Hi there,
How do you think the notion of private property has changed, from the industrialised age, to a new globalized age, where we have a networked society, aided by informattional technology and also a biodiverse world, where the human genome is now being made public???
Thanks for your ideas.
HELP PLEASE!!! How is private property justified in a globalized world?
Hi,
I think there's a difference between private property and privacy. Sometimes it might be a question of degree, but the difference is important.
As pointed out by an earlier respondent, we are having less and less privacy nowadays. While privacy and be defined as control over private aspects of our lives, some stuff was never totally private anyway, like finger prints, blood type... (Some countries have finger prints on the Identity cards, so fingerprints have been in databases for the longest time). The thing is that nowadays there is a systematic effort to collect and keep this info, and make it available. It's the last bit that's 'scary', making it available. There have been many cases of lost information, from the British Government losing lists of people receiving aid, to giant corporations like HSBC losing data on who owns insurance policies with them. I am sure there are many more that are not reported. But again, these pieces of info, which we might want to claim as private to us, were never private. The 'bank knows' I own an insurance policy with them. The people who have access to the systems can know. So believing in the privacy of this info was held only by the belief that non-disclosures and all that jazz that employees have to sign mean a lot. Sometimes, they just don't.
To me, a lot of things we thought as private, aren't really private, and people can find out if they want to.
But this is different from private property. For the importance of property rights, we should look at the Coase Theorem. Basically, Coase theorem argues that if there is clear definition or private property, problems like pollution would be solved. Imagine you owned a river and live by fishing in it. Now I'm a factory owner, and I dump my pollutants into the river. Because you own the river (the property rights are clearly defined) you can sue me. So we will negotiate. One solution could be that I pay you for the damage to the river and for the fish you lose and continue dumping but include the costs of this payment in my costs of production. But the main thing is that the cost of my pollution is borne by me.
If tomorrow factories are forced to pay for their emissions of pollutants in the atmosphere, those with cleaner etchnology would be at an advantage and factory owners have the incentive to clean up their acts, or go bankrupt.
Now you can apply this idea to elephants in Africa for example. If the tribes own the elephants and gain the tourism revenue from allowing tour groups to visit the herd, they will have the incentive to protect the elephants rather than allow people to kill them for ivory if the revenues from tourism are higher than the price of ivory. People who illegally kill elephants do so because they have to property right on the elephants, and thus they make money by killing them. However, if nobody owns the elephants, nobody has an incentive to protect them.
In sum I'd say that clearly defined property rights can help solve many problems in the world. But of course, defining who gets the property rights is a very tough question, a whole can of worms. But on the other hand, we must realise that own right of information about ourselves is changing, it was not private, and is likely to be less so in the future.
HELP PLEASE!!! How is private property justified in a globalized world?
Because private property is good.
If you want to see what happens when a country gets rid of private property go read some articles and Zimbabwe.
Unfortunately, due to the phoney war war on terror, I/you/we have fewer and fewer rights to privacy.
? How can State ownership be good in a Free World??
