Speaker 0 (0s): 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, I w why don't you go and introduce yourself, Bart, let it, let the people know where you're from and what you got going on.

Speaker 1 (24s): I'm professor of economics and law and director of the Smith. It's two for politically economy and philosophy at Chapman university.

Speaker 0 (31s): 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, 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?

Speaker 1 (51s): So I am an experimental economist by training. And so what that means is I build virtual models of the economy of, and then I run undergraduates through the computer simulations in the laboratory. And the 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 w it wasn't, things were pretty poor. And so some of our colleagues and reviewing the work asked sets, well, one of the reasons they're not trading as much as they're you, you're not enforcing contracts. There's no thing in this virtual world, it is produced stuff and they move it around and, and, and 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 can read the transcripts.

And nothing they were talking about was talking about that problem, but the question raised, but it got us thinking, what are we as taking for granted? And assuming it's going on in this virtual world, this kind of virtual terrarium that we built, and we were taken 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 we'd 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 us. What we call a field to a house. Anyone could move from any field to another field, a house, to a house, if things go, and as you might expect, though, we didn't expect things flew all over the place. Items were just moving around. They just, 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. I mean, part of what we do in economics is we're interested in seeing what does it takes for it to create wealth, to create people being better 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, undergraduate sports, where I was at the time. So they are civilized people. And yet the world they were in was not civilized. And, and so that was like, what what's going on there. And we tried to give them 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 shutting them away.

Now we should be able to get the problem was you give them that power. They feel like, oh, I would've shut my off 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, 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, out of 12 were being successful.

But we were spending all our time focusing on these ones that weren't and try and understand that as opposed to trying to understand, well, what made it work and these, and these different groups. And that's got, gotten me into thinking about, 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 going to Cosmist, I'm not having, I didn't, wasn't a philosophy major as an undergrad. I was a math major as an undergrad. And so I, you have to reach on luck if you're going to study property in the Western world.

And I also had 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, we, in our principles, books will introduce property rights and we'd say, well, the government enforces this people from keep people from stealing so that I want to become a restaurant tour.

I wanna, I wanna write and sell music. And, but that didn't seem right to me in some way, because you know, there, 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, how to start somewhere much more humble. And that was what I wanted to explore in the book.

Speaker 0 (6m 5s): I think you did a great job and it's, 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, the behavior of property rights and how the sinew in between those two is the linguistic and symbolic thinking that that happens.

And I, I really wish that I got to be honest when I first got the book, I thought, oh, it's gonna be an economist book. And, 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, I really think that you have hit a nerve. And if, if the way you described it in your book, if, 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, and, and whatnot.

Now, the first argument, it seems to me that you had to dismiss, or, or that you thought of was, well, everybody has property squirrels have property crows out property. Can you talk a little bit and maybe address that?

Speaker 1 (7m 20s): Sure. So I work with primatologists comparing undergraduates and chimpanzees and rhesus macaques and Capuchin monkeys. And so, and I've been to a couple biology conferences and I was, and they asked, when 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 his harems. And it seems that the males don't go after females and another hair I'm. So they respect them as a property and they keep listing all these examples.

I learned about scrub Jays. So they will hide their, their food in a cache. But if another scrub Jays watching, as soon as the on liquor leaves, the scrub, a jug, digs it up and re hides it as if it's trying to protect it from that. And I'm thinking, okay, so they're saying property all over the place. I also work with and talk with friends in, 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? How do we make that work? And then, I mean, I'm a social scientist, so I didn't go right down the middle of that. And I'm going to pull from both the humanities and 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 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 Marriotts 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 gotta be important. Part of the story of how it works with the biology of what makes humans special.

Speaker 0 (9m 22s): Yeah. I, I, 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 mine, regardless of where you're, from, what color regardless, can you tell people a little bit of how you figured that out?

Speaker 1 (9m 39s): Well, so it was important for me to look for evidence that would be universal. If I'm going to make this claim that all human beings have property. I got to find some way of having some evidence of that. Now there are anthropologists who have studied human societies from what we know from time and Memorial. And they have come to the conclusion that all human groups have had property and tools, utensils, and ornaments, but I w I wanted, is there something else in particular, I was interested in how humans think about things in property that w what would be those kinds of remnants.

And that would be in, in the language. And so I had been following this linguistics work by professor Anna 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 gotta be some core idea that they share some concept that's in all, every human mind, such that no matter what language you teach, you could somehow communicate with them.

And so they posit them 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 further. And so I came across her work in the mid two thousands, 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 a concept of things.

Every human society has the concept of doing something. And I'm like, well, that's economics. I got you. I things, but what's nothing about property. Or at the time was, I would've said property rights. Like, 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 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 tray, they'll trade food for sex. They're going to 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, why is that? Why is that? And I worked with primatologists who tried really hard to make the, get that they know how the animals like things, and they know that they give it to the another different animal and try to get them to move stuff around and they won't do it.

And that's when 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, 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 mind. I also have to respect you when you call it, say something as 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. It can't be unless I'm by myself, which case Robinson Crusoe doesn't need to have mine because there's no one else around.

And so buying in yours work together, basically from that starting point. Also, if we're equals and I, if I want you to respect my claims, or this is my I'm going to have to think of yours, about things you claim as mine. And that means we can do bunch of other things. Once we got that abstract system in place and that's, what's missing another 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 we, 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, to this interloper, the leave me alone. That's true. But the interlopers thinking, ah, she's saying yours, that's a human way of trying to understand what non-humans are doing and 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 Deakin's book, the property species, symbolic species, and its symbolic part was it's important that he argues that no other animal has this idea of abstract thought that transcends here in now. And that's what we're trying. 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 they, there's no evidence that they have that. Now you can teach chimpanzees some basic symbolic FOD, but they have to be young and they don't use it amongst themselves. They will only use it with their captors and things like that. But, but they, you could get the essence of that, but it's, you're not going to get into any other primate beyond the chimpanzees. So Bonobos sure.

Maybe they're going to find it in gorillas if they really work at it or something like that, but it's not going to be outside primates. And it's, 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 w when Lewis Carroll talks tells a story of the mouse and the sad tale, like tail sounds exactly the same, but T a L E N T I a T I T a, I L are two different things.

They point way different things in the world. And how do you know that? Because 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, if 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, you got, 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, they're not leaving the presence. And they can't do that. Will like, I can 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 kinds of amazing things that human beings can do, we have, we have culture that accumulates, we have arts. We have morality, we have creativity of re redefining things and putting them together to make something new. Those things along with trade, all have to have some common arc 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, it there's something in is 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 at that will be an offense to me. And I will call my buddies around me, defend me for that. And so there's work morality into this as well. And that's, 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 Bayer might do, but sending 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 in human experience from that. And I'm also thinking about the future regarding it bears. They're not thinking, oh, they're just thinking right here right now. When, when, when, when you walk between them and their Cubs get away from the Cub.

Speaker 0 (20m 14s): It's so fast. Like there's so much in there that you just said, and I want to come and do two on a, as you were speaking, it really reminded me of you threw in some really nice segues into other books that you referenced in your book. Like you talk about Lewis Carroll. And then like one of my favorite books, flatland, which gets us, he 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, if you have one, a trade and the word mine or vine 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, 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, I thought was a fascinating story, was the call from below. If we could stay on this topic for one more second, could you explain to the people what the call from below is?

Speaker 1 (21m 21s): So, so there are these vervet monkeys and they feel the observers real realize that the call that the Verbot monkey make was different, whether there was a predator that was coming from below. So there was a cat coming, or there was an ego 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, Scott, you run up as fast as you can. If it's an ego, you gotta 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 or there, they had different, 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 different 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 gotta be an Eagle. If you're going to have a running down, it's gotta be a leopard if you're going to be running up. And, 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 went, they wouldn't be thinking about days of, past of past leopards. They only need it for the moment when the leverage trying to eat them. And so it was a it's a, as I call it, it, it an index, it's a pure pointer. You hear the sound from below and you run up, it has a specific pointing in, and it's pointing to the past because as you've learned this as a kid from all the other times as it's happened, and you know, it have it in the moment, but that's not the essence in language.

And so it, so people want to say, oh, look at verbiage, 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, tale, 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.

Speaker 0 (24m 6s): 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, forwards me a little bit into the, into the cling on ship of savior Wharf.

That was super funny, by the way, we should explain to people what I'm talking about here. Can you, can you flush that?

Speaker 1 (24m 48s): So there was this idea that language determines how you can think. So, whatever the language that you have, this is going to constrain how you, as a human being thinks and, and that's highly contested and debated. And I think what it misses is that, and what the law that 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 X.

I shouldn't pick a language that I'm not expert in here, but, but, but so in Spanish and 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, you used 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, 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 new other language has it, does it mean they can't think with that idea of fair, they 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 in any other speaker of a language can also have that idea. The language doesn't constrain me as an English Anglophone to have fairness and exclude other people. And so it 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, 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, calm came out of a sense of commerce being originally the antonym to fair was not unfair. The original answer them to fair was foul and that's baseball, that's cricket and baseball. And if that means crossing a line, so, and that think of all the uses of fare, it generally comes down to, 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 Sue somebody and they're putting something on the scale, but they've padded it, see that would be, that would be foul.

Speaker 0 (28m 8s): It would be felt.

Speaker 1 (28m 10s): And so a fair merchant is one who is not going to do that to you. And now fairs 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 were 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, in, within the field of play.

Speaker 0 (28m 31s): Yeah, I think that that's a, that's a nice segue into first off. W 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 and the different prepositions there. Can you talk to people

Speaker 1 (28m 57s): A little bit about that? So, but so the idea, I had to have an idea of how humans came to have property, but yet tie it back to our evolutionary past. And so the observation from anthropologists that every human society, it has property in tools was that key. And so how is it that well, 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 feeling. But what actually, if you want to look 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, and I think that's true when you play, you know, play sports, you know, you are, you are not, you're feeling the ball through the bat.

And, and, and so even the bad is a part of you. And so you are inside of it, but that means there's only goes so far, right? It's only the king goes so far on the world and an outside that 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 as being inside that tool. And so that's how, I mean, I think that's how we integrate our feeling with, with the things that we do.

We are inside the tool, in some sense, our NAB attracts way of thinking about it. But I wanted to think, we know what 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 concepts around property. It was, it was very much prevalent in the 15 hundreds in English jurisprudence.

We, they talked about having property in a Swan. And it sounds quite to us, we keep it. I even talked about property and tools that you get the context of it, but it's not the it's only seems to work in a certain small area and we get the idea, but I was like, why would we choose in that little preposition is designed to give meaning to how the whole thing about property works. That it's only goes so far.

And then it stops with the, and I argue stops with the physical world with the, and so if I have property in this mouse, it goes anywhere in the mouse, but not 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, 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 claimed to it, went with it. And so it seemed to be bounded by the cow. Now what the cow you started walking. I didn't get to claim all this land that the cow was walking on, just because the cows on it stopped with the cow only went as far as that big. And then think about it for a 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 right, naturally to kids and other, other people as well, that, that there's something going on with, with that illness. And I was looking to see, where is that in the language? And maybe a also, where is that in disputes, property disputes of what were found items. You might see that kind of stuff. And it came out as I, you know, have I an explored all these other languages?

No, I think it, I think it would be worth pushing the boundaries and see how far, what I'm saying goes here and 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? It could be, this could be refined, but, but I think it's a starting point. It's this 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, in a, in a chattel,

Speaker 0 (33m 50s): Right? And then that, that goes for milk to anything that comes out of the cow. That would be your property. I actually wrote some stuff down. It it's towards the, towards the end of the book, you talk about the scheduling patterns, the scheduling patterns, and up 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 inward there, the custom I think is kind of, kind of can be tricky.

Can you talk to people like what that,

Speaker 1 (34m 23s): So this is the part where in humanities, when they're arguing that 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, on the continent, farming have land, they'd 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, there was a, there was a gap there because native Americans were not organized around stationary agriculture.

And so they were moving around. They, and so that they didn't have the same 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 they, the native Americans had been living as 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 mind, even though no parent has taught them that.

So that's the, I would argue the kind of universal genetic part that somehow in, in the, the, their brains are constructed in such a way that social world they live in. We'll 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 the another abstract idea now, 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 was out, not steel is abstracts, does that. Sometimes if you're dying and you're dying of food, starvation taking something, it's not theft, right. It's self preservation. And, but if I have plenty of stuff, then I go off and want to take something that would be called steely. And so it's an abstract idea that has to be learned how you would apply it on the ground in real time.

Speaker 0 (37m 18s): 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 there's a great book called black elk speaks, and it's about native Americans. And in that book, the, the medicine man, who's, who's narrating. It says when the white man came to us and said, he wants to buy the land, we laughed at him. Like you can't buy the land. The land belongs to everybody.

And that just got me thinking like, well, you know, they, they may have laughed, but what happened? We took the land, but what's to stop us from using these same set of rules and laws and abstract thought to someone buying the air. Can't like, just buy out the oxygen.

Speaker 1 (38m 8s): Well, so, but you're constrained by how the actual physical world works in that sense. So, so others, well, there's many ways to go after that question. Let me think about this. Let me go back to the, so the core problem, when the Europeans came to north America was they didn't treat them as equals.

Speaker 0 (38m 35s): Oh, I

Speaker 1 (38m 36s): See. Right. So they said there was a trade they didn't, and then they use power to get what they want. Right. And so there was a lack of empathy there, a lack of seeing them as an us, they were the other, and that is, you know, think of, of history that's the customer has been passed down. 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 as a customer, 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, so yeah, the custom part is, is something that I think gives some people fear like, oh, no, it kind of can be arbitrary.

It can, it can mean that the customer can do bad, do bad by other people, but it also means we can, it's not fixed. We can become good. We can, 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.

Speaker 0 (40m 4s): That's a great way to put it. It seems to be, sometimes the instrument becomes an institution and then the institution becomes corrupted. But if we just use it as an instrument, it it's neither good nor bad. It's just an instrument of change. I think that's a great way. Thank you for, for getting that out there and explaining custom in a way that I 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 in 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, I don't know, I'm kind of rambling a little bit, but does that kinda make sense?

Speaker 1 (40m 44s): 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 and an order 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 and that as an equal, as an equal person in this transaction. And that's, that's a beautiful thing I think about commerce is that it makes us equal.

Now, does that mean we always are equal above that. 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 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 and force.

Speaker 0 (41m 50s): That brings us to the fast fish, loose fish and the behaviors of what you are. You, you did something 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

Speaker 1 (42m 6s): Well? So I'm a law professor, Bob Alexson from Yale university had been looking at how property comes about and what, 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 polices to see. And so, but somehow they're not always fighting. So somehow all these people from different countries out there wailing 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 bailing 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 that nor the 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, knowing when, after it went after that other whale.

So that's, if it, if the fish has held fast, then it's yours. And, but if you are in competence or maybe this one happened to be fighting a little bit more or whatever, and it gets away, then it's the loose fishes for anyone free game for anyone to go after. And so that was the rule. But then when you looked at how Whaley moved off the course of, of the north American Atlantic, the Dupre 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, holds the whale. You put the harpoon in the whale, you put a drug to it to kind of track it, to keep it from diving and to be in the pit. And if you're in pursuit of it, it's your well. And so the custom changed to fit the prey, to fit the people who were doing the whaling, all those circumstances. So it's an example of how custom is important and it evolves and it changes.

So he says he, he viewed, it 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 experimental that constant, well, let me see if I can do ex-ante let me design a little 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, and so they, this was a way to minimize the conflict. It was a way to make everyone better off that this is why whales were going to go extinct if we didn't discover oil, because they had great rules about 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. So we no longer needed to have a 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 is, 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.

Speaker 0 (45m 56s): Yeah, it is. It's fascinating. Just the whole concept of like the, the, the abstract framework, I guess that's why there's not so many people that can do the things you're doing is like, you really have to understand the cross-disciplines in the ability to, to build the frameworks. Like, let me ask you this question. How do you, how do you go from the concept of whaling to building a model that people can play?

Like what, what does that process look like? How do you build experimental models? That's fascinating.

Speaker 1 (46m 31s): Well, so it was partly a response to a prior, 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 would have happened. And then we couldn't figure out what's going on when it, when we did see it. So I thought history is going to be guide for me. And I go into, if I built this world and I can't find any fastest loose fish, and I'm, I'm doing something that's not capturing the S central elements of the naturally 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 it, so, so we had the circles moving around. I knew that that was important. Like a whale moving I needed to have what happens if two people go after the same? Well, I needed to build in the comp the consequences of conflict. And so we made it really, really, It was pretty sort of two went after it. They lost half the whale, they lost half the value of it.

And three went after it. You will, you will 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 because it's not because I haven't made it painful for them. They, they want to fight. And corn 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 great benefit from doing so. And, and if 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 iron, holds the whale by bite. When they attach 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 drug part of the technology that actually kept them at the surface and slowed down and our experiment. They could still dive and keep the same color. And as result, we didn't see that rule.

That rule was harder on the uptake in experiment. So th so the idea is you try to match as 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, do I have something here to calibrate? I don't see. I see, I see fast fish, loose mission in the world. I don't see it here. I gotta, I gotta 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.

Speaker 0 (49m 11s): Have you been able to see, like, let's say you build this model at 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?

Speaker 1 (49m 26s): Well, so it really depends on, on the problem you're, you're studying so early in my career, I was working on problems of electric power deregulation. And so, so this would have been well 22, some years ago. So California had just deregulated their wholesale market for electricity in a year in 2000. And it was only the wholesale level that kind of had the deregulation.

It wasn't deregulated on the using end. We actually used the power at the end point consumers, industrial industry and things like that. And so what, so what happened there happened to be a very hot summer and we realized like there's no way as a price goes up. And this is a central point of prices that when prices go up, it's a signal for me to cut back and the 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 customer is only saw that 30 days later, they got upset and there's 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 com purchase sellers of power to, to, to shut off or interrupt the demand of people in exchange for a lower price. And as a result, you get rid of the volatility, you get rid of the blackheads because people are volunteering saying, well, I'm just not going to turn my dryer on at two o'clock in the afternoon, when it's 105 degrees outside, I can do this. I can do that some other way. I'll hang them outside. But so it's, so in that sense, an experiment was really important connection to the, to the external world, because we're saying, look, the work, the market was deregulated, but it wasn't deregulated.

As all other markets were consumers being able to adjust their, adjust their, their purchases. So, so it didn't really get, so that's a problem and experiment that was meant to really inform policy people outside of, well, this is how you need to work on this market. Now, the whaling market, I'm not, I'm interested in how I am modeling and thinking about the world. And that's another way to run an experiment. People are going to act this way, let me see what they do and I'll wait 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 didn't, I'm surprised by. And sometimes it's a real important element. Sometimes it's just kind of nicely wraps up the story in a different way, but it's, it's, it's meant to be a humbling exercise. The being told by your subjects that no, that's not how you think about this.

An experiment in the book is that way too. I put, put a 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.

Speaker 0 (52m 35s): I don't know if you've, you've 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, like we are doing exactly what you just explained almost unconsciously every day. And just much like you, we get it wrong, you know, but some of us don't like to admit that and we're like, that's, 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, it's an economic question. And it's, it's sort of something, man. I can tell you this, cause 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, the micro and the macro here's, 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 is going up. Oh, the teachers have to do more for every percentage. The tuition goes up. If you just have to do that much more. And I see them fighting on both sides and, and just, you know, coming at odds, kind of like baller B and just like that group. And that seems to me, that's the same thing that's happening in our world today. As it's, there's these two forces that have the same problem, what 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?

Speaker 1 (54m 20s): Well, well, that's the, that's why inflation is so insidious because it affects everyone and it, it, it, it is, you could see it as the way you put the problem it's you can understand why both the parents and the teachers, the school are upset, both losing, purchasing power out of this thing. And that's the value of that dollar is dropping because of, of inflation. And so that, I mean, that's, that explains why inflation puts everyone on edge because workers are, are feeling that they're not getting enough.

And players are saying, I haven't been paying too much. Everyone is on unhappy with when money is being deflated or inflated from sorry. So unhappy people are also unhappy when it's deflated, but that's, that's the whole trick of monetary policies. How not to get into either one of those areas.

Speaker 0 (55m 17s): Yeah. It seems like a pretty intense balance beam right there. Well, doctor wasn't wet, can you leave us with something that maybe something that you, that you were found out about yourself, writing the book and something that you hope the book accomplishes?

Speaker 1 (55m 33s): 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 costs and benefits, and that kind of determines what happens. But the actual process is an imagination. It is a part of our, our, our, our minds. Being able to think about an idea of this thing being mine. And that gives us great powers in the world to, to do things, to trade and to specialize and sets things up.

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. It's not, it's not a material. We tend to focus on the material part of what economics is. And in order to make this work 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, to argue that somehow humans are categorically different.

I find that a little hard to, 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. When 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 the Western world.

This is the planet wide phenomenon. And I think property is the key to that I think our, 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.

Speaker 0 (57m 33s): Awesome. I, I, I was going to tell you too, I think you can make a series out of this book. It seems to me like if you look at, you know, 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, 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 I, I hope you do that. Like, you should totally make it a series and launch more books on it. Okay.

Speaker 1 (58m 1s): Thank you. I thank you so much. I, I I'm pleased that people are reading it and, and that you enjoyed it so much. It really, as an author, there's no, there's no more special thing to hear.

Speaker 0 (58m 14s): Nice, nice. Well, where can people reach you at? And, and

Speaker 1 (58m 18s): I am I'm on my website is Bart J wilson.com. If you just say Bart Wilson in Google and maybe Chapman am. Sure. I'll come up. I'm also on Twitter at Bart Wilson.

Speaker 0 (58m 33s): Fantastic. And I got all your links below and people can check them out. Thank you very much for your time for bar 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, and there's so much value in there. 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.

Speaker 1 (59m 4s): Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. It was a great time.

Speaker 0 (59m 7s): Thank you very much. Have a good day. Okay. Bye bye.