Economist Writing Every Day

I’m working on a new paper with Bart Wilson. We might have a draft to release soon.

1. https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2023/03/25/discrepancy-in-views-about-music-pirating/  In that post, I pointed out that the estimates reported in journals for the effect of pirating on music revenues range from almost 0% to almost 100%. There is room for new empirical work. Not often is the range of the estimates that big.
2. My coauthor Bart Wilson did an interesting podcast episode for the Curious Task in 2020.

https://thecurioustask.podbean.com/e/ep-64-bart-wilson-%e2%80%94-is-the-idea-of-property-universal/

Episode: Bart Wilson — Is The Idea of Property Universal? 

I’m providing a rough transcription of the part that stood out to me, because he identified a prime big unanswered question. This is around minute 7 of the episode.

Host: Why is [the Property Species] an interesting topic deserving of a book?

Bart Wilson: “So, I work with primatologists… and I would talk to them about what I’m working on with my laboratory experiments on property. They would say, ‘Oh yeah. Dolphins do that, too, or baboons. … scrub jays re-cache their food if another scrub jay is watching them so they are protecting themselves against theft… so property is all over the animal kingdom. And then I’m also working with my colleague in the English department. In the humanities, property is a very narrow thing, something Western European. It’s very modern. And, so, in one part of the academy property is this broadly natural phenomenon and in another part of the academy it’s very local: only some humans have it. And so, as a social scientist…”

Bart identified a gap in understanding. Property cannot be both common to all animals and rare among humans. In his book The Property Species he spans that gap by claiming (spoiler alert) that property is common to all humans and only humans. Human language is an important piece of that story. No other animal can wield complex symbolic language.

In our new paper (manuscript forthcoming) we’ll be investigating how humans use symbolic language to describe nonrivalrous digital resources.