also be justified as good and wrong can be you can't justify it as good, whereas doing good and doing bad that can be universalized without this need to quote, justify it.

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And that's I think right and wrong is carries with it a presumption that it can be justified.

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We're not.

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You could see how not all human groups would need to have have to justify doing good and doing bad.

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Uh that that that that would be part of the concept.

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And so I so that's the sense I wanna I wanna I wanna make this claim of human universality.

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I need to be sensitive to all human groups and the abstract categories that they work with and not all of them are gonna work with rights and wrongs the right the west does.

280

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Can we back up a little bit about human evolution?

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You were talking about property developing?

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What's your best guess, looking at the fossil records and whatever about when property developed.

283

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And is there any sense that it might have developed independently in different hominid species or developed?

284

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Fell away and then redeveloped or almost developed.

285

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So I would I mean I went to the natural history museums um section on human ancestors and just the sheer number of different species that predates even homo.

286

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But if you know among homo genus homo the number of different ones is just amazing.

287

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Um I would not be surprised that you could get the core elements of abstract thought in more than just homo sapiens.

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Um And and I think the best evidence would be home.

289

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Ohio Bridge Insys because they are pretty good evidence that they are making compound tools.

290

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So they are making spears 400 to 500,000 years ago.

291

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And that requires taking this piece, taking a point gluing it together with the right kind of glue.

292

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Making glue doesn't, isn't easy.

293

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Some experimental anthropologists have gone through the process of trying to figure out how to make this glue and you can't just throw any sets of red ochre together to make the glue.

294

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It's got to be done particular Okra in a particular way with right temperatures which tells you there's a lot of teaching going on and a lot of and a lot of abstract ideas of sticky, right stickiness, all those kind of things in order to put together.

295

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So that means you have the possibility of kind of property ideas in their nations, nations, but it's not clear that that would be um, you would have the abstract category of mine yet.

296

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Um, and that might take, you know, fully symbolic human beings for that to come about.

297

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So I, I think that abstract notion of mine, the abstract notion of true the abstract notion of say I can say this is mine probably isn't any other species but prior homo homo SAPIEN, prior to homo sapiens, you had a lot of prominence doing all those compact compound tool things that gets it ready to go.

298

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Um, So I'm ready.

299

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I'm prepared to go back about 500,000 years because you see that beginning of compound thought compound tools and therefore you got abstract thought.

300

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But it's pretty well established.

301

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That group, full symbolic human beings is not going to come to at least 100,000 years.

302

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And that's right.

303

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At the same time we start seeing trade long distance trade.

304

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So the timing is quite coincidental.

305

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It seems to me like they might happen you know, in the big based on our time scales simultaneously.

306

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But it seems like property would have the property norms would have to come first in order to be able to say let's swap something.

307

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Uh but it might have come you know 1000 years earlier or what you gave this range 500,000 200,000 years ago is kind of where you're paying it probably.

308

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Yes.

309

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Yes.

310

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But your your intuition that I think is right in order to get and I think Adam smith recognized this.

311

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Uh he recognized that you don't see any other animals say this is mine, that yours and that the whole meaning of any he says give me that what you want and you shall have what I give me that which I want.

312

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You shall have what you want is the meaning of every such offer that implies.

313

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You say this is mine to this thing before and then I get to say it afterwards and vice versa for the thing we're trading.

314

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And so you got to have that notion of mine and yours before you get to the trade because what's true of most species is you either take it and you fight for it or you don't try, you don't you don't get into any you don't get any.

315

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The other thing.

316

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Well, another reason, it seems like it might need to be property would need to predate trade.

317

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Not just I mean, there's that reason, but beyond the concept of mine and yours wouldn't you also need to have at least the rudiments of social norms or institutions, not in terms of big states, but such that you would be confident that there's any point to trading that it's not just going to be taken right back to you from you or something like that.

318

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Well, and so there are many customs about setting up that basically we're at peace.

319

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We're not at war.

320

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And then after those customs, that's when they go to trade.

321

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And so it's and if you refuse to go to the custom, that's basically saying we're declaring war, there will be no trading.

322

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So The peaceful commerce thesis is a 500,000 years old.

323

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I think I would push that only back to homo sapiens.

324

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Um, but but you can imagine how long it's gonna take, even if you just start to get the first concepts detached from the here and now, how long it's gonna take before that gets extended to a new new abstract concept before you kind of get that whole portfolio to get trade off the ground.

325

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Now, I mean, we're also limited by stuff that survives.

326

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Right?

327

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And so when we say trade started 100,000 years ago, it's because the onyx doesn't break down and the seashells that have little holes in them, uh don't don't break down.

328

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Whereas food, all that stuff that we might have been trading kind of goes away doesn't make sense to think that because woodworking or things like that maybe is easier than stonework.

329

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That that that's definitely got to be an upper bound.

330

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There's got to be wooden tools or something that predate and obviously don't survive.

331

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Yeah, so like they're chewing handouts is famous because it doesn't change for like a million years and exactly.

332

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And then then it's slow change slightly and there's this innovation, but then it doesn't change.

333

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That also seems to be evidence.

334

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This is just like piles of them.

335

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So they're that those hominids are more like birds, they're just making nests because it's kind of this is built into what we do.

336

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And maybe there's a little bit of teaching from one generation about how to to shape, shape it.

337

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But really getting kind of um full fledged tools becoming property.

338

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You're probably not going to get that until you get to the compound tools that that take a special skill in attaching these things in three distinct pieces together.

339

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Your book made me think of property and property norms almost as like this mystical magic trick that the human species was able to pull off like animals, all animals and plants for that matter have to incorporate the material of their environment to to live and thrive in in any sense, through food or nutrition or something.

340

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And they use, you know, they use food and other materials or small tools to kind of expand themselves or to uh you know, make their the ongoing project of their life more complex and grand.

341

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And then through our mental faculties were able to kind of extend that trick beyond the limits of our physical body and through some mutual understanding that's able to get pretty extensive because if if, you know, humans didn't mutually respect each other's ability to do that, you would, I don't know at most just have tiny little tribes or bright hermits who occasionally made hand ax.

342

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But it's obviously gone so much further than that, I don't know, do you think about property at all those or is that two grand?

343

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I think part of what drove me to write the book was I think it's very mystical and magical the way that kind of, I'll just think about it like that all these other animals are just a little bit different than human beings, then how is it that we get trade of things?

344

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Like there's we're the only species that trades one thing for another thing routinely.

345

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That's uh matt Ridley's hypothesis.

346

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That's adam smith's hypothesis?

347

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And and and so how is it that you get to that when I work with primatologist, they have tried their hardest to get chimpanzees to trade stuff and they won't.

348

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And they know that they surprised me.

349

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I when I read that in your book, I've wondered about that often.

350

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Why don't, you know, has no one ever tried little experiments on an island to get a culture of bonobos or something to make fire or to to, you know, do very simple, primitive civilisational things.

351

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And I'm sure they have, they can't get the and I and I what's the explanation?

352

00:43:56.240 --> 00:44:04.990

Because they don't think outside the here and now they can only be right here in the present and to get trade off the ground.

353

00:44:04.990 --> 00:44:10.340

You have to think about the future and think about the world after the stuff has been traded.

354

00:44:11.160 --> 00:44:14.260

You have to think about it, this thing is out of mind.

355

00:44:14.270 --> 00:44:16.940

I don't call this mind and now you call it yours.

356

00:44:16.950 --> 00:44:19.120

And I call the other thing mine.

357

00:44:19.120 --> 00:44:25.090

And we have to get over being right here wanting to satisfy what I want right now.

358

00:44:25.100 --> 00:44:26.980

And that's a huge leap.

359

00:44:26.990 --> 00:44:36.260

And so I think symbolic thought is that spark that no longer makes it magical uh that we can do this.

360

00:44:36.270 --> 00:44:50.420

Um And that's I think that's what's missed when we try to say, oh yeah, every all these other animals have property too, but that misses the very amazing things that we do with things and we do it so easily.

361

00:44:50.430 --> 00:44:53.120

And our Children pick it up so quickly.

362

00:44:53.600 --> 00:44:57.520

The three kind of phrases you use frequently as like the core of property.

363

00:44:57.520 --> 00:44:59.830

I can say about this thing that it's mine.

364

00:44:59.840 --> 00:45:03.960

Other people know that it's true and no one else can say that it's mine.

365

00:45:03.970 --> 00:45:07.860

I feel like there's a, there's 1/4 phrase that I hear sometimes tell me where it fits in.

366

00:45:07.870 --> 00:45:13.000

When I say that something's mine, other people understand it is right, that it is mine.

367

00:45:13.010 --> 00:45:16.760

Is that the same thing as them understanding knowing that it's true.

368

00:45:16.770 --> 00:45:17.790

Do you mean by right?

369

00:45:17.790 --> 00:45:19.710

You mean correct or do you mean moral?

370

00:45:19.720 --> 00:45:26.150

So the fourth part is, is how it gets implemented.

371

00:45:26.160 --> 00:45:33.910

So, so when I make the claim and other people can know it's true.

372

00:45:33.920 --> 00:45:39.920

Um, the kind of moral evaluation about that comes secondary.

373

00:45:39.930 --> 00:45:53.700

So my point is all those three components have to come first and then within your community based upon the thing itself and the context, we're now gonna make moral judgments about those claims as well.

374

00:45:54.360 --> 00:46:04.500

That was that's a good lead into my next question was if I say about something, this thing is mine, how do I or anyone know if I have good reasons to say that?

375

00:46:04.510 --> 00:46:08.520

And is there anything some somewhat general you can say about that?

376

00:46:08.530 --> 00:46:26.760

Or is that too philosophical of a question now, how do we know, um, that's what makes property accustomed it has, it has to be taught to us and we've accumulated those, um, those reasons from our history.

377

00:46:26.770 --> 00:46:37.990

Uh we we've we've learned it from our parents, we've learned it from going on the school school grounds with learning how to settle conflicts there with, with people our own age.

378

00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:47.790

But we have it in our experience is how to when we consider it to be morally good and when it is morally wrong.

379

00:46:48.620 --> 00:46:59.420

And so it has to be taught and, and but also it means it's flexible so that when we find some new situation, we can apply the concept there.

380

00:46:59.820 --> 00:47:01.700

Well, let me, let me put it a different way.

381

00:47:01.710 --> 00:47:04.370

Your book is very, very multidisciplinary.

382

00:47:04.380 --> 00:47:05.370

It's very impressive.

383

00:47:05.370 --> 00:47:08.540

And it gave me a headache thinking about what you had to go through.

384

00:47:08.550 --> 00:47:15.680

You tend to take a light touch in terms of moralizing or or making grand like moral underpinnings of property.

385

00:47:15.690 --> 00:47:28.950

You kind of gesture at the douglases Douglas Rasmussen and then oil as as maybe representing morally how you think about property or what it is or how it's justified or what it does.

386

00:47:28.960 --> 00:47:30.350

Maybe that's kind of what I'm getting at.

387

00:47:30.350 --> 00:47:39.750

Like what what are the customs or the history, you know, pointing towards in terms of giving us good reasons to favor some property norms over others.

388

00:47:39.760 --> 00:47:42.450

Well, I want people.

389

00:47:42.460 --> 00:48:00.020

So I think there are people who are suspect of property that somehow there's something suspicious about it that I wanna, I wanna if we think about it biologically, we think about it in terms of human universals that could put people at ease.

390

00:48:00.020 --> 00:48:14.520

That there's something that that that that there's been some deep history and value to this idea, but also that just because the property doesn't mean what we do with it in the name of property is morally good.

391

00:48:15.150 --> 00:48:19.990

And and so I so I will leave it.

392

00:48:20.000 --> 00:48:27.420

I kind of want to leave the idea of when we and how we make these moral claims about property is a different project that I want to.

393

00:48:27.430 --> 00:48:36.450

I want to figure out how where it comes from and and give a story a synthetic story that reaches beyond what how people currently think about it.

394

00:48:36.960 --> 00:48:47.520

Um but then leave it to particular circumstances when we make these claims to how we would evaluate it as morally good application of property or not.

395

00:48:47.530 --> 00:49:01.310

I think I found your book because I was looking for someone to to make a modern more empirical and grounded in current scientific understanding attempt at john locke's project in describing and grounding the nature of property.

396

00:49:01.320 --> 00:49:04.260

You know, I hope it's not blowing too much smoke to say.

397

00:49:04.260 --> 00:49:05.080

I was very happy.

398

00:49:05.080 --> 00:49:05.640

What I found.

399

00:49:05.640 --> 00:49:07.680

You are you are you the modern john locke?

400

00:49:07.680 --> 00:49:16.560

And are there other people engaging in this kind of project surprisingly difficult to find a book that answered or tried to explore this question.

401

00:49:16.570 --> 00:49:19.430

I don't know, in both the philosophical and scientific way.

402

00:49:19.440 --> 00:49:21.730

Well, that's what I enjoy doing.

403

00:49:21.730 --> 00:49:26.380

I actually kind of tying back to how we started the conversation as experimentalist.

404

00:49:26.390 --> 00:49:31.220

I ran this experiment and I thought it was about property rights.

405

00:49:31.230 --> 00:49:33.340

And I was surprised about what happened.

406

00:49:33.340 --> 00:49:39.850

And I said, well, how can philosophy maybe help me make sense of what I'm seeing in my experiments?

407

00:49:39.860 --> 00:49:48.360

And so I really was thinking, philosophy gives you these basic ideas of how things work.

408

00:49:48.370 --> 00:49:50.830

And I want to tie to what am I observing?

409

00:49:50.840 --> 00:49:52.260

What are the facts on the ground?

410

00:49:52.260 --> 00:49:54.770

And can I organize those things together?

411

00:49:55.420 --> 00:49:59.070

And so that I think that's different.

412

00:49:59.070 --> 00:50:03.830

I don't think philosophers are feel constrained by facts sometimes.

413

00:50:03.840 --> 00:50:06.620

And I want to give them a few facts to be constrained by.

414

00:50:06.630 --> 00:50:14.800

But I also think that um economists particularly about the facts, we think about property are too philosophically free.

415

00:50:14.810 --> 00:50:21.180

Um and we need to we need to get a little more rigorous about thinking about it in that way.

416

00:50:21.190 --> 00:50:24.670

So, um yeah, I was directed.

417

00:50:24.680 --> 00:50:30.160

I mean once I but I thought I needed to look at some philosophical background property.

418

00:50:30.170 --> 00:50:36.780

Of course luck is one that everyone starts with, everyone knows if you're going to get any introduction to property, you get lock.

419

00:50:36.790 --> 00:50:38.340

Um so I had to read that.

420

00:50:39.370 --> 00:50:46.600

And it seemed at that there's an intuition too about how he works.

421

00:50:46.600 --> 00:50:48.510

That seems to work really broadly.

422

00:50:48.520 --> 00:51:05.620

And so all the I guess that's been suspect, you know, they're famous uh philosophers and legal scholars who make fun of him for what he's doing there, but there's but you talk to anyone and you talk what is Locke's theory of property and you tell them they're like, oh, that makes sense.

423

00:51:06.000 --> 00:51:11.840

There's something intuitive about working with, something that people say, yeah, that's that's property.

424

00:51:11.850 --> 00:51:21.180

Um, and I wanted to give some kind of deeper psychological understanding of how how that connection works.

425

00:51:21.190 --> 00:51:23.620

And so it's not kind of labor mixing it.

426

00:51:23.620 --> 00:51:25.870

I think I can go back further in time.

427

00:51:25.870 --> 00:51:37.040

It's not just labor, it's um, it's this abstract idea of mine that gets put inside the thing that gets at what luck is talking about.

428

00:51:37.050 --> 00:51:47.570

What's the weakest part of your argument and what keeps you up at night about your book about that you feel like could be a little stronger or where there are objections that you wish you had a better pithier come back for?

429

00:51:47.580 --> 00:51:58.970

Well, I don't have good evidence beyond kind of anglo latin and french, which I don't know any french.

430

00:51:58.970 --> 00:52:11.320

But kind of just what I read about it, basically Western evidence of how people talk about things that they put property inside the thing in their, in their, in their minds.

431

00:52:11.330 --> 00:52:38.080

Uh, I think it really, I really could now, I've had some hints of people have told me that, oh yeah, if you look at the particles and Japanese, they're doing that same kind of work, but I, so I think it really could use more of um looking at languages outside the ones that I know and and looked at that could flesh these ideas out now.

432

00:52:38.090 --> 00:52:40.960

So that's kind of a major concern.

433

00:52:40.960 --> 00:52:42.060

I want to have it now.

434

00:52:42.070 --> 00:52:52.410

I think I talked about the book, there's a little bit of an out that when I say if property is custom and it's conventional ized, it could be conventional Isan language differently.

435

00:52:52.420 --> 00:52:59.670

And so that doesn't mean that you're gonna be directly seeing the, in this, in the language of every human community.

436

00:52:59.680 --> 00:53:06.450

You're talking about the old english practice of saying, you know, I have a property in something that's how john locke talks about it.

437

00:53:06.610 --> 00:53:23.640

So you might not find the in this in every single language, but I think you still should have some sense of how people work with stuff um, to get a sense that they think of it being contained um, in the thing, but I don't know that, I've only gone so far with that.

438

00:53:23.640 --> 00:53:25.420

So I think that's a, that's a week.

439

00:53:25.430 --> 00:53:28.390

It's something that's really open.

440

00:53:28.550 --> 00:53:34.540

I don't know if you're familiar with David Friedman with his book legal system is very different from ours.

441

00:53:34.550 --> 00:53:47.660

It's, it's reminding me of some, some, somewhat of what you're talking about, It might have some bearing on that each chapter is kind of a review of a different legal system wildly different from like the anglo american one that could have some bearing, he's a law and Ikan guy.

442

00:53:48.040 --> 00:53:49.940

I think we should wrap up here in just a second.

443

00:53:49.940 --> 00:54:39.400

But I wanted to ask if you have any recommendations for a book and author an article that you think sheds light on this topic in addition to your own if you're interested in kind of because we talked a little bit about anglo centric thinking in science, I would recommend um Anna where's Becca's book imprisoned by english or or she has another word book called um I can't remember the title now but so if you're interested in just how as english becomes the language of science, we tend to want to think through the world through Anglo ideas.

444

00:54:39.410 --> 00:54:50.320

And she gives us pause to think about how can we universalize what our scientific inquiry is to not just be a western way of thinking about things.

445

00:54:50.320 --> 00:54:56.960

Because those concepts come with a whole lot of other ideals that we take for granted as I mentioned with right and wrong.

446

00:54:56.970 --> 00:55:00.610

And so in her, in her book english an english customs.

447

00:55:00.620 --> 00:55:05.560

Um she talks about fair and I think that would be the one that people might be interested in.

448

00:55:05.570 --> 00:55:11.960

How you can't translate the concept of fair 1 to 1 into any other language.

449

00:55:11.970 --> 00:55:32.810

Uh so and so she's saying, look that doesn't mean that other societies can't think with the concept of fair, but there that means we have an opportunity to understand what is the, what is the constellation of ideas all around fairness that make it unique from justice or equality.

450

00:55:32.820 --> 00:55:38.430

And so I she that kind of work I think would be very interesting there.

451

00:55:38.440 --> 00:56:02.120

I can also send there was a law professor at indiana um just had a, he's very much interested in kind of kind of language of, we apply these concepts of property to now ideas and how we can do that beyond just physical things and and I thought that was real intriguing.

452

00:56:02.120 --> 00:56:06.760

It just came out in the law review, but I can't remember where it is, but I can, I'll find those things.

453

00:56:06.770 --> 00:56:08.390

What's, what's next for you?

454

00:56:08.390 --> 00:56:11.070

Are you working on any new projects?

455

00:56:11.460 --> 00:56:21.020

I am interested in kind of a sequel to this book and my prior book with vernon smith called human ah mix moral sentiments and the wealth of nations for the 21st century.

456

00:56:21.030 --> 00:56:39.050

A sequel to both of these books in the sense of I want to expand how we understand economics through conduct, which it means it's not just behavior, but there's actual moral valuations about what we do and how to understand those things.

457

00:56:39.590 --> 00:56:54.310

And and so I want to make basically our actions, both the cause and effect of why we do them and do that in a I want to try to do in a rigorous way and also a way that is universally human.

458

00:56:54.320 --> 00:57:06.390

So I want to take these ideas that are concepts that in every human society and then build how we deal with conduct in how we on and how we interact with each other.

459

00:57:06.400 --> 00:57:09.200

So it's my kind of broad idea.

460

00:57:09.210 --> 00:57:16.560

I'm kind of spending this semester flushing it out trying to get more specific, so probably too early to put a timeline on that.

461

00:57:16.570 --> 00:57:21.330

Oh yeah, yeah, I I still need to have the the core idea yet.

462

00:57:21.340 --> 00:57:34.120

I just know that I I have related books I want to use um john Searles book about how making sense of of social institutions.

463

00:57:34.130 --> 00:57:46.370

I wanna, there's a book called David Haig's from Darwin to Derrida where he he looks at how much molecular geneticist and evolutionary biologist can't talk to each other, they really don't like each other.

464

00:57:46.370 --> 00:57:52.440

And then he's proposing a solution uh an evolutionary model that helps us understand that.

465

00:57:52.440 --> 00:58:07.990

I want to apply that basically to conduct in humans and use that same kind of model and kind of put that together in a way that I can then I think augment the way we think about game theory, which I think is a little too narrow.

466

00:58:08.000 --> 00:58:25.900

Um but also think about how we have purposes uh in life that seems to be left out of economics, you wanna say where people can find you, I'm I'm on twitter at Bart Wilson and my website is Bart J Wilson dot com awesome.

467

00:58:25.910 --> 00:58:27.920

Bart thanks so much for coming on and talking to me.

468

00:58:27.920 --> 00:58:28.660

It was a pleasure.

469

00:58:28.670 --> 00:58:30.200

Thank you for having me.

470

00:58:30.200 --> 00:58:31.010

It's been fun.

471

00:58:32.240 --> 00:58:33.250

That's Bart Wilson.

472

00:58:33.250 --> 00:58:36.970

His book is the property Species, Mind yours and the human mind.

473

00:58:36.980 --> 00:58:37.960

It's an amazing book.

474

00:58:37.970 --> 00:58:38.530

Please buy it.

475

00:58:38.530 --> 00:58:39.410

Please read it.

476

00:58:39.420 --> 00:58:48.260

If you like the show, please subscribe on Apple podcasts or Spotify to ideas having sex and follow on twitter at ideas having sex.

477

00:58:48.270 --> 00:58:49.520

That's with two X's.

478

00:58:49.530 --> 00:58:51.610

I'm chris Kaufman, Thank you for listening.