Bart Wilson — Is The Idea of Property Universal?

Alex Aragona speaks with Bart Wilson as he explores the natural tendencies of humans in relation to their views and attitudes on property. References from Episode 64 with Bart Wilson You can purchase Bart Wilson’s book, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and The Human Mind on Amazon Canada. Bart referenced a study by linguists Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka on the conceptual semantics of possession found in every language, which may be accessed through ScienceDirect at this link. The full Bing episode, Not Yours, which demonstrates the morality of possession within children is available for viewing on Youtube. Bart’s laboratory study, “Exchange and Specialization as a Discovery Process,” was co-authored with Sean Crockett and Vernon L. Smith and appeared in volume 119, issue 539 of The Economic Journal (2009). You can access an e-version of the article through Wiley Online Library. In the podcast, Bart draws upon the whaling norms in the absence of formal sea jurisdictions featured in Robert C. Ellickson’s publication, Order without Law, and additionally informed one of his experiments’ testing for the rules of competition. Order without Law is available for purchase from the Harvard University Press’ website. A PDF copy of The Case of the Swans that was briefly mentioned by Bart and contains the concept of “hath property in” is available for viewing on CommonLII here.  You can purchase the Andrea Tyler and Vyvyan Evans study, The Semantics of English Propositions, from which Bart illustrates the lingual relationship between physical objects and functionality in the podcast directly from the publisher’s website.