I started reading this book, The Natural Dividend: Just Management of our Common Resources by two Norwegian conservationists/sociologists/political scientists. It has emerged in some Den writing already #1515430 and mentioned in a Nordic Node, but now I'm grappling with the original.
(I have not tabled the Capitalism book club torturing/self-flaggelation exercise, just didn't want to bring a 3.8-pound monstrosity in my travel bag; some neat, friendly Norwegian common-pool resource people is an easier task, figuratively and literally.)
The opening paragraph is so shit I was about to hurl the book across the room.
"dwindling" resources; the need to embrace a post-carbon world; the need to quit oil etc.
Fucking morons.
Good thing I was
a) in a public place, so good commercial morals limit my display of outrage, and
b) I have it on pretty good authority #1515430 that there’ll eventually be serious considerations of common-pool resources and Norway’s history with hydro build-out.
economically illiterate intellectuals need not apply for Den’s attention
Anyway, once you mentally side-step their obvious economically illiterate error around what a resource is (quite an arduous task because they invoke it and portray their ignorance over and over and over), there's some interesting musings.
"the underlying conflict that propels this study — the conflict between private and common interests — is as old as civilization." (p. 20)
Other metaphysical-deep economic convos involve
- where does value come from #1471628, #1556891
- which things do we allocate according to market/profit-and-loss tests and which (children, brides, religion, schooling) follow other domains
- who precisely is the collective to whom common pool resources belong?
- do we fuck the boomers before or after we address natural dividend/commodity extraction troubles? (not kidding, it's in there... Den reading between the lines; see follow-up posts!)
...aaaand, excitingly, WHO OWNS THE SUN?!
The convo is
how much of nature's underlying productive power (and the value it generates) is transferred with a private title to nature?
As for the sun, the authors say:
It is an absurd question. No one owns the sun. Or, alternatively, the sun is ours to share. After all, the sun was created in a process that is completely independent of (and prior to!) human influence: no person made or produced the sun. More importantly, the sun is absolutely essential to our survival on the earth: without it we would die. Should the sun fall under private ownership, its owner would have monopoly power over our very existence. (p. 25)
Same age-old questions (p. 26):
I actually don't think that consideration is more important: the necessary and vital dimension is one of SCARCITY an economic concept concerning the relationship between what's in store/what can easily or profitably be procured and what is potentially desired by [total aggregation] of potential consumers and at what cost (=price).
All of these economic phenomena are what we mean by "market" but what is allocated via a market and what isn't is a technical and value-based economic restriction moreso than it is political (yes, yes; occasionally also political/moral, see organ trade.)
"Owning" means some version of deciding what happens to an object, how it gets used and by whom. No human (so far) has the technical and physical ability to determine what happens to the sun (or the rays that hit earth). Nobody rules it; ownership claims to it, issued by Parliament or Mr. Trump, are immaterial. They do not bind and so while politically valid or even morally adhered to be some hypothetical morons, they do not matter.
Secondly, it involves excludability (#1515488) Nobody has the technical abilities to exclude others from enjoying the sun's warming powers or, whenever tech like that becomes available, travel closer to it.
Thus: nobody owns the sun.
Quite of lot of these philosophical postulates/justifications don't hold the same way for e.g., a waterfall or river or the beauty of a mountain or the gold #1480191 (#1506177) or iron or oil in the ground.
Ergo, authors' introductory analogy fails.
I am looking forward to delving into these meta-economic concept... and grow even more gray hair from the economically illiterate retardation I anticipate.
The excerpt you posted about the sun seems fraught with some misconceptions.
No one was granted the right to harvest and sell the sun. They were granted the right to use the land for solar collectors and they contracted with the local power grid to sell energy to them.
First, who appointed the author judge over what rewards are rightful and what are not?
Second, the value provided by the entrepreneur is as much in the transformation of the energy as the production of it.
If the author would like to go to the logical conclusion of those who produced something are the only ones who can rightfully reap reward from it, then only God can reap any reward from nature because all matter and energy was produced by God and humans only transform it. I suppose the author is a Christian?
Same critique as above. Author has not justified his conception of "rightful rewards". Nor have they recognized the true nature of the energy production process, which is really energy transformation.
By the author's logic, he himself belongs to the commons, because the material and energy needed to produce his own being did not come from himself.
Lastly, I find the whole topic pointless and pedantic.
You can argue til you're blue in the face "who owns the sun". The answer right now is no one because no one has the technology to exclude its use. But you can be damned sure that if such technology is developed, there will be those who will lay claim to the Sun, in which case the answer to "Who owns the Sun" is simply "Whoever has the means to exclude its use."
There isn't any point debating normative economics until you have a firm understanding of the positivistic realities.
They have PhDs... Therefore they think themselves appropriate judges for that.
Beautiful. I shall invoke slavery now... Your body is not even your molecules, bitch!_
I agree that it's (almost entirely?) all excludability, that is a technical and economic consideration, not a moral or political one
I thought the topic was intriguing - and your musings provocative. Didn’t get to comment on it. Cared enough to come back a few hours later to see that it has been downzapped to oblivion. Well just so you know, I clicked on your nym to retrieve this for myself. May my petty sats shoot it all the way to the top again
Hahah thanks! Appreciate it
I'm surprised you could slog through that writing. I probably couldn't (at least not purely voluntarily), but they're close to some interesting questions and just too ignorant to frame them the right way.
The concept they should be leaning on is easements, specifically negative easements.
Do we have a negative easement on the path between us and the Sun, since we've been relying on the flow of energy over that path? We haven't transformed it in any way, nor have we embordered it, so certainly nothing like Lockean homesteading has occurred.
The same question can be asked of a scenic view, enjoyed from one's property but not a part of it, or downstream water rights.
I'm not sure we have this type of thing fully answered. I doubt those sorts of negative easements can make sense, though.
that's exactly it... and why I keep going. It's going to unleash/put the finger on so much good stuff... I just have to be preparated that they'll botch it in very predictable green-doomer ways
Easements sound cool... and very legalistic. Have I heard about this from some Mises/Judge Napoletano/Bob Murphy thing?
More likely you'd have come across it in Kinsella's writing. That's where I learned the most about them.
Good for you getting a few chapters in, what motivated you to read this book haha?
This book review, dude talking about the history of Norwegian natural resources management and the oil industry
https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/book-review-the-natural-dividend
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