Law professors Michael Heller and James Salzman talk about their book, Mine! with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Heller and Salzman argue that ownership is trickier and more complicated than it looks. While we tend to think of something as either mine or not mine, there's often ambiguity and a continuum about who owns what. Salzman and Heller explore a wide and surprising range of property rights from everyday life. The conversation includes a discussion of the insights of Ronald Coase on the assignment of property rights when rights conflict.
Michael Heller: Yeah. This is really the contribution that we can make to your economics listeners, who think of mine, often, as an on/off switch. And what we do in the book is--and each of the chapters takes one of these--is laid out the six simple stories.So, attachment is: My home is my castle. Like, what's attached to that deed of paper? How much resource control do you have when you say, 'I control this two dimensional plane?' What else do I get? Attachment.First in Time. First come, first served. This is how kids decide who gets the swing on the playground, that's how geosynchronous satellites are--space is claimed in orbit. It's used all the time. Who gets first. Firstborn son, historically, for inheritance. So, First in Time is the second one.Possession. Possession is nine tenths of the law. It's mine because I'm holding on to it. That's the parking chair example, right? Possession is this very powerful language that we all speak, but we don't realize that we're speaking all day long, every day.So, attachment, first, and possession are three.Labor is the fourth. It's mine because I worked for it. You reap what you sow. This one is the basis for our intuitions about intellectual property, about patents, about copyrights, why we reward those that--innovative effort. It's the emotional feeling behind it: It's mine because I worked for it.The fifth one is self-ownership. It's mine because it comes from my body. So, your genetic data, why is that yours? Does it belong to you or the gene company?And the sixth and final one is family. Birth and death, marriage and divorce, those are the moments when, really, a lot of wealth in our country moves around. So, there's a notion that the meek shall inherit the earth, but the reality under American law is that the meek actually get very little.So, that's it. Attachment, First, and Possession--that was the airline seat. Labor, Self-Ownership, and Family.That's the only stories that people use and it's all the stories that people use to claim every resource in the world.
