- Ownership
Description
Allocating responsibility for all identified resources to individuals or to social groupings by some mutually agreeable rationale.
Context
The idea of property goes along with a culture's shift from a nomadic, hunting and gathering existence to a settled, farming way of life. It also relates to the shift from times of abundance to those of scarcity, as occurred in South Pacific island and Native American cultures. The idea is central to economics, and has strong emotional overtones in capitalist, communist, socialist etc. rhetoric.
Claim
Economic development has never occurred without a strongly-sanctioned concept of property.
Property is so foundational a concept to existing economic life that it could be allocated by different rationales than those used today, but not eradicated.
Pluralism appears to be the common national experience in that property is owned or used and managed at all levels from national down to municipal and communal government, and from multinational conglomerate corporations down to family and single person responsibility.
Counter-claim
As new resources are identified in the oceans, in Antarctica, in space as well as in the field of informatics, it is clear that "property" is too narrow a concept to be of much genuine utility.
Allocation of property value in a highly interrelated world leads to situations, as that of Latin American debts to American banks, which reveal the concept as simply unserviceable.
Metadata
- Commerce » Property