We take property to be as natural as the air we breathe because it’s all around us and we are used to it. But the idea of property is a relatively modern and quite artificial construct. It’s an entirely human construct, as artificial as a car or a mobile phone. It’s not “natural” at all.
We didn’t have the notion of propety until fairly recently. Anatomically modern humans or homo sapiens have been around for only about 250,000 years, or roughly 10,000 generations. For 95% of human history, we lived in mobile foraging bands. We had no notion of property. We operated under economic and ecological constraints that actively penalized accumulation.
Our ancestors used to be hunter-gatherers.
Owning things was not compatible with the nomadic hand-to-mouth existence of hunting and gathering. While hunter-gatherers did recognize personal possessions (like an axe or or a spear), the modern concept of property—exclusive ownership of land, surpluses, and capital (a quite sophisticated concept) was largely incompatible with nomadic life which only became economically necessary after the Neolithic Revolution.
When one has to walk 10 to 20 miles every few days to follow migrating herds or seasonal plants, anything you could not carry was a liability, not an asset. Carrying things would slow down the group and threaten survival. Continue reading “Poverty, Property and Prosperity”
