Pippip's picture

I would like to add that property rights are not always about land, by adding an example from my own life. I apologise in advance if it seems petty by comparison.
A few months ago, the microwave on the 5th floor of my office building broke. It was a communal microwave oven that some of us used to heat up our lunch. I work for a very large and very kind multinational company, which has no problem spending money on staff amenities, and the janitor advised that we simply had to fill out a form to request a replacement.
However, there are 3 departments based on the same floor, and for some accountancy reason the cost couldn't be split three ways (I don't know why), and so a stand off was reached. It sounds selfish, but the reason none of the 3 were willing to pay for it outright wasn't only because it was a shared resource, there is more to it.
In our company, the allocation of head office desk space is centrally planned. Sometimes this is a good thing: as work priorities shift, some teams grow bigger, or others shrink, and get moved about into the best space to fit them. But in this example, no manager wants to put their own budget money down to improve facilities in one area of the building, when they could find the whole team moved at short notice somewhere else, and not realise the benefits. Like with the land rights examples, a lack of ownership has led to people being unwilling to invest in improving their surroundings.
Now that I've finished writing this, I realise that my example is about land after all. In fact, my office drama is exactly analogous to a parcel of Chinese farmland allocated to a collective of families. The point I was trying to make though, I think still stands - that it is not always about land and national governments - which to me seem very big, and forbidding. My own example is smaller-scale, and trivial compared to developing-nation scenarios, but maybe just because this problem is local to me, I feel more empowered to be able to solve this one.

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Roman Hardgrave's picture

It's funny how you can see these concepts everywhere. Thanks for sharing.

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