Bryan Caplan deems Herb Gintis’ “The Evolution of Private Property” one of the most fascinating articles he’s read in years.
Private property depends on the endowment effect — our tendency to value our stuff extra just because it’s ours — which is widespread in nature:
Among the many animal behaviorists who put this theory to the test, perhaps none is more elegant and unambiguous than Davies, who studied the speckled wood (Pararge aegeria), a butterfly found in the Wytham Woods, near Oxford, England. Territories for this butterfly are shafts of sunlight breaking through the tree canopy. Males occupying these spots enjoyed heightened mating success, and on average only 60% of males occupied the sunlit spots at any one time. A vacant spot was generally occupied within seconds, but an intruder on an already occupied spot was invariably driven away, even if the incumbent had occupied the spot only for a few seconds. When Davies “tricked” two butterflies into thinking each had occupied the sunny patch first, the contest between the two lasted, on average, ten times as long as the brief flurry that occurs when an incumbent chases off an intruder.
[...]
In general, the taking of an object held by another individual is a rare event in primate societies (Torii, 1974). A reasonable test of the respect for property in primates with a strong dominance hierarchy is the likelihood of a dominant individual refraining from taking an attractive object from a lower-ranking individual. In a study of hamadryas baboons (Papio hamadryas), for instance, Sigg and Falett (1985) hand a food-can to a subordinate who was allowed to manipulate and eat from it for 5 min before a dominant individual who had been watching from an adjacent cage was allowed to enter the subordinate’s cage. A “takeover” was defined as the rival taking possession of the can before 30 min had elapsed. They found that (a) males never took the food-can from other males; (b) dominant males took the can from subordinate females 2/3 of the time; (c) dominant females took the can from subordinate females 1/2 of the time. With females, closer inspection showed that when the difference in rank was one or two, females showed respect for the property of other females, but when the rank difference was three or greater, takeovers tended to occur.
[...]
Consider, for instance, the sparrows that built a nest in a vine in my garden. The location is choice, and the couple spent days preparing the structure. The nest is quite as valuable to another sparrow couple. Why does another couple not try to evict the first? If they are equally strong, and both value the territory equally, each has a 50% chance of winning the territorial battle.Why bother investing if one can simply steal (Hirshleifer, 1988)? Of course, if stealing were profitable, then there would be no nest building, and hence no sparrows, but that heightens rather than resolves the puzzle.
[...]
Long before they become acquainted with money, markets, bargaining and trade, children exhibit possessive behavior and recognize the property rights of others on the basis of incumbency. In one study (Bakeman and Brownlee, 1982), participant observers studied a group of 11 toddlers (12-24 months old) and a group of 13 preschoolers (40-48 months old) at a day care center. The observers found that each group was organized into a fairly consistent linear dominance hierarchy. They then cataloged possession episodes, defined as a situation in which a holder touched or held an object and a taker touched the object and attempted to remove it from the holder’s possession. Possession episodes averaged 11.7/h in the toddler group, and 5.4/h in the preschool group.
For each possession episode, the observers noted (a) whether the taker had been playing with the object within the previous 60 s (prior possession), (b) whether the holder resisted the take attempt (resistance), and (c) whether the take was successful (success). They found that success was strongly and about equally associated with both dominance and prior possession. They also found that resistance was associated mainly with dominance in the toddlers, and with prior possession in the preschoolers. They suggest that toddlers recognize possession as a basis for asserting control rights, but do not respect the same rights in others. The preschoolers, more than twice the age of the toddlers, use physical proximity both to justify their own claims and to respect the claims of others.
When I think of the evolution of private property, I think of David Friedman, who gave A Positive Account of Property Rights back in 1994:
We frequently observe behavior which looks like the claiming of rights and the recognition of rights in contexts where neither a moral nor a legal account seems relevant.
Consider, for example, Great Britain’s “right” to control Hong Kong, Kowloon, and the New Territories. It is difficult to explain Communist China’s willingness to respect that right on legal grounds, given that, from the Maoist standpoint, neither the government of Britain nor previous, non-communist governments with which it had signed agreements were entities entitled to any moral respect. It seems equally difficult to explain it on legal grounds, given the general weakness of international law and the fact that for part of the period in question Great Britain (as a member state of the United Nations) was at war with China. An alternative explanation — that the Chinese government believed that British occupation of Hong Kong was in its own interest — seems inconsistent with the Chinese failure to renew the lease on the New Territories, due to expire in 1997.
A second example is presented by the 1982 Falklands war. On the face of it, the clash looks like an attempted trespass repelled. Moral and legal accounts seem irrelevant, given the attitude of Argentina to the British claim. Yet the willingness of Britain to accept costs far out of proportion to the value of the prize being fought over is difficult to explain except on the theory that the British felt they were defending their property, which raises the question of what that concept means in such a context.
A further difficulty with moral accounts of rights, in particular of property rights, is the degree to which the property rights that people actually respect seem to depend on facts that are morally irrelevant. This difficulty presents itself in libertarian accounts of property as the problem of initial acquisition. It is far from clear even in principle how unowned resources such as land can become private property. Even if one accepts an account, such as that of Locke, of how initial acquisition might justly have occurred, that account provides little justification for the existing pattern of property rights, given the high probability that any piece of property has been unjustly seized at least once since it was first cleared. Yet billions of people, now and in the past, base much of their behavior on respect for property claims that seem either morally arbitrary or clearly unjust.
A further difficulty with legal accounts of rights is that they are to some degree circular. We observe that police will act in certain ways and that their action (and related actions by judges, juries, etc.) implies that certain people have certain rights. But the behavior of police is itself in part a consequence of rights — such as the right of the state to collect taxes and pay them to the police as wages and the property right that the police then have over the money they receive.
For all of these reasons, I believe it is worth attempting a positive account of rights — an account which is both amoral and alegal. In part I of this essay I present such an account — one in which rights, in particular property rights, are a consequence of strategic behavior and may exist with no moral or legal support. The account is presented both as an explanation of how rights could arise in a Hobbesian anarchy and as an explanation of the nature of rights as we observe them around us. In Part II I suggest ways in which something like the present structure of rights might have developed.
One puzzling feature of rights as we observe them is the degree to which the same conclusions seem to follow from very different assumptions. Thus roughly similar structures of rights can be and are deduced by libertarian philosophers trying to show what set of natural rights is just and by economists trying to show what set of legal rules would be efficient. And the structures of rights that they deduce seem similar to those observed in human behavior and embodied in the common law. In Part III of this essay I will try to suggest at least partial explanations for this triple coincidence — the apparent similarity between what is, what is just, and what is efficient.
Definitely read the whole thing.
