The not so wild, wild west
"Mention of the American West usually evokes images of rough and tumble cowboys, ranchers, and outlaws. In contrast, The Not So Wild, Wild West casts America's frontier history in a new framework that emphasizes the creation of institutions, both formal and informal, that facilitated cooperation rather than conflict. Rather than describing the frontier as a place where heroes met villains, this book argues that everyday people helped carve out legal institutions that tamed the West." "The authors emphasize that ownership of resources evolves as those resources become more valuable or as establishing property rights becomes less costly. Rules evolving at the local level will be more effective because local people have a greater stake in the outcome. This theory is brought to life in the colorful history of Indians, fur trappers, buffalo hunters, cattle drovers, homesteaders, and miners. The book concludes with a chapter that takes lessons from the American frontier and applies them to our modern "frontiers" - the environment, developing countries, and space exploration."--BOOK JACKET.
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- Here work shows of course that the simplistic Econ101 Trategy of the Commons is wrong. And that of course was known long before. Just as in any other field just reading 101 isn't sufficient. This is an old problem in economics and much has been written about.
What her work actually shows is that the determining factor isn't so much if something is private or government or something else but rather about various other factor, like communication, monitoring and enforcement.
> Problem is that privatisation (together with markets, cause the two always go hand in hand) introduces incentives to compete and to exploit
There are tons of resources under private management and private operates are very well capable of understanding that if they simply use up the resource they will hurt their future earnings potential.
In the old school case of common land being zoned off, those lands became private. Those private operators used that land far more efficiently and the result a massive increase in the British population. And guess what, 100s of years later and that land is very often still farmed to this day. They understand that the land has capacity that needs to be restored in various way.
Now one can make the argument if the privatization happened in a fair way. Meaning did all the people who had access to common land get an fair share. That however is a different question.
With farm land this works because based on Ostroms work its pretty easy to monitor, and enforce. Secretly going to another farmers land and planting or harvesting isn't all that viable. In case of fishery rights this get much more complex. Before the invention of barbed wire such simply mechanism didn't work for cattle for example and thus other mechanism were used. However once barbed wire was invented cattle farmers moved to full privatization. See 'The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier' if you are interest in various stories like that.
We can take various other examples. Common forest could suffer tragedy of the commons. But private logging operations have long understood that they need to split up land to have forest at different stages so that they can continually harvest wood for a long time.
Privatization (as in splitting up the resources into various parts) can align the intensives correctly, the damage the resource takes impact your own utility and thus aligns intensives correctly.
So it totally correct to say that splitting up a resource and managing it independent is a potential solution. But I think Ostrom work indicates that we need to look deeper and beyond a one size fits all solution to resource management.
- I've never created a reading list, so this was a fun exercise.
Programming:
* Analyzing Computer System Performance with Perl::PDQ - Gunther
* The Mythical Man Month - Brooks
Philosophy:
* A Journey Around my Room - de Maistre
* Anger, Mercy, and Revenge - Seneca
* Schrödinger - What is Life?
* Man's Search for Meaning - Frankl
* Essays - Montaigne
* Ethical Intuitionism - Huemer
* The Consolations of Philosophy - de Botton
* A Manual for Living - Epictetus
* Meditations - Aurelius
Psychology / Meaning / Purpose / Science:
* Purpose and Meaning in the Workplace - Dik, Byrne & Steger
* The Case Against Education - Caplan
* Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Caplan
* Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
* A Confession - Tolstoy
* Enlightenment Now - Pinker
* The Better Angels of our Nature - Pinker
* The Improving State of the World - Goklany
* The Skeptical Environmentalist - Lomborg
* Religion for Atheists - de Botton
* Ending Aging - de Grey
* Gut Feelings - Gigirenzer
Fiction:
* Heart of Darkness - Conrad
* Candide - Voltaire
* Brave New World - Huxley
* Selected Works - Goethe
* 1984 & Animal Farm - Orwell
Politics:
* Obedience to Authority - Milgram
* The Problem of Political Authority - Huemer
* The Communist Manifesto - Marx
* Socialism - von Mises
* Just One Child - Greenhalgh
* The God That Failed - Crossman
* Death by Government - Rummel
Thought-provoking:
* Free to Learn - Gray
* The Beautiful Tree - Tooley
* Education and the State - West
* The Machinery of Freedom - Friedman
* Against Intellectual Monopoly - Boldrine & Levine
* From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State - Beito
* The Not So Wild, Wild West - Hill
* More Guns, Less Crime - Lott
* Race & Economics - Williams
* Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men - Hummel
- The "wild west" was really not as wild as people think.
A nice book that explores a little how problems were actually solved in the wild west is:
> The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier
> https://www.amazon.com/Not-So-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748...
- If you phrase it this way, I can agree with some of your points. I think, more than "allowing people to become rich", I would state "respect and recognition of private property" a an important philosophical factor to enable economic growth. As of today, I have yet to hear about societies where "everything belongs to everyone" ending up being economically successful. So that might be one trait leading to success or improvement.
As for the free movement of goods, I know there is no country in the world following pure free market policies. Therefore it is also unfair to judge free market based on the numerous imperfect application of its principles. Note, however, that we do have examples of societies working well without central government, such as the early days of the "Wild West" societies in the US. Those societies were basically growing at an exponential rate at the time with an ongoing flow of immigrants, while managing to self-control and police themselves. The book "The Not so Wild Wild West" explains this point very well, if you are interested to read about this.
One last thing. Obviously not every country has to follow either free market or end up like Cuba, however there is a clear trend: when a society decides to indulge in welfare and collectivism, it almost never goes back and ends up going bankrupt and ruining everyone. I do not know how familiar you are with the current situation in Europe, but over the past 30 years you could see the trend of massive public debt (fueled by government intervention in all aspects of private life) growing and growing over time. And now you get Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, close to bankrupcy. Hardly a coincidence.
- > respect and recognition of private property
At some level, private property is an invention of the State. Without that, the property belongs to whoever can defend it, and whoever has the most guns wins.
This becomes even more significant with the advent of intellectual property, also an invention of the State. There are many digital examples of "everything belongs to everyone" that are going extremely well, and luckily with zero government tyranny required. Meanwhile, the patent system is a mixed bag at best: sometimes promoting/reward innovation, sometimes inhibiting/punishing it. I don't know how this balance should be struck between sharing and ownership, but I know that the way we're handling it now is deeply sub-optimal.
The concept of ownership and the ways in which we trade are social constructs, the economic "rules of the road". They are malleable, not inherent, and we can rewrite those rules however we wish to manage externalities such as worker safety or environmental damage. Obviously, if it is done poorly (or disingenuously), the results will not go well. But we take for granted the times when it does go well.
> The book "The Not so Wild Wild West"
I'll look into this. I'm definitely a proponent of the social contract occurring at a more local level, where people are actually people instead of numbers in a database. But I'm skeptical that it is enough sustain this thing we call civilization. Just because people can be rational and altruistic does not mean they will.
> when a society decides to indulge in welfare and collectivism, it almost never goes back and ends up going bankrupt and ruining everyone
There is an element of truth to this; many European entitlements go too far and cost too much (as has often happened with American unions as well). But I don't buy that social programs are inherently inefficient; there are many things that matter which don't show up on balance sheets. Stress, health, environment, social bonds, self-determination, respect: these things all matter to a society's quality of life and its bottom line, but are very hard to measure or draw profit from.
Also, we must look at the other side of the historical coin: turn-of-the-century America, where industry held all the bargaining power, and the whole family had to work 60+ hour weeks in dangerous factories with no human rights protections. Or, workers who lived in "company towns", in a life one step away from indentured servitude. I have a hard time not seeing strong similarities between Amalgamated Warehouse Whatever and the Dickensian hellscape of a century ago (or Foxconn, for that matter).
I suppose I just don't like dogma: MARKETS GOOD, GOVERNMENT BAD. The common thread between democracy and capitalism is to lessen the corrupting influence of power by distributing it: one person = one vote, and every person wielding their own power over buying and selling. But there is no system that is immune from manipulation and corruption; the incentive to game the system and maximize one's own power to the detriment of others will never go away. If we want to prevent tyranny, we have to constantly evolve ways to distribute power again, whether it takes the form of markets, governments, communities, or new organizational patterns we haven't thought of yet.
