What’s the actual proposition here? just “Yay private property!”, or something more specific like “perpetual inheritable private land and physical capital exclusivity rights to individuals are better than time-limited non-transferrable power structures”?
Personally, I don’t follow the personal property vs capital distinction—the continuum from one’s body to one’s training/knowledge to one’s access to tools to one’s creativity to one’s ability to coordinate (and to be coordinated with) to larger shared tools and resources to larger coordination of people and resources seems pretty smooth to me. Private property is pretty fundamental in my mind, and I don’t see a sane alternative.
But that doesn’t keep me from thinking that our current societies have gone too far in legal and cultural protection of large-scale ownership, accumulation over long periods, and directed transfer based on personal relationships. All of these aspects can be tuned without breaking the fundamentals of private ownership of things.
My original Facebook post was just saying something like “yay private property” and expressing some dismay at how popular “boo private property” has become among some of my Facebook friends, and that I think the “boo” camp seems to be making arguments that are so far removed from the “yay” side that there’s not really a way to object or make a case for “yay”, sort of like people just have different intuitions about what property is that makes it very hard to do anything other than talk past each other. That points to needing a way to explain the basic intuition for why we should even have private property, strange as that may seem.
I agree that I don’t see a real distinction between personal and private/capital property. On the one hand I feel like this is an after-the-fact categorical distinction created to deal with intuitive objections people have to abolishing private property. On the other I feel like it’s an attempt to rehabilitate a forager notion of what property is private vs. communal, i.e. whatever you can carry on your back is yours, whatever you can’t is shared.
Ah, yeah. I generally ignore the yay/boo crowd. If I did want to respond, I would probably reject their category of “private property” as not cutting reality at the joint. In most cases where I have had a real discussion, the steelman is about perpetual residual ownership of very-long-term assets, and generational transfers of large quantities of such ownership.
I have a much harder time supporting “yay dynasties”.
Seriously? Seems horrible to me—even more problematic than other perpetual exclusivity of capital. It has all the problems of accumulation over time and failure to (re)distribute in the far future based on need/use, and additionally limits even the “owner” from efficient use or disposition.
So it’s a little hard to say, because most of the historical evidence we have of them has them is situations where they’re the only stable property rights, and so likely they were over-utilized. It also seems inflexible in important ways, and so I’m more of a fan of the modern American system of trusts.
But the central premise—that rather than willing your property to people, you could will it to a purpose—seems pretty great, once you’ve incorporated the lesson of lost purposes, and so can write a will that will fail gracefully with time.
I think prioritizing wishes of the dead over the those of the living is egregiously wrong.
And, like all such things, context matters so much—the root question (for all of this post’s topic) is “compared to what?”. It’s possible this was more effective than available alternatives (state or bandit seizure of the property), and possible that it happened at a scale where it was fairly efficient use of the property for a long-ish period of time.
Uh, does this also involve 2-boxing in Transparent Newcomb’s Problem?
I honestly don’t know—a huge amount depends on context and whether my brain can actually deal with the implication of perfect prediction. Omega technology doesn’t exist and may or may not be possible.
In other words, yes. If Omega predicted today-me, I don’t think I’d get to actually test it—there would only be $1k on one box and the other would be empty. A different me in an imaginary universe where Omega was possible and well-known enough for me to not fight the hypothetical, might be able to believe the setup, and therefore one-box.
Does your jump to this topic imply that you believe human ancestors have Omega-like prediction powers and I should apply reverse-causality to their wishes?
Lacking a source to support the claim but I am very confident in the statement here, that sound very similar to the critique James Buchanan (Public Choice economist) made of Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom. Basically the machine can work as long as everyone has the same understanding of property rights. Once that assumption is lost the machine is broke.
What’s the actual proposition here? just “Yay private property!”, or something more specific like “perpetual inheritable private land and physical capital exclusivity rights to individuals are better than time-limited non-transferrable power structures”?
Personally, I don’t follow the personal property vs capital distinction—the continuum from one’s body to one’s training/knowledge to one’s access to tools to one’s creativity to one’s ability to coordinate (and to be coordinated with) to larger shared tools and resources to larger coordination of people and resources seems pretty smooth to me. Private property is pretty fundamental in my mind, and I don’t see a sane alternative.
But that doesn’t keep me from thinking that our current societies have gone too far in legal and cultural protection of large-scale ownership, accumulation over long periods, and directed transfer based on personal relationships. All of these aspects can be tuned without breaking the fundamentals of private ownership of things.
My original Facebook post was just saying something like “yay private property” and expressing some dismay at how popular “boo private property” has become among some of my Facebook friends, and that I think the “boo” camp seems to be making arguments that are so far removed from the “yay” side that there’s not really a way to object or make a case for “yay”, sort of like people just have different intuitions about what property is that makes it very hard to do anything other than talk past each other. That points to needing a way to explain the basic intuition for why we should even have private property, strange as that may seem.
I agree that I don’t see a real distinction between personal and private/capital property. On the one hand I feel like this is an after-the-fact categorical distinction created to deal with intuitive objections people have to abolishing private property. On the other I feel like it’s an attempt to rehabilitate a forager notion of what property is private vs. communal, i.e. whatever you can carry on your back is yours, whatever you can’t is shared.
Ah, yeah. I generally ignore the yay/boo crowd. If I did want to respond, I would probably reject their category of “private property” as not cutting reality at the joint. In most cases where I have had a real discussion, the steelman is about perpetual residual ownership of very-long-term assets, and generational transfers of large quantities of such ownership.
I have a much harder time supporting “yay dynasties”.
I don’t know, waqfs seem pretty great to me.
Seriously? Seems horrible to me—even more problematic than other perpetual exclusivity of capital. It has all the problems of accumulation over time and failure to (re)distribute in the far future based on need/use, and additionally limits even the “owner” from efficient use or disposition.
So it’s a little hard to say, because most of the historical evidence we have of them has them is situations where they’re the only stable property rights, and so likely they were over-utilized. It also seems inflexible in important ways, and so I’m more of a fan of the modern American system of trusts.
But the central premise—that rather than willing your property to people, you could will it to a purpose—seems pretty great, once you’ve incorporated the lesson of lost purposes, and so can write a will that will fail gracefully with time.
I think prioritizing wishes of the dead over the those of the living is egregiously wrong.
And, like all such things, context matters so much—the root question (for all of this post’s topic) is “compared to what?”. It’s possible this was more effective than available alternatives (state or bandit seizure of the property), and possible that it happened at a scale where it was fairly efficient use of the property for a long-ish period of time.
The narrowing circle in action!
Absolutely. Abandon all hope for a better past! I un-apologetically prioritize the future half of my light-cone.
Uh, does this also involve 2-boxing in Transparent Newcomb’s Problem?
I honestly don’t know—a huge amount depends on context and whether my brain can actually deal with the implication of perfect prediction. Omega technology doesn’t exist and may or may not be possible.
In other words, yes. If Omega predicted today-me, I don’t think I’d get to actually test it—there would only be $1k on one box and the other would be empty. A different me in an imaginary universe where Omega was possible and well-known enough for me to not fight the hypothetical, might be able to believe the setup, and therefore one-box.
Does your jump to this topic imply that you believe human ancestors have Omega-like prediction powers and I should apply reverse-causality to their wishes?
Lacking a source to support the claim but I am very confident in the statement here, that sound very similar to the critique James Buchanan (Public Choice economist) made of Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom. Basically the machine can work as long as everyone has the same understanding of property rights. Once that assumption is lost the machine is broke.