Bethell simultaneously develops two themes. First, he describes in detail many historical cases that show how attenuated property rights have shrunk the economic pie. Second, be traces economists' thinking about property and law. Many readers will be familiar with the examples. Even so, it is useful to gather them in one volume....
Most interesting to me were the accounts of the Plymouth colony, the Irish potato famine, and the Arab world. I was unaware that prior to sailing for America, the Pilgrims had opposed the communal arrangement that later nearly caused their complete destruction. (I had always assumed that the Pilgrims were naive Christians emulating the early church.) Their position had been compromised by agents who acceded to demands by the colony's financial backers that output be equally distributed.
Bethell ascribes the Irish potato famine to insecure property rights. Apparently, he caught the scent of the property-rights trail from an 1836 comment of Thomas Malthus on Ireland: "There is indeed a fatal deficiency in one of the greatest sources of prosperity, the perfect security of property." Malthus, however, did not elaborate. Additional suspicion was aroused by others (John Stuart Mill, for example) who attributed Irish poverty to sloth and shortsightedness. Such behavior, says Bethell, is symptomatic of faulty incentives. For example, the English had perpetrated a series of land confiscations that had undoubtedly shortened landlords' time horizons. In any event, the important question for Bethell is why Ireland was poor in the first place, for the famine merely pushed it over the edge. Whether Bethell has all the historical details correct I am not sure, but his discussion is an interesting one.
For the Arab world, Bethell notes that "the brutal punishments meted out to thieves suggest that Arab property is prized and protected. The problem is that there is no security against the depredations of the state itself" (p. 225). Land that was once cultivated and productive is now desert. Bethell dismisses the Koran as the source of the difficulty. Instead, he traces the problem to a "freezing" of Islamic law in the fifteenth century....
With respect to his other theme, economists' thinking about private property, Bethell argues that Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus, among others, understood its importance but took its existence as a given. Bethell tells the story of the profession's subsequent long descent toward neglect of private property's importance....
Bethell locates the property-rights renaissance in the economics profession in the late 1950s and early 1960s at UCLA and Chicago. Armen Alchian and Ronald Coase figure prominently in the discussion. Unlike Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus, however, Alchian and Coase confronted an intellectual milieu that did not accept the importance of property rights. They, along with other property-rights theorists, had to work hard to get their foot in the door, as did their close professional relatives, the public-choice economists.
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