New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Hardin vs. Demsetz, or The Tragedy of the Commons versus the Economists

By Gordon Hull

I’m going to be teaching Harold Demsetz’s “Toward a Theory of Property Rights” (1967) tomorrow, and noticed a couple of things that I hadn’t before. I suspect they’re related, and say something about the moment the article appeared.  At least, that’s what I want to propose here.  To set it up: Demsetz is known for the theory that property rights emerge when it is efficient to internalize externalities.  His example is land rights among Native Americans; he says that property in land increases with the arrival of the fur trade.  Absent land rights, there was always a risk in overly intensive hunting occurring: without private property, it is in nobody’s interest to invest in the growth and maintenance of hunting stock.  Before the arrival of Europeans, this was fine because there was no particular incentive to hunt too intensively.  When the European fur trade arrived however, the incentives to intensive hunting grew, and property rights emerged as a management strategy.  If I have to live with the consequences of depletion of the hunting stock on my land, I’ll have the incentive to manage it correctly.  That, at least, is the story.  It’s quasi descriptive in the sense that Demsetz thinks this is an explanation for why we have property regimes, and somewhat normative in that it’s clear between the lines that he thinks private property is a good way to go.  Here’s the observations: first, the piece is heavily reliant on Ronald Coase, and second, although the narrative sounds like a tragedy of the commons narrative, it actually flies in the face of what Hardin was trying to do in that article.

If this is true, it is horrific, even for an agency that locks children in cages

UPDATE: Dahlia Lithwick has some helpful context, including litigation from the 1970s involving forced sterilizations of poor Latina women in California.  Lithwick also recounts some of the more familiar history about the early 20c legal history of forced sterilization (endorsed by SCOTUS in Buck v. Bell and Justice Holmes' declaration that "three generations of imbeciles is enough" and supposedly ending in another case in 1942), but I didn't know about the California cases.

Mass hysterectomies at an ICE detention center:

Several legal advocacy groups on Monday filed a whistleblower complaint on behalf of a nurse at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center documenting “jarring medical neglect” within the facility, including a refusal to test detainees for the novel coronavirus and an exorbitant rate of hysterectomies being performed on immigrant women .... Multiple women came forward to tell Project South about what they perceived to be the inordinate rate at which women in ICDC were subjected to hysterectomies – a surgical operation in which all or part of the uterus is removed. Additionally, many of the immigrant women who underwent the procedure were reportedly “confused” when asked to explain why they had the surgery, with one detainee likening their treatment to prisoners in concentration camps.

A little more:

The complaint details several accounts from detainees, including one woman who was not properly anesthetized during the procedure and heard the aforementioned doctor tell the nurse he had mistakenly removed the wrong ovary, resulting in her losing all reproductive ability. Another said she was scheduled for the procedure but when she questioned why it was necessary, she was given at least three completely different answers.

“She was originally told by the doctor that she had an ovarian cyst and was going to have a small twenty-minute procedure done drilling three small holes in her stomach to drain the cyst,” according to the complaint. “The officer who was transporting her to the hospital told her that she was receiving a hysterectomy to have her womb removed. When the hospital refused to operate on her because her COVID-19 test came back positive for antibodies, she was transferred back to ICDC where the ICDC nurse said that the procedure she was going to have done entailed dilating her vagina and scraping tissue off. “

Another nurse then told her the procedure was to mitigate her heavy menstrual bleeding, which the woman had never experienced. When she explained that, the nurse “responded by getting angry and agitated and began yelling at her.”

Here's a refresher on how ICE has been treating children.

A Deleuzian Undercurrent to “What is an Author” (part 6: Instaurateur as Event)

By Gordon Hull

I want here to tie together the preceding several posts (one, two, three, four, five) and finish the case for a Deleuzian undercurrent (perhaps better to say, Deleuzian and Althusserian undercurrents) to Foucault’s 1969 “What is an Author” seminar.  Recall the specific point of interest: in a somewhat odd moment near the end of the lecture, Foucault distinguishes between authors and “instaurateurs.”  The first move is to distinguish Marx and Freud from Ann Radcliff, the founder of Gothic novels.  Radcliff “opened the way for a certain number of resemblances and analogies which have their model or princiuple in her work” (114).  Marx and Freud, on the other hand, “have created a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded” (115).  He then disginguishes Marx/Freud from science as established by Galileo; for Marx/Freud, “the initiation of a discursive practice is heterogenous to its subsequent transformations” (115) rather than a development of it.

The most direct Deleuzian way to express this distinction is to say that instaurateurs are repetitions (as I explored earlier) or “events.”  Before doing that, though, it’s worth noting that Foucault did not have to mention Marx in this context.  Indeed, given his dismissals of Marxism and his hostility to the PCF, it is perhaps striking that he does so.  After all, while it is certainly the case that Foucault sees himself as offering a different critical approach from that in Marxism, he could achieve that simply by distinguishing his approach from Marxism.  Why the reference to Marx?  As I have suggested, the Foucault-Marx relation is one that’s under-explored in the literature; here, it’s only necessary to note that Foucault takes appreciative notice of Althusser’s circle and its efforts at rereading Marx.  In a decisive passage (that I noted last time), Althusser  writes: