The evolution in animals of a first possession convention, in which individuals retain what they are the first to acquire, has often been taken as a foundation for the evolution of human ownership institutions. However, among humans, individuals actually only seldom retain an item they have acquired from the environment, instead typically transferring what they possess to other members of the community, to those in command, or to those who hold a contractual title. This paper presents a novel game-theoretic model of the evolution of ownership institutions as rules governing resource transfers. Integrating existing findings, the model contributes a new perspective on the emergence of communal transfers among hominin large game hunters around 200,000 years ago, of command ownership among sedentary humans in the millennia prior to the transition to agriculture, and of titled property ownership around 5,500 years ago. Since today’s property institutions motivate transfers through the promise of future returns, the analysis presented here suggests that these institutions may be placed under considerable pressure should resources become significantly constrained.
GDP growth is declining in industrial economies, and there is increasing evidence that growth may be environmentally unsustainable. If growth falls below returns to wealth then inequalities increase, as Thomas Piketty recently showed. This poses a challenge to managing slow and/or negative growth. Here, we examine policies that have been proposed to solve the problem of increasing income inequality in slow-or non-growing economies, including redistribution, taxation, and employment reforms. We construct a simple model, expanding Piketty's recent work, to evaluate the parameter ranges within which these different policies can be effective. Our analysis leads to two main findings. First, except in the case of complete wealth equality, any strategy to prevent increasing income inequality must reduce returns to wealth below the rate of growth. Second, several strategies may prevent an increase in income inequality during periods of low growth and may slow rising inequality, but not prevent it, in non-growing economies.
Theories of ownership have long focussed on the institutions governing resource stocks such as land, and largely neglected the ownership of resource flows such as the crops that flow from that land. Originating among early modern legal scholars, the assumption that the paradigm form of ownership was of land has been inherited by later theorists. The 'tragedy of the commons' thesis, for example, conflates the absence of stock ownership with the absence of flow ownership, and several commons scholars have now started to move away from a stock-centric conception of ownership. The same assumption has also been inherited by theorists applying Heinsohn and Steiger's 'property economics' to theories of degrowth. Here, I recast their theory to include ownership of flows as well as stocks, answering critics who point out that their theory cannot account for unsecured debts. This recasting places greater focus on the different ways in which ownership institutions not only assign an owner to a resource, but also motivate the transfer of resources between individuals. This prompts a new way to frame a key question for theorists of degrowth: in a nongrowing economy where fewer transfers can be motivated by the likelihood of receiving returns on loans, will this result in more possessive behaviours, in more communal ownership norms of reciprocity, or in more command ownership through coercion and status? Existing theory, focussed on stocks, groups these different institutions together as 'private' or 'nonproperty' ownership. This article suggests that disambiguation of the different 'nonproperty' institutions that govern the ownership and transfer of resource flows is key to better understanding the political and institutional implications of degrowth.
Today's ecological and political instability has renewed interest in how similar problems have arisen in the past – and how they have been resolved. But current research remains divided along different research traditions. Here, I draw together five broad research strands: neo-institutionalism, socio-ecological systems, demographic-structural theories, world-systems approaches, and peace and conflict research. I begin by establishing that each of these five traditions proposes to explain state crisis, in the sense of a decisive turning point from which the state might not emerge in its current form. But each of the five strands proposes a slightly different set of hypotheses, and adduces a slightly different set of cases in support. To unify these into a single theory, I set out a typology of the various ecological and institutional drivers of state crisis, and identify four broad social responses: reform; entrenchment of elites; breakdown of the state; and collapse. Thanks to this typology, I draw attention to a neglected distinction between crises that take place in different ecological-economic conditions, with crises that occur in conditions of worsening scarcity hypothesised to have very different causes and trajectories to crises that occur in conditions of sufficiency. But beyond this fundamental scarcity/sufficiency distinction, I find no other outright contradictions between different hypotheses. Compiling these into a unified state crisis theory establishes a framework for testing these competing, but entirely compatible, hypotheses.
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