{"id":9271,"date":"2015-06-20T07:11:41","date_gmt":"2015-06-20T12:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9271"},"modified":"2015-06-20T07:11:41","modified_gmt":"2015-06-20T12:11:41","slug":"property-rights-inequality-and-commons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9271","title":{"rendered":"Property Rights, Inequality and Commons"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/bollier.org\/blog\/property-rights-inequality-and-commons\" target=\"_blank\">Property Rights, Inequality and Commons<\/a><\/h3>\n<div id=\"content-area\">\n<div id=\"node-1171\" class=\"node node-type-blog node-promoted build-mode-full clearfix\">\n<div class=\"meta\"><em>I recently spoke at a conference, \u201cProperty and Inequality in the 21st Century,\u201d hosted by The Common Core of European Private Law, an annual gathering of legal scholars, mostly from Europe.\u00a0 They had asked me how the commons might be a force for reducing inequality.\u00a0 Below are my remarks, \u201cThe Commons as a Tool for Sharing the Wealth.\u201d\u00a0 The conference was held at the University of G\u00f6teborg, Sweden, on June 12-13, 2015.<\/em><\/div>\n<div class=\"content\">\n<p>Thank you for inviting me to speak today about the relationship between property law and inequality \u2013 a topic that receives far too little attention.\u00a0 This should not be surprising.\u00a0 Now that free-market ideology has become the default worldview and political consensus around the world, private property is seen as synonymous with freedom, economic growth and human progress.<\/p>\n<p>Oh yes, there is this nasty side issue known as inequality.\u00a0 Malcontents like the Occupy movement and renegade economists like Thomas Pikketty have brought this problem to the fore after years of neglect.\u00a0 Their success has been quite an achievement because for years the very existence of inequality has been portrayed as an accident, an aberration, a mysterious and shadowy guest at the grand banquet of human progress.<\/p>\n<p>I wish to argue that hunger, poverty, inadequate education and medical care, and assaults on human dignity and human rights, are not bugs in the system.\u00a0 They are<em>features.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Indeed, market ideologues often argue that such deprivations are a necessary incentive to human enterprise and economic growth; poverty is supposedly needed to spur people to escape through the work ethic and entrepreneurialism.<\/p>\n<p>Property rights lie at the heart of this dynamic because they are a vital tool for defining and patrolling the boundaries of private wealth, and for justifying the inevitably unequal outcomes.\u00a0 So it\u2019s important that we focus on the role of property rights in producing social inequality \u2013 without ignoring the many other forces, including social practice, culture and politics, that also play important roles.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Property Rights, Inequality and Commons I recently spoke at a conference, \u201cProperty and Inequality in the 21st Century,\u201d hosted by The Common Core of European Private Law, an annual gathering of legal scholars, mostly from Europe.\u00a0 They had asked me how the commons might be a force for reducing inequality.\u00a0 Below are my remarks, \u201cThe [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[152,6551,240,338,425,4302,6552,5401,6553,868],"class_list":["post-9271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-commons","tag-david-bollier","tag-economic-growth","tag-freedom","tag-inequality","tag-occupy-movement","tag-property-rights","tag-sharing","tag-thomas-pikketty","tag-wealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9271"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9272,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9271\/revisions\/9272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}