Heller, Michael, and James Salzman. _Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives_. First edition. New York: Doubleday, 2021. # Progressive Summary There are 6 main stories of ownership which people use to compete over scarce resources. An ownership story is like a remote control, which allows some people to guide the actions of others. Most of us think in terms of a binary on/off switch - either we own something or we don't. The authors suggest more nuanced metaphors - a dimmer switch, or a bundle of sticks. Having awareness of the ownership stories allows us to be more intentional in how we tackle big issues such as inequality and climate change. This book is an attempt to go upstream from economics and psychology (ie Freakanomis and Nudge), because those fields assume that ownership is already settled. # Key Points Most of what we own are things that other people sold or gave to us. But where did their ownership come from in the first place? It all comes down to a "first owner" asserting an ownership claim based on one of the following 6 stories: - First come, first served. (First in time) - Possession is nine-tenths of the law. (Possession) - You reap what you sow. (Labor) - My home is my castle. (Attachment) - Our bodies, our selves. (Self-ownership) - It's mine, because it's in my family. (Family) ## First in Time An ancient Roman law says, "Whoever is earlier in time is stronger in right." *Primogeniture* is the rule that inheritance goes to the first-born son. First-in-time was the principle that the colonial powers used to carve up the New World. ## Possession The idea behind possession is that the longer something remains in our possession, the stronger our claim on ownership of it. Possession + time = ownership. This seems to capture something deep in human psychology. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote back in 1897: "A thing which you have enjoyed and used as your own for a long time, whether property or an opinion, takes root in your being and cannot be torn away without your resenting the fact and trying to defend yourself, however you came by it. The law can ask no better justification than the deepest instincts of man." Examples of ownership through possession: - squatting ## Labor ## Attachment One of the most universal attachment rules, found in almost every culture, and dating back for thousands of years, is known as the law of increase, in which the owner of an animal also owns its offspring (yes, this is quite anthropocentric). This is probably because the maternity of an animal is more discoverable than paternity, and also because the chances of survival of a baby is better when it's kept near its mother. Every factor of ownership design points in the same direction. If newborn farm animals are the easiest case, then the boundaries of land ownership may be the hardest. This is because "all the variables of ownership design are in constant conflict." > In early America, wild-caught food was an important nutritional resource. So states favored labor and possession (I worked hard to gather those fiddleheads) over attachment (Those fiddleheads are mine because they’re attached to my land). That right to roam was the universal rule at America’s founding—a deliberate anti-aristocratic rebuke to England, which reserved rich hunting and foraging lands to large landholders and the Crown. > the invention of barbed wire in the late 1800s upended the meaning of landownership in America. Barbed wire was a cheap way to send a powerful message: It’s my land—and, by the way, the stuff on it is mine, too. Keep out! But people can climb barbed-wire fences or cut through them. So landowners pushed to change the law as well, using the attachment principle to create an invisible fence. > Attachment is a powerful core intuition for ownership. It’s the principle that translates an airplane boarding pass into my wedge of space; a land deed into control of my crops, trees, animals, wind, solar, water, oil, gas, and countless more resources. Through attachment, the owner of an existing thing—whether land, cow, or copyright—comes to own new things plausibly connected to the original. But why is this so? At the most basic level, we need straightforward rules that assign initial ownership of newly valuable resources. This helps keep people from fighting with each other too much in the scramble to claim the unowned. That’s true not just for calves and buried treasure but also for drone flyways and fracked oil. For newly emerging resources, we often lack any preexisting rule at all. Attachment often fills that vacuum, first in practice, then as a matter of law. > But is attachment fair? Often, no. That’s a big downside. As Merrill emphasizes, the principle “has built into its very operation a set of doctrines that mean the rich get richer.” Wealth concentration does not always result, but attachment tends in this direction. If we grant new resources to established owners, there can be a multiplier effect where “those who already have significant property continually get more.” ### Spratly Islands The Spratly Islands are a highly contested archipelago in the South China Sea. One of the oldest bodies of international law states that coastal states control a body of water that extends about 3 nautical miles off their coast. This is the *cannon shot rule*. The old law in Latin translates to "land's dominion ends where the range of weapons ends." After WWII, the US extended this further, and today coastal states can claim control over a range of 12 nautical miles from shore. Furthermore, there can be Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) for ocean resources up to 200 nautical miles away. Russia, Canana and other countries are trying to claim control over EEZs in the Arctic. On the high seas, beyond national control, resources are governed by *rule of capture*, and are vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. That's what happened to whales in the 1800s (decimation of whales is one reason why there was growing demand for land-based oil.) States now control over 90 percent of seafood through EEZs, but domestic fleets are still capable of overfishing. Because of the extended range of territory and EEZs, even barren atolls are worth fighting for. That's the reason why China, Vietnam and the Philippines are fighting over the Spratlys. China on the basis of ownership dating back two millenia (first in time), Vietnam because it has controlled it since the 17th century (possession), and the Philippines because of proximity (attachment). ## Self-Ownership ## Family # Comments Would be interesting to compare the ideas to: [[Reference Notes/The Elements of Justice]] --- This book helps to resolve issues that come up with the market economy. Does the gift economy operate by different rules? The key is in the following statement in the book: > Ownership rules pick winners and losers in every imaginable setting. This is the old paradigm of scarcity, which creates winners and losers. Can we actually imagine situations in which there are no winners and losers? --- This book also gives a lot of flesh to the idea that the central affliction of our times is separation. Blacks and Native Americans lost their land because of partitioning. The problem of ownership also arises once we conceive of ourselves as separate from everything else. For instance, the story of self-ownership begins to break down once we look at our bodies as ecologies of the non-human world. # Quotes ![[Reference Notes/Highlights/Books/Mine!#Highlights]]