The Property Species

Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind

By: Bart J. Wilson

Narrated by: Mike Lenz

What is property, and why does our species have it? In The Property Species, Bart J. Wilson explores how humans acquire, perceive, and know the custom of property and why this might be relevant to understanding how property works in the 21st century.

Arguing that neither the sciences nor the humanities synthesizes a full account of property, the book offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: Property is a universal and uniquely human custom. Integrating cognitive linguistics with philosophy of property and a fresh look at property disputes in the common law, the book makes the case that symbolic-thinking humans locate the meaning of property within a thing.

That is, 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.

Written by an economist who marvels at the natural history of humankind, the book is a must-listen for experts and anyone who has wondered why people claim things as "Mine!" and what that means for our humanity.

©2020 Oxford University Press (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Masterful return of the Humanities to Economics.

This book, beautifully performed as an audiobook, represents a masterful continuation of a tradition in Economics and the Social sciences that has unfortunately experienced a long hiatus. Economists including Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and Frank Knight strode across disciplines to better understand commerce and the material well-being of societies. Unfortunately, due to the effort to exhaustively mathematize the profession, and the broader trend of rigidly drawing lines between disciplines, economists these days are rarely venture outside their spreadsheets and explicitly economic subject matter. Bart J. Wilson breaks this trend by veering into linguistics, history, and anthropology to shine a light on the blind spot of Economists and other social scientists. Property rights, as Wilson persuasively and thoroughly points out, are not just the legal rights over material objects we demarcate and carry around with this. They are a custom unique to humanity and imbued with moral character. The rights to property represent an extension of one's person. The universal visceral human response to theft is tied to this custom and sits at the heart of every economic system.