TrueLife - Dr. Wilson - Navigating the symbolic pathway to property

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

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Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the True Life podcast. We are here with an amazing man. He has got a CV that's like a heavyweight champion. He is from Chapman University. he is, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself, Bart, let the people know where you're from and what you got going on.

I'm professor of economics and law and director of the Smith Institute for Politically Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University. And you've recently written a new book that I found amazing called The Property Species. And for those that people don't know, it starts at the cover. It's a beautiful book and it gets into everything property. Can you tell people a little bit about what made you decide to write this book? So I am an experimental economist by training, and so what that means is I build virtual models of the economy, and then I run undergraduates through the computer simulations in the laboratory, and based on the decisions they make, I pay them based on what they do. And so it depends on what they do and what everyone else in the experiment does. And so I had been working with some colleagues on building a model that would see how exchange and specialization grew from the ground up.

And we found that people are having trouble with it. It was it was it was it things are pretty poor. And so some of our colleagues in reviewing the work asked that well one of the reasons they're not trading as much is that you're not enforcing contracts. There's nothing in this virtual world it has produced stuff and they move it around and it in, from one house to one field and things like that, and there was no contract enforcement. But the other feature of this world was they could talk to each other, and we could read the transcripts,

and nothing they were talking about was talking about that problem. But the question raised, but we got us thinking, what are we taking from granted and assuming it's going on in this virtual world, this kind of virtual terrarium that we built? And we were taking for granted that people couldn't move stuff from other people's houses and fields to their own. And we kind of enforced that with the rules of the software.

So we thought, just kind of exploratory, well, what would happen if we got rid of that? What if we just allowed things to go anywhere? Anyone can move stuff from what we call a field to a house. Anyone can move from any field to another field or a house to a house. And as you might expect, though we didn't expect, things flew all over the place. Items were just moving around. there was no real stable possession. And that was true in about five of the six sessions. And so we were kind of, we were stumped. Part of what we do in economics is we're interested in seeing what it

takes to create wealth, to create people being better off by working together and cooperating. And that's pretty much what we do. And then we found this example where things were going the other direction. And these are with, you know, George Mason University undergraduates, which is where I was at the time. So they are civilized people, and yet the world they were in was not civilized. And so that was like, what's going on there? And we tried to give the mechanisms to help them. And so like if there's somebody who was one thief and the rest of them were all getting along, we gave the people the power to just shun that person, shun them away. Now we should be able to be it. The problem was you give them that power. They feel like, oh, I would have shut my self off from everyone. And so then the economy was poor because no one was trading with anyone. No one was stealing, but no, they also weren't trading. And so we tried different things like that to help them. And none of it worked. Either they, and what we finally realized is that some groups, a minority, like basically one and a half out of 12, were being successful, but we were spending all our time focusing on these ones that weren't and trying to understand that, as opposed to trying to understand, well, what made it work and these different groups? And that's got me into thinking, well, I want to understand how property works. What makes it work as opposed to why do I see the problems with it out there?

And that was, I started reading some philosophy that. I'm an economist. I wasn't a philosophy major as an undergrad. I was a math major as an undergrad. And so you have to read John Locke if you're going to study property in the Western world. And I also have been reading Adam Smith, so I read his contemporary David Hume. And that's when I realized that the language they were using to talk about how property comes about was always in terms of property, not property rights, which is the modern way it's talked about.

And economists, you know, in our principles books, we'll introduce property rights. and we'd say, well, the government enforces this, keep people from stealing so that I want to become a restaurateur. I want to write and sell music. But that didn't seem right to me in some way because, you know, people had to solve this problem long before there was a government saying, all right, you can't steal. And the other intuition was kids don't not steal things

because they're afraid of the government. They do it for another reason. So what's that connection from when you are a kid to when you become an adult? And then it has to have something going on there. And that's when I realized that this idea of rights was pretty much a modern, you know, large polity kind of concept. And that's how economics is organized around. But how we got there had to start somewhere much more humble.

And that was what I wanted to explore in the book. I think you did a great job. And it's always fascinating to me to see the way people use their linguistic ability to paint pictures. And I think that's what you did in the book. You did an excellent job of crossing multiple disciplines. I felt like I got to learn quite a bit about the philosophy of property rights, the behavior of property rights. And how the sine you in between those two is the linguistic and symbolic thinking. that that happens. And I really wish that, I got to be honest, when I first got the book, I thought, oh,

it's going to be an economist book and, you know, it's going to be about policy and this and that. And, you know, I couldn't be further from the truth. It was so beautiful

and so well done. And that's why I'm so excited to talk to you. I really think that you have hit a nerve and if the way you described it in your book, if people could read this and it could become part of the curriculum, I believe that everybody could have a,

much better understanding of property rights and whatnot. Now, the first argument, it seems to me, that you had to dismiss or that you thought of was, well, everybody has property. Squirrels have property. Crowes have property. Can you talk a little bit and maybe address that? Sure. So I work with a primatologists comparing undergraduates and chimpanzees and Reese's macaques and capuchy monkeys. And so, and I've been to a couple of biology conferences and I was and they ask, what am I working on? And I say, I'm interested in property. And then the conversation goes to, well, let's see.

Well, baboons have property. They organize as harems. And it seems that the males don't go after females in another harems, so they respect them as a property. And they keep listing all these examples. I learned about scrub jays. So they will hide their food in a cache. But if another scrub jay is watching,

as soon as the on-licker leaves, the scrubway digs it up and rehides it as if it's trying to protect it from that. And I think, okay, so they're saying property all over the place. I also work with and talk with friends in humanities, and they talk about how property is something that only some human beings have. It's a modern Western idea. And so there's these two parts of campus that have either properties all over the animal kingdom or only some people have it, and something's not right there.

So how do we make that work? And then, I mean, I'm a social scientist, so I'm going to go right down the middle of that, and I'm going to pull from both the humanities and the way they're thinking about it and the way from biology, but I'm going to make none of them happy. And that I'm going to argue that only human beings have property, no other animal does, and that what other animals are doing may look like the effect of what we see property in humans, but it's not the same origin. as what it is in humans.

And I'm also going to pull from the humanities and say, yes, it's very cultural. It is social. And in fact, it is socially transmitted from one generation to the next. And that is got to be an important part of the story of how it works with the biology of what makes humans special. Yeah, I found it interesting when you brought up the point that maybe there's not an exact linguistic roadmap, but everybody has this concept of mind, regardless of where you're from. from what color, regardless. Can you tell people a little bit of how you figured that out?

Well, so it was important for me to look for evidence that would be universal. If I'm gonna make this claim that all human beings have property, I gotta find some way of having some evidence of that. Now, there are anthropologists who have studied human societies from, you know, from timing memorial, and they have come to the conclusion

that all human groups have had property and tools, utensils, and ornaments. But I wanted, Is there something else? In particular, I was interested in how humans think about things in property, what would be those kind of remnants, and that would be in the language. And so I have been following this linguistics work by Professor Anna Weersbeck of in Australia. And she and her fellow linguistic scholars posit that the reason,

the way that what makes it possible for any two human beings to communicate on the planet is that there's got to be some core idea that they share, some concept that's in every human mind such that no matter what language you teach, you could somehow communicate with them. And so they posit then that every language would have these core concepts that when you reduce them and as they study them, you can't break them down any first. And so I came across her work in the mid-2000s, a linguistics professor when I was at George Mason University, gave me her book. And it was fascinating because she said, every human society has the concept of you. Every human society has the concept of I. Every human society has the concept of things. Every human society has the concept of doing something. And I thought, well, that's economics.

I got you, I, things, but there was nothing about property. Or at the time was that I would have said property rights. There's something missing here. Like, this is the core building blocks of economics, but they don't have kind of something being mine. And then literally like two weeks later, there's a brand new working papers you put out by chance where they're documenting that you could say this is mine in every language. so that this thing and mine, all three of those concepts, are semantically primitive and common to every single language. I said, all right, now we have the beginning of property,

because if I can say this is mine, and I can also say this is not mine, and you can say the same thing to me about something else, and now we have trade. And it started to click that we had to find a way to understand why human beings are the only species to trade one thing for another thing. So primates will trade favors for sex.

They'll trade food for sex. They'll trade doing things and then for stuff. But they don't trade some grapes for some apples. Some grapes for some carrots. They won't trade stuff. They won't trade tools. They don't do any of that. And why is that?

Why is that? And I worked with primatologists who tried really hard to get that. They know how. the animals like things and they know that they give it to another different animal and try to get them to move stuff around and they won't do it. And that's what I put the idea together. Well, whatever makes trade that observation possible might be tied this notion of having the concept of mine and its unique idea in humans that it's outside here and now. When I say this is mine, it's not just about right here right now. I'm talking about how I got to this point, I can make that claim. There are all these people around me who might back me up on that. And I'm also saying something for the future, so that you'll be leaving me alone to do what I want to do with this thing that I call mine. And that, and that is actually where most economists stop. They think of it as mine, but that's only half the story. In order for me, in my community, to be able to say that's mine, I also have to respect you when you call it.

say something is mine. Because when I make that claim this is mine, you're got to have the concept of yours. You have to have yours when you're thinking about me. And so yours is tied with mine just in how it works pragmatically on the ground. Unless I'm by myself, in which case, Robinson Crusoe doesn't need to have mine because there's no one else around. And so mine and yours work together, basically from that starting point. Also, if we're equals, and if I want you to respect my claims of this is mine, I'm going to have to

think of yours about things you claim as mine. And that means we can do a bunch of other things once we got that abstract system in place. And that's what's missing in other animals. Sure, they're going to fight their territory. They're going to

defend their mates. They're not going to let that food out of their mouth. But they don't say to you or any other species, that's yours. They may not get into a fight with you, but that's not saying that's yours. That's saying, I don't want to get beat up. Right. And that's different.

And I think a lot of times we want to slip and make that equivalent that when a bear is defending her cubs, that she's basically saying to this interloper, leave me alone. That's true. But the interloper is thinking, she's saying yours. That's a human way of trying to understand what non-humans are doing. And to make that case is I have to argue, and this is why the book, which is kind of named after this book called, I use the property species to follow in those footsteps of Terrence Deacon's book, The Property Species. The symbolic species.

Nice. And the symbolic part was it's important that he argues that no other animal has this idea of abstract. thought that transcends here and now. And that's what we try, when we try to argue that other animals have property, we're giving that same abstract idea and we're planning it in their mind of this other creature. And there's no evidence that they have that. Now, you can teach chimpanzees some basic symbolic thought, but they have to be young.

And they don't use it amongst themselves. They'll only use it with their captors. and things like that. But you could get the essence of that. But you're not going to get in any other primate beyond a chimpanzee. So Bonobos, sure, maybe they're going to find it in guerrillas if they really work at it or something like that. But it's not going to be outside primates. And there's nothing in the evidence of what other animals do that you can see them acting symbolically.

and I'll put it another way. They don't have the same sign having a different meaning. So when Lewis Carroll talks, tells the story of the mouse and the sad tale, like tail sounds exactly the same, but T-A-L-E and T-A-I-L-I-L are two different things. They point way different things in the world. And how do you know that? Those T-A-L-E is pointing to other things in the story in the sentence, and T-A-I-L is pointing to other things, and that's how you pull it out.

And so that's symbolic, that it's all upon the relationship of the words and the concepts that pull out the meaning of what you're interested in. And there's no evidence any other animals doing that. And that, I think, then gets us to getting trade off the ground. Because when I can think outside right here right now of this stuff, you have stuff. I have stuff. And I say, this is not mine, this is yours. I'm imagining a future that's not right here yet where this thing is in,

you call mine and something else I call mine. And that's a lot of work to get out of right here right now. And think about it, what your dog or any other animals, they're not leaving the presence. And they can't do it at will. Like I can at will think, oh, here's a situation. Let me train my phone for something over there. That kind of power is unique to abstract thought.

And if you think of all the other kind of amazing things that human beings can do, we have culture that accumulates, we have art, we have morality, we have creativity of redefining things and putting them together to make something new, those things, along with trade,

all have to have some common art or story, And that's when I saw that connection between property, economics and trade, and this idea of having abstract thought that this puts it all together. Because property is also moral. Like you, there's something in, it's a moral claim. It's not just a factual claim. This is mine. I'm also saying that if you go and do something that I don't want you to do, I'm going to be upset. That'll be an offense to me and I will call my buddies around me to defend me for that.

And so you got to work morality into this as well. And that's having an interpretation of an act that we give abstract meaning, doing something bad to me, doing something good to me, is an idea not just in the moment of defending my cubs, as a bear might do, but standing outside of that saying, it's not just here, not just now. this means something more and I'm drawing on past I'm drawing on human experience from that and I'm also thinking about the future

regarding it bears they're not thinking they're just thinking right here right now when you walk between them and their cups get away from the cub it's so fascinating like there's so much in there that you just said

and I want to come into you too on as you were speaking it really reminded me of you threw in some really nice segways into other books that you reference in your book. Like you talk about Lewis Carroll and then like one of my favorite books, Flatland, which gets us, that's such a great book. I wish more people would read it. But it gets us into what you were talking about, about moving freely through time. Right. If you have, want to trade and the word mine or thine can be from the past, our family owned it, or it's going to be mine in the future. Like this is, it's such an abstract thought. It's no wonder why with different cultures and different traditions, we see so many people quick to turn to violence on the topic of economics or trading or the guy with the spear that you talk about in your book or how the guy from Mars might see us there.

It also brought up the point that I thought was a fascinating story was the call from below. If we could just stay on this topic for one more second. could you explain to the people what the call from below is? So there are these vervet monkeys, and the field observers realized that the call that the vervent monkey make was different whether there was a predator that was coming from below, so there was a cat coming, or there was an eagle coming that would be coming from above,

or if it's a snake, in which case it could be any kind of on the same level as you, And so the response to those different threats are very different. So if there's a leopard coming from below, you run up as fast as you can. If it's an eagle, you've got to run down as fast as you can. And if it's a snake, you just freeze. And so they had a different sound, just like tail. They had tail and then they had quail. They had different sounds.

But they didn't have tail for both a hawk, or an eagle and a leopard because then you'd be doing the wrong thing in half the time. And so you have to have a distinct sound, a distinct sign to go with that particular threat. And so the threat in that case always depended on in having that specific stimulus. It's got to be an eagle if you're going to have a running down. It's got to be a leopard if you're going to be running up. And so, and you can imagine then if some reason all the leopards disappeared, you would never then hear that call ever again because there would be no reason to come in. They wouldn't be thinking about days of past of past leopards.

They only need it for the moment when the leopard's trying to eat them. And so it was a, as I call it an index. It's a pure pointer. You hear the sound from below and you read. up. It has a specific pointing in the, and it's pointing to the past because you've learned this as a

kid from all the other times as this has happened, and you now have it in the moment. But that's not the essence in language. And so it, so people want to say, oh look at verbit, monkeys have words. Like, no, their words just point to the world and that's

it. Our words point to other words. And then they go out to the world. And so the reference comes after the words are worked out within the relationships to each other. Because if you just have one word out there, tail. It's an abstract idea, but I have to have some other kind of words now in order to tell me if this is about a mouse's appendage or whether it's about a story. Yeah, it's a great point. Sometimes it makes me wonder, why is it that we, it seems, I hate to say this, but it seems that.

As we get older, we get lazy and we no longer want to manipulate the symbols for ourselves. We allow other people to manipulate those symbols and tell us what things are. I wish there was a way, like I wish there was a way to incorporate this type of thinking and language into the curriculum of kids today, which kind of fast-forns me a little bit into the, into the Klingon ship of Sapir Wharf. That was super funny, by the way. We should explain to people what I'm talking about. Can you flesh that out a little bit? So there was this idea that language determines how you can think.

So whatever the language you have, this is going to constrain how you as a human being thinks. And that's highly contested and debated. And I think what it misses is that and what the lit, the, the linguistics that I talked about in terms of semantic primes gets you around that is that you may, so I'll give an example. In English, we use the word fair all the time. That's not fair. This is fair. This is a fair deal. You can't translate fair one to one into any other language. Why? So other languages, there might be a few words that you could use. If you want to say fair and put it into French, you could use different words. You can use, I shouldn't pick a language that I'm not expert in here.

But so in Spanish, in all these romance languages, you can use basically a word for just or equal, equitable. And you can see how, depending on the context, one of those might be the use, use the word fair. But fair is separate. Fair has a connotation of being people on equal playing, equal levels. as opposed to just, which is about something above you. And so the idea is now that in English we use this word fair, has all these kind of concepts built into it. But just because no other language has it,

doesn't mean they can't think with that idea of fair. They're just going to pull another word and kind of make it do its work based upon the context. And so it's not the English language that makes me, us think about fairness. Any other speaker of a language can also have that idea. The language doesn't constrain me as an anglophone to have fairness and exclude other people. And so it's, that doesn't mean there aren't habits, though. And so because we think with fair a lot, that might come from a habit of being an anglophone. And one theory that's put out there is that

the kind of anglophone world is a world built upon games. And games have rules and games have umpires and things like that. And that fairness will come out of that. And in particular, fair came out of a sense of commerce. Originally the antonym to fair was not unfair. The original antonym to fair was foul. And that's baseball. That's cricket.

well, and then baseball. And that means crossing a line. So, and think of all the uses of fare. It generally comes down to that you can go so far and do some action, but at some point you cross a line and that's when it becomes foul, or now we call it unfair. But when that would be in commerce would be if you're going to somebody and they're putting something on the scale, but they've patted it.

See, that would be, that would be foul. That would be foul. And so a fair merchant is one who is not going to do that to you. And now fair has kind of evolved from that point to be more about outcomes as opposed to process. But originally it was all about process, about how you are going up to the plate. Everyone can go up to the plate. Now when you hit it, you got to make sure it's in the, within the field of play. Yeah, I think that's a nice segue into.

First off, I know nothing about property. When I read this book, I really felt like I learned a lot. And I think a lot of people, everybody should buy this book, the property species by Dr. Bart Wilson. I think you will learn a lot about property. And as we talk about language, I learned that there's a big difference between what's in property and what I have property in, in the different prepositions there. Can you talk to people a little bit about that? So the idea, I had to have an idea of how humans seem to have property, but yet tie it back to her.

our evolutionary past. And so the observation from anthropologists that every human society has property in tools was that key. And so how is it that, what happens when we make a tool? And so think about a cane and you close your eyes and you're tapping around and you hit the leg of the table. What you do is you feel the table leg. that's what you think you were feeling.

But what actually, if you want to break down what the sensational input is, it's the handle in your palm. You didn't actually feel the table. Your mind reorganized the sensory input so as if you are in the particular cane. I think that's true when you play sports. You know, you're feeling the ball through the bat. And so even the bad is a part of you. And so you are inside of it, but that means it only goes so far, right?

The cane goes so far in the world and outside, you're no longer in it anymore. So tie back to the abstract thought, if I put that tool down, but I was in it, but I can abstract it from here and now, I can still keep myself in that, I can think of myself of being inside that tool. And so that's how, I mean, I think that's how we integrate our feeling with the things that we do. We are inside the tool in some sense, our abstract's way of thinking about it. But I wanted to think, you know, is there evidence in our language about that? And it turns out that in, what is it, 13th century Latin, and that they started using a preposition in to talk about the concept. concepts around property. It was very much prevalent in the 1500s in English jurisprudence.

They talked about having property and a swan. And it sounds quaint to us. We get it. I even if you talked about property and tools, you get the context of it, but it's not the, it only seems to work in a certain small area and we get the idea, but it's like, why will we choose in? that little preposition is designed to give meaning to how the whole thing about property works that it only goes so far and then it stops with the and I argue it stops with the physical world and so if I have property in this mouse it goes anywhere in the mouse but nothing outside of it and so think about how we deal with animals so I grew up on a farm you know you have cattle you have a little mark on them. When that cow goes on to wander somewhere else, the neighbor can't just claim the cow.

The rules of domesticating animals are, I can still make a claim on that cow is mine. So wherever the cow went, my property went with the cow. The idea of my claiming, having a claim to it went with it. And so it seemed to be bounded by the cow. Now, what the cow started walking, I didn't get to claim all this land that the cow was walking on, because the cow is on it.

It stopped with the cow, only went as far as that being. And then think about it very naturally. This explains why when you own a cow and it gives birth to a calf, somebody else just can't come up and claim the calf. The property was in the cow. It's a part of the cow. And now the calf, which was a part of the cow, is also yours. You can claim it as mine.

It seems very natural to people. And I think very natural to kids and other people as well, that there's something going on with that inness. And I was looking to see where is that in the language? And maybe also where is that in disputes, property disputes over found items, you might see that kind of stuff. And it came out. As I, you know, have I explored all these other languages?

No. I think it would be worth pushing the boundaries to see how far what I'm saying goes here in other cultures. What kind of words would they put around those situations? Could you create situations and see if they test about property being contained within the thing? This could be refined, but I think it's a starting point. It's consistent going with the story of how we get tools that there's something here that might be common to all human groups of having it being physically contained in a chattel. Right. And then that goes for milk too and anything that comes out of the cow would be your purpose.

I actually wrote some stuff down that towards the end of the book, you talk about the scheduling patterns, the scheduling patterns and the property in the thing indirectly refers to the use of the thing in the external world through the property and thing involved in the custom. Like that little end word there, the custom, I think, can be tricky. Can you talk to people like what that particular part means? So this is the part where in humanities, when they're arguing it looks like properties different around the world, and I think they just go too far and say only some people have it. But the idea is that we all have the idea and the customer property, but the things and the set of things that can be applied to are going to be different. Why? Because they've been passed down from generation to generation differently.

They have lived in a different world with the different. social organizations. So Europeans had developed on the continent, farming, have land. They go over to this brand new area in North America and they come across these people and they're like, oh, I'll give you some money for this. Now, these Native Americans, they don't have any idea. They don't trade land. They don't own land. So they don't even know what the Europeans are doing. And the Europeans are thinking, well, this is what we've done. And so there was a gap there because Native Americans were not organized around stationary agriculture.

And so they were moving around. And so that they didn't have the same. The things that you could have property and were different. They were their tools, not land. And so that custom, it's a custom. It's a way the Native Americans have been living. it's the way the Europeans have been living. And think of it as in our kids.

They have to be taught what property is. They don't know the rules when they're born. They learn the word mine all on their own. And they will pick up something and claim it mine, even though no parent has taught them that. So that's the, I would argue, the kind of universal genetic part that's somehow in their brains are constructed in such a way

that the social world they live in will give them the concept mind. But they have to be taught when they can say that when they can't. And you teach them by telling them another abstract idea, no, no. And so that's the part that is important about custom, that it has to be taught, it has to be passed on from generation to generation,

and it's done in an abstract way. that's how not steal is abstract. Sometimes if you're dying and you're dying of food, of starvation, taking something is not theft. Right. It's self-preservation. But if I have plenty of stuff and I go off and want to take something,

that would be called stealing. And so it's an abstract idea that has to be learned how you would apply it on the ground in real time. It's like what also is, crazy abstract to me is the fact that we have people that can judge that you know what i mean like we've we've given these people okay you be the judge what's your background and the reason that i started thinking about that was i saw uh there's a great book called black elk speaks and it's about native americans and in that book the the the medicine man who's who's narrating it says

when the white man came to us he said he wants to buy the land we laughed at i'm like you can't buy the land the land owns belongs to everybody and That just got me thinking like, well, you know, they may have laughed, but what happened? We took the land. But what's to stop us from using the same set of rules and laws and abstract thought to someone buy in the air? Like to buy up the oxygen? Well, so, but you're constrained by how the actual physical world works in that sense. So, so are there's, well, there's many ways to go after that question.

Let me think about this. Let me go back to the core problem when the Europeans came to North America was they didn't treat them as equals. Oh, I see. Right? So they said there was a trade. They didn't. And then they used power to get what they want. Right.

And so there was a lack of empathy. There was a lack of seeing them as an us. They were the other. and that is you know think of in of history um that's the custom that has been passed down part so that has been part of when you can apply this and think about women they couldn't own things that was the custom we had to the custom can evolve though and that's the thing the important part of recognizing property is a custom it can change and as we decide that to include the we as being more and more people then

how it gets it worked out will be different and how we use power will be different. And so, yeah, the custom part is something that I think gives some people fear. Like, oh, no, it kind of can be arbitrary. It can mean that the custom can do bad by other people. But it also means we can, it's not fixed. We can become good. we can't there is a room for moral progress in order to how we use property so it's not the institution itself that's morally bad it's how we apply it and how we treat the other people in the use of it

that's a great way to put it it seems to me sometimes the instrument becomes an institution and then the institution becomes corrupted but if we just use it as an instrument it's neither good nor bad it's just an instrument of change i think that's a that's a great way thank you for getting that out there and explaining custom in a way that it's it's it's it's a difficult concept to kind of think about but if you just talk about it for a little bit it could really change the way people interact with each other and groups act with each other if we can just get to this level where we can see each other as not the other but as as as i don't know i'm kind of rammed a little bit but does that kind of make sense well and that's what you i mean that's what you have to have that

to really get trade off the ground right because otherwise i will just take what you have as opposed to I want to trade with you. And somehow I have to respect you in a way that I'm not going to try to take stuff. Or to recognize that maybe we both will be worse off if we try to fight over this. But I have to at some point treat you as an equal person in this transaction. And that's a beautiful thing, I think, about commerce is that it makes us equal. Now, does that mean we always are equal about it? We always treat it that way?

No, no. But I think it has that potential if we can just put ourselves in the shoes of the other people. Why would this be good for you if I'd go through this transaction? We think about it in those terms and I'm trying to do something good for you because I want you to do something good for me. Then we're going to be doing things for the right reason as opposed to how I can do it through power. we're in force. That brings us to the fast fish, loose fish, and the behaviors of which you were, you did some awesome investigating about the behaviors with Baller B and the old letter D over there. Can you tell people a little bit about that particular game and why it works

and what you learned? Well, so, a law professor, Bob Alexson from Yale University, have been looking at how property comes about and how the rules might differ over time and why they might differ. And so he went to looking at whaling because there's no country that runs the seat, police is the sea. And so, but somehow they're not always fighting.

So somehow all these people from different countries out there whaling at the same time are getting along. And so he noticed that the rule when they're hunting right whales off the North Atlantic. It's a baleen whale. It's called the right whale, R-I-G-H-T, because they don't have teeth. They don't sink when you kill them and they swim in large groups of northern surface. So they're the right ones to go after. And he noticed that if there's a harpoon in the whale and attached to a boat, no one went after the other whale. So that's, if the fish is held fast, then it's yours. But if you are incompetent, or maybe this one having to be

fighting a little bit more or whatever, and it gets away, then it's the loose fish is for anyone, free game for anyone to go after. And so that was the rule. But then when you looked at how whaling moved off the course of the North American Atlantic, the prey was different. They were sperm whales, which the males are large, they have teeth, they will dive. And so the custom seemed to be different. And he talked about how it evolved from fast fish, loose fish, to what they call iron holes the whale. You put the harpoon in the whale, you put a drug to it to kind of track it, just keep it from

diving and to be in the bay. And if you're in pursuit of it, it's your whale. And so the custom changed to fit the prey, to fit the people who are doing. doing the whaling, all those circumstances. So it's an example of how custom is important. It involves and it changes. So he says, he looks at economic history, looks at legal history, and he sees all this.

He says, well, but this is my story. This might be just a little too pat. And so that was, as an experimental economist, said, well, let me, see if I can do ex ante. Let me design a little world in a virtual world where people are moving after circles and they're trying to capture them. and they're going to attach a little a line to them and I want to see if they talk about it and the whales are moving around do they what kind of rules they adopt and fast fish loose fish is pretty natural

that they came up with with the slow whales and they attached to it and um and so they this was a way to minimize the conflict it was a way to make everyone better off now this is why whales were going to go extinct if we didn't discover oil because they had great rules about how to make sure they get as many whales as possible and so it's only when the discovery of oil basically in Pennsylvania that like had a different energy source that we no longer we needed to have whale oil in order to keep you know keep our cities lit at night but it's those rules that they come up with on the ground that somehow has to have a common connection as you as you mentioned earlier We have to understand the minds of these other people.

We have to understand that when I do this, they're going to read this situation. They're going to see it and interpret it the way I am interpreting it to be myself. And that is, I think that kind of abstraction is important to really get that off the ground. Yeah, it is, it's fascinating. Just the whole concept of like the, the abstract framework, I guess that's why there's not so many people that can do the things you're doing. You really have to understand the cross disciplines and the ability to build the frameworks.

Let me ask you this question. How do you go from the concept of whaling to building a model that people can play? What does that process look like? How do you build experimental models? That's fascinating. Well, so it was partly a response to the prior experiment. that I kind of opened with, kind of the house and the field and things moving all over the place, it was a very abstract in a world kind of setting, and then we didn't know what happened,

and then we couldn't figure out what's going on when we did see it. So I thought history is going to be guide for me. And if I built this world, and I can't find any fast fish, loose fish, and I'm doing something that's not capturing the essential elements of the natural occurring world in my virtual world. And I wanted to get that baseline, do what I needed to get that baseline, and then I could start asking other questions of it. So we had the circles moving around. I knew that was important like a whale moving.

I needed to have what happens if two people go after the same whale. I needed to build in the consequences of conflict. And so we made it really, it was pretty. So if two went after it, they lost half the whale. They lost half the value of it. And if three went after it, you would lose two thirds of it. So it was really painful if you're going to go fight, which is important because if they still fight, it's not because I haven't made it painful for them. They want to fight.

And so the important part of that detail is you want to make sure that the costs were really severe there such that if they want to, if they're going to find a way out of it, there's a good benefit from doing so. And there is an essential element that we didn't put into the experiment that I think was important to what we found. So we also gave them the ability to implement ironholds to whale by when they attached themselves to it, they would turn the color. And the color matched who the identity of the person was in the experiment. So yellow, green, blue, things like that. And what we didn't attack include was the drog-part of the technology that actually slowly. kept them at the surface and slowed down. And our experiment, they could still dive and keep the same color.

And as a result, we didn't see that rule. That rule was harder on the uptake in the experiment. So the idea is you try to match the essential elements to get at the, what's the important part of the problem. And then you run the experiment and say, well, okay, do I have something here to calibrate? I don't see, I see fast fish, loose fish in the world. I don't see it here. I got to adjust.

Or once I start seeing it robustly, like, okay, now I have, I've recreated the essential elements of the world. And now I can start asking other questions. Have you been able to see, like, let's say you build this model, like the fast fish, loose fish, or perhaps you've had other experimental models that you've used. Have you been able to extrapolate, like, techniques and then apply those techniques to the real world and see the same type of change there? Well, so it really depends on the problem you're studying. So early in my career, I was working on problems of electric power deregulation. And so this would have been, well, 22 some years ago.

So California had just deregulated their wholesale market of electricity in 2000. And it was only the wholesale level that kind of had the deregulation. It wasn't deregulated on the using and who actually used the power. at the end point, consumers, industry, and things like that. And so what happened there, it happened to be a very hot summer. And we realized, like, there's no way as the price goes up. And this is an essential point of prices, that when prices go up, it's a signal for me to cut back. And if prices go down, that's a signal for me, I can buy more.

Well, what happened was the wholesale level prices were skyrocketing, but the retail customers only saw that 30 days later. And they got upset. And they had no way to cut. But more importantly, they had no way to cut back, in which case, that's why they were blackouts. So we designed an experiment where we allowed the wholesale sellers of power to shut off or interrupt the demand of people in exchange for a low price. And as a result, you get rid of the volatility. You get rid of the blackouts because people are volunteering saying, well, I'm just not going to turn my dryer on it two o'clock. in the afternoon when it's 105 degrees outside.

I can do that some other way or I'll hang them outside. So in that sense, an experiment was really important connection to the external world because we're saying, look, the market was deregulated, but it wasn't deregulated as all other markets were it. Consumers being able to adjust their purchases. So that's a problem and an experiment that was meant to really, really informed policy people outside the world. This is how you need to work on this market.

Now, the whaling market, I'm interested in how I am modeling and thinking of the world. And that's another way to run an experiment. I think people are going to act this way. Let me see what they do. And most of the time, I'm wrong, at least about something. And that's the point. So it's about me. I'm modeling the world.

I think it works this way. Oh, but it doesn't. Now I got to readjust how I think about things. And every experiment I've run, there's always some element that I didn't anticipate that I'm surprised by. And sometimes it's a real important element. Sometimes it's just kind of nicely wraps up the story a different way. But it's meant to be a humbling exercise being told by your subjects that, no, that's not how you think about this. And experiment in the book is that way too.

I put an idea out there. I thought it would work this particular way, and then it didn't. And I have to, now I have to learn why. I don't know if you've, you probably have thought about this too, but I think it's so beautiful, the way you just explain that. And in the book, you talk about symbolic thought and modeling. And I think all of us, as people, we have these models. We are doing exactly what you just explained almost unconsciously every day.

and much like you, we get it wrong, you know, but some of us don't like to admit that and we're like, it's them that's wrong. It's not me that's wrong, you know. And I want to be mindful of your time. I got one question. It's an economic question. And it's sort of something, man, I can tell you this because you're a mathematician. And you might laugh a little bit because I'm not a mathematician. But when we think of fractals and we think of the micro and the macro, here's my example. So my daughter goes to an amazing school, and I love all the people there. And with the economy the way it is, it seems to me that the parents are going, they're paying more tuition because of inflation is coming. And so they are paying more money and getting less service according to them. And then the teachers, they're doing more work and getting less money because of inflation.

And both sides are coming, like they have the same problem. You know what I mean? It's like tuition's going up. Oh, the teachers have to do more. For every percentage of tuition goes up, the teachers have to do that much more. And I see them fighting on both sides and just, you know, coming at odds, kind of like ball or B and just like that group.

And that seems to me that's the same thing that's happening in our world today is that there's these two forces that have the same problem. Do you see that same problem happening on a grand scale? And if you do see it, is it going to continue or are there some things we can do to fix it? Well, that's why inflation is so easy. because it affects everyone. And it and it is

you can see it as the way you put the problem. You can understand why both the parents and the teachers of school are upset because both losing purchasing power out of this thing. And that's and the value of that dollar is dropping because of

inflation. And so that I mean that's that explains why inflation puts everyone on edge because workers are feeling that they're not getting enough. Employers are not going to mind paying too much. Everyone is unhappy with when money is being deflated.

I'm sorry. People are also unhappy when it's deflated. But that's the whole trick of monetary policies, how not to get into either one of those areas. Yeah, it seems like a pretty intense balance beam right there. Well, Dr. Can you leave us with something that maybe something that you found out about yourself writing the book and something that you hope the book accomplishes? So I think the most important element about understanding how property works is to understand how it works up here. And it's about ideas.

Economists tend to want to think of everything in terms of the cost and benefits and that kind of determines what happens. But the actual process is an imagination. It is a part of our minds being able to think about an idea of this thing being mine. And that gives us great powers in the world to do things, to trade and to specialize and sets things out. But it starts basically with abstract ideas. And I think economists are a little reluctant to want to go to something like that because it's not physical and it's not material. We tend to focus on the material part of what economics is. And in order to make this work, it has to work with our minds.

And that humans are different than any other species in this respect. I think that's, I, it's a very unpopular position to take in biology to argue that somehow humans are categorically different. I find that a little hard to understand when you see that, you know, we're sending space, probes outside the solar system, but it has to be different going on here. We're living longer. What was it? In the 1950s, the average life expectancy on the planet was 46. Now it's 73. I mean, no other animals doing that kind of thing, living longer lives around the planet, not just in, you would think, Western world. This is a planet-wide phenomenon. And I think properties to to that. I think our sense of morality is key to that. I think our art is key to that. And all of those

things are what make it possible to be a human being in the 21st century. Awesome. I was going to tell you, too, I think you could make a series out of this book. It seems to me, like if you look at, Star Wars or all the great, even the books that do really well, they seem to be series. And I think that you could branch out here. I would definitely read and promote. the property species crypto or the property species cultural. You know, there's so much you can do there. I hope you do that. Like, you should totally make it a series and launch more books on it.

Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm pleased that people are reading it and that you enjoyed it so much. It really, as an author, there's no more special thing to hear. Nice. Well, where can people reach you at? and I am on my website is uh bart j wilson uh com if you just type bart wilson and google and maybe chatman i'm sure i'll come up i'm also on twitter at bart wilson fantastic and i got all your

links below and people can check them out thank you very much for your time uh for bart for coming out and i really learned a lot and i really think that if people take a few moments to read this book it'll change the way you see property. It'll change the way you see language. And you'll learn about linguistic primes. And there's so much value in there. And I appreciate you doing this and spending some time with me and my audience. So thank you.

I hope you have a great day and a new set of books. And you're welcome back on this podcast. Anytime. Just reach out to me. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. It was a great time. Thank you very much.

Have a good day. Okay. Bye.