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"What is property, and why does our species happen to have it? In The Property Species, Bart Wilson explores how Homo sapiens acquires, perceives, and knows the custom of property, and why it might be relevant for understanding how property works in the twenty-first century. Arguing from some hard-to-dispute facts that neither the natural sciences nor the humanities - nor the social sciences squarely in the middle - are synthesizing a full account of property, Wilson offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: All human beings and only human beings have property in things, and at its core, property rests on custom, not rights. Such an alternative to conventional thinking contends that the origins of property lie not in food, mates, territory, or land, but in the very human act of creating, with symbolic thought, something new that did not previously exist. Integrating cognitive linguistics with the philosophy of property and a fresh look at property disputes in the common law, Wilson makes the case that symbolic-thinking humans locate the meaning of property within a thing. The provocative implications are that property - not property rights - is an inherent fundamental principle of economics, and that legal realists and the bundle of sticks metaphor are wrong about the facts regarding property. Written by an economist who marvels at the natural history of humankind, the book is essential reading for experts and any reader who has wondered why people claim things as "Mine!", and what that means for our humanity."

AbstractThe current approach to the study of property cannot distinguish the causes of human action from the consequences of human action. It also cordons off morality thereby opening a hole in how property rights work. The scientific difficulty is that our analysis must constantly shift between the individual, their local community, and the larger polity in which both are embedded, in order to explain simultaneously different levels of consequences with different kinds of causes. The difficulty is made worse when we construct mental models without the human mind. My framework leaves the human mind in. Since Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, the study of property rights has had a decidedly external stance: the institution imposes itself on the individual from the outside. The problem of property rights, however, also calls for inquiry from the inside out of human agency, because in the study of property, ideas are primary.

AbstractA property right, the standard view maintains, is a proper subset of the most complete and comprehensive set of incidents for full ownership of a thing. The subsidiary assumption is that the pieces that are property rights compose the whole that is ownership or property, i.e., that property rights explain property. In reversing the standard view I argue that (1) a custom of intelligent and meaningful human action explains property and that (2) as a custom, property is a historical process of selecting actions conditional on the context. My task is to explain how a physical world of human bodies with minds that feel, think, know, and want gives rise to a custom of property with meaning and purpose. Property is primary because ideas are primary.

AbstractThis article attempts to clarify our understanding of the everyday use of the word "fair" as we apply it to economic behavior. I first examine the decomposition offairinto its semantic primitives and discuss implications of recent research that indicates that the word is one‐to‐one untranslatable into any other language, that is, the concept offairis distinctly Anglo. I also make a Wittgensteinian appeal to context and human sociality as an indispensable tether for what we mean by a fair experience and what we know, epistemologically speaking, about fairness. The principal implication of this is that rules that guide fair behavior are not located in an individual's private utility function but instead reside in the connections that the individual has to his cultural environs.