- I research the political economy of ecological sustainability, using theoretical models and comparative empirical research.edit
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,... more
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.
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Under what circumstances are interest-bearing loans compatible with an economy without much growth? The question is becoming increasingly important given a tendency towards declining growth in industrialised economies and increasing... more
Under what circumstances are interest-bearing loans compatible with an economy without much growth? The question is becoming increasingly important given a tendency towards declining growth in industrialised economies and increasing evidence that continued growth is incompatible with environmental sustainability. Previous theoretical work suggests that when interest-bearing loans compound, this results in exponentially growing debts that are impossible to repay in the absence of economic growth. We here examine ten historical cases to assess support for this finding. We find that interest-bearing loans have typically resulted in unpayable debts in these non- and slow-growing economies. We further identify four broad category of measures to prevent or alleviate the problem of unpayable debts, and show how they have been employed in the past. Our Appendix compiles sources of debt regulation from across the world over five millennia.
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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... more
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 ...