Book Review: The Property Species: Mine,Yours and the Human Mind (2020)

Property Premises

Having spent most of my career studying possessions, materialism, gift-giving, and sharing, I eagerly looked forward to The Property Species by economist Wilson (2020). Wilson offers a bold and original analysis of the beginnings and nature of property. But as I read, I found myself arguing with many of his premises and conclusions. I believe the book is an instructive provocation and that there are lessons to be learned from examining his claims and arguments. In what follows I lay out Wilson’s claims, critique them, and then discuss how I believe they should cause us to re-examine our own premises and what we may learn from doing so in light of current property-related consumer behaviors.

Wilson makes six key claims:

1. “…property emerged gradually out of the human tradition regarding tools” (p. 25):

a. [on contemplating a spear in a cave painting circa 17,000 BCE] “the person created the spear ‘for himself’ and ‘not for me’” (p. 40).

b. “If someone else were to pick up the spear when I lie down, my immediate response would be to shout, ‘Hey, that spear is mine!’” (p. 48).

c. “I think I have good reasons to say that this spear is mine. I use it as an extension of myself and to take it is to harm me” (p. 53).

d. “The other members of our group disapprove of someone taking my spear because they empathize with me in the harm that I feel” (p. 58).

2. “The concepts of THIS, MINE, I and WANT are as simple as they get in any language, and in every language people know what each individual word for such a concept means” (p. 52).

3. “If things were not scarce and people not mischievous, selfish, and limited in generosity, we would not need a rule of property regarding things” (p. 87).

4. “…property and the concept of mine is a human universal” (p. 88).

5. Property is basic to economics:

a. “…economists broadly accept property rights as indispensable for understanding economics” (p. 60).

b. “…thinking with property…makes the routine exchange of things possible, which is the hallmark of humanity and the very foundation of economics” (p. 195).

If these premises are indeed the foundation of economics, it appears that economics may be on shaky ground. The first four are largely unwarranted assertions of universal motives. All five premises ignore the sharing that forms the basis for the household and a number of other groups. As I (Belk, 2010) and others (e.g. Widlok, 2017) contend, without sharing the human species would almost certainly not have survived. But the focus on ownership by isolated individuals is a key handicap in Wilson’s book. For example, there are only three mentions of “family” in the book’s 230 pages. One notes that in ancient Rome the oldest male citizen in the family/household was the head of the house (p. 90). The other two mentions, both in passing, are of the family dog (p. 5) and a family vacation (p. 99). Yet the dog is likely a shared possession as well as a family member and the vacation is a shared family consumption activity. As we will see, this omission causes problems.

Lines of Evidence

In support of his five premises, Wilson draws on a diverse set of evidence. One is his understanding of the “the minds of human beings who lived 17,000 years ago” based on the presence of spears in several prehistoric cave paintings in France. Let’s call this line of evidence archaeological. He also draws on economic theory, especially John Locke’s labor theory of value and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. From Locke, he takes the premise that if a person takes things from nature, like a tree and a stone, and makes something of them, like a spear, that thing belongs to him or her. Presumably the person made the spear by him- or herself. From Smith, Wilson takes the idea that this object is invested with emotion and feelings of self. This involves another line of evidence focused on the extended self – some possessions are regarded as a part of us; the spear extends what we can do (1c above).

Wilson also draws on child development. For example, he suggests that while “no human child must be taught the word mine, all must be taught by their mentors to say, ‘That is yours,’ and the customs of when they can and cannot say, ‘This is mine’” (Wilson, 2020, p. 12). He also observes that children assume that created objects like toys belong to someone, but that natural things like seashells do not. And we are told that children are natural born possessors, that no human parent needs to teach their children to resist attempts to take things within their grasp, and that two-year-olds believe that a ball belongs to the first one who touches it.

Another line of evidence offered is from the work of Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014) in establishing 65 “prime” linguistic concepts that they assert generalize across all languages. This work on Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) presumably makes it possible to translate these concepts across languages with no loss of meanings. Natural Semantic Metalanguage has its critics (e.g. Bamberg, 1997; Wearing, 2009), but it has been characterized as “an instructive failure” (Wawrzyniak, 2010). Nevertheless, Wilson insists that speakers of all languages can say “It’s mine” and mean the same thing by it. Let’s call this line of evidence linguistic.

An additional line of evidence that Wilson draws on is ancient Western legal precepts. The bulk of legal precedents regarding property are drawn from ancient Roman law. Wilson notes that the basis of the term for Roman citizens, or Quirites, was the term quiris, or spear. The Roman Quirite, with his quiris in hand, could say “Hoc est meum” and mean that not just the spear, but all the things acquired by using it, were his belongings. More subtle surviving applications of Roman law need not concern us here, except perhaps that someone who enjoys usufruct rights to a thing (the freedom to use it within prescribed boundaries) does not enjoy proprietas (property) in the thing. Someone who rents or hires a thing does not modify the property rights in the thing that continue to be held by its owner.

A final line of evidence used to buttress the claim that asserting “It is mine” is the basis for property rights, involves a series of computer-run economic experiments with students who were allowed to communicate with one another through computer terminals. The experiments involved tasks in which the students or student groups played zero-sum competitive games with real monetary payouts. Thus, the gains of one student or group meant losses for others. For example, in one game the students had to “hunt whales” on a computer screen and harpoon them. They sometimes lost a harpooned whale, but their now embedded harpoon bore testimony that they were the first to have made contact with the whale. The students were left on their own to evolve strategies or the rules of the game. Wilson tells us that the simulation resembled whaling off the US Atlantic coast in the 18th and 19th centuries. The idea was to see whether the students would develop their own moral codes of competition as the whalers reportedly did. The experimenters recorded outcomes and messages between the players in order to demonstrate various property principles involving empathy, competition, and cooperation.

Through these various lines of evidence, Wilson provides support for each of his five propositions. Together the book offers evidence for an instinctive or evolutionary basis for property economics and property law. Wilson is emphatic that these lines of evidence show that the development of property rules could only happen with the human species. While animals can, to varying degrees, demonstrate possessiveness, territoriality, toolmaking, cooperation, competition, and gift-giving, Wilson insists that they do not have property. This, Wilson says, is because they cannot voice that something is theirs, they abandon their tools, and they presumably do not have symbolic thoughts about the things in their possession. While he asserts that only humans have property in things, he acknowledges that animals may have property in food, sexual mates, and territories. Rather than resolve this apparent contradiction he attributes it to the different definitions of property in different disciplines such as biology, zoology, and anthropology. Due to these differing definitions, Wilson argues, it is only an illusion that animals have property.

Property Problems

Despite bringing together a diverse set of evidence, Wilson’s The Property Species has a number of limitations, blind spots, questionable assumptions, omissions, and mischaracterizations. Although the book presents itself as being scientific, there appears to be an underlying agenda to justify neoliberal policies of minimal government and maximal private ownership. Harvey (2005, p. 2) specifies that neoliberalism is:

a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free market, and free trade.

Aided by John Locke’s elevation of private ownership ideology, the free market economics of Friedrich Hayek, the deregulation and privatization of the Reagan/Thatcher years, and the reformulated free market economics of Milton Friedman, neoliberalism has led to “…an economy built on just-in-time production, the internationalization of capital, the deregulation of industry, insecure labor, and the entrepreneurial self” (Iber, 2018, p. 50). Wilson’s attempt to ground private property rights in human nature can be seen as an attempt to justify contemporary capitalism, free market economics, and neoliberalism by claiming they derive from a drive for private property that is natural and instinctive (e.g. Angebauer, 2020; Slobodian, 2018).

One of the biggest problems of the book is that with the exception of some of the groups in the experimental lab studies, it is written as if the claim, “It is mine” is necessarily singular; never the plural, “It is ours.” Such joint property, de facto or de jure, is most common within kinship groups (Belk, 2007, 2010; Gowdy, 1998; Widlok, 2017, 2019), but it can occur within larger groups. It is common for instance in the demand sharing of hunter-gatherer groups (Macdonald, 2000; Peterson, 2013). Widlok (2017, p. 3) gives the current example of sharing game meat acquired by a successful Hadza hunter in Tanzania. Rather than the hunter or her family getting the larger share of the meat, it is shared with the entire camp group of 25–30 people as well as anyone else who is present or asks for a share. The person who killed the game accrues no special status, her kin have no special claim on the meat, and she has no special claim on future game killed by others with whom she has shared. Although there is ownership of personal possessions in such nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, possessions are a burden due to the groups’ mobile lifestyles (Belk et al., 2000; Widlok, 2017). It may well be that the paleolithic hunters in France shared their spears. Wilson’s vision of the birth of possessive individualism in the depiction of people and spears in cave art requires a leap of faith that is questionable in light of contemporary evidence with hunter-gatherers. This suggests a basic weakness in his archaeological line of evidence.

Wilson further assumes that we live in a world of scarcity and that finite resources mean that one person’s gain is another’s loss. While we are beginning to address the fact that we live in a world of finite natural resources, we also live in an age of great abundance for a growing portion of the world (Lewis, 2008). Elder-Vass (2016, pp. 4–6) notes that with internet affordances like Google and Wikipedia, the resulting information, images, and videos are both abundant and seemingly infinite. Yet, as noted in the third premise above, Wilson (2020, p. 87) assumes that things are scarce, and people are mischievous, selfish, and stingy. Aside from offering a quite negative characterization of the human species, this view invokes the “limited good” view of the world: there is only so much stuff (goods, money, jobs, or other property) to go around, so that your gain is my loss (Foster, 1965). On the other hand, an unlimited good worldview suggests that not only is there enough to go around, but in fact, by contributing to the local economy there may be more for everyone (a positive sum worldview). This is even more true in a sharing economy (e.g. Giesler, 2006; Wolf and Ritz, 2018). Together with the net positive economic effects of globalization, this weakens confidence in the behavioral support for Wilson’s economic line of evidence as well as the zero-sum competitive assumptions behind his experimental line of evidence.

Sharing tangible goods outside the family is practiced most extensively in times of need like war, famine, or natural disaster (e.g. Baker and Baker, 2016). Formerly nomadic Aboriginal groups in Australia who have settled in outback communities and adopted some of the ways of the European colonizers have started to develop individual property norms. But strong traces of their former sharing ethos still remain. For instance, if someone owns or is in charge of an automobile, members of the community may expect to be able to use it in order to go to a funeral, initiation, or shopping, provided that they ask first (Belk et al., 2000; Stoltz, 1993). Refusing to share is loudly criticized and sometimes results in fights (Belk et al., 2000).

We also see shared ownership in institutions. Churches own objects on behalf of their congregations. Museums own art objects on behalf of their patrons. Corporations own things on behalf of their shareholders. Communities own things for use by their residents. And nations own things on behalf of their citizens and residents. These legal fictitious persons likely never voiced a collective cry “This is mine!” And yet, they certainly exercise ownership and control of these things through their leaders. Greer (2018, 12) notes that property in land implies lineages as well as individuals and there are typically inheritance arrangements of some sort. The model of a single owner is an oversimplification that ignores more complex realities. It is too simplistic to assert that indigenous groups like native Americans had no land ownership or hunting territories prior to colonization. The situation is vastly different between sedentary groups like the Nahua of central Mexico, the semi-sedentary village Ninnimissinuok of New England, and the nomadic Innu of the St Lawrence Valley in Quebec (Greer, 2018). But all had systems of land ownership that attached to groups and extended far back in time.

Joint ownership of land and other possessions means that more people can potentially enjoy them compared to when we lock them up or fence off private property. Individuals may also derive greater inspiration from merely having access to things like art, parks, and athletic fields through communal forms of sharing (Chen, 2009). And while digital music, books, and film are now thoroughly commodified, making them more difficult to share with others, short of censorship or social engineering (e.g. Strittmatter and Martin, 2018/2020) no one can stop us from singing a song with others, discussing a book, or posting a review of a film. These too are forms of communal sharing. Sharing the use of an object creates feelings of attachment and ownership even if there is no legal claim to the object (Klein and Baker, 2004). For instance, children speak of “our home,” “our cat,” and “our table,” even though their parents may be the legal owners (Belk, 2010). In other instances, we may jointly assume ownership of an object like a cooperative garden plot (Findlay, 2018) or participation in a “library” of children’s toys (Ozanne and Ballantine, 2010).

In Western property practices there may be non-owners of things who have the temporary short- or long-term legal right to use an object like a rental apartment, a leased automobile, or a mortgaged house. With the advent of the so-called “sharing economy” we can engage in short-term rental of a variety of goods and services from rides and timeshare vacation homes to designer clothes and garden tools. In these cases, users may well refer to these things as “mine,” at least for the period specified in the rental contract. The short-term rental of the “sharing economy” increases abundance and in some cases demonstrates true shared ownership (Belk, 2014).

Another problem occurs when we regard property from a behavioral point of view rather than a hypothetical economic point of view. Wilson regards all property as exchangeable if not fungible such that an object may be replaced by an identical object or one of similar or greater value. But behaviorally this is seldom the case. If you are married and wear a wedding ring, imagine the reception you would receive if you return home one evening and tell your partner what a “killing” you made in exchanging your ring for one that is similar in appearance but made of finer materials and easily worth 50% more. Because of the romantic love and marriage that the ring likely represents in the West (Belk, 1988, 2020), your partner may well conclude that you have just sold out the bond between you as a couple as well.

Radin (1993, p. 41) observes that a person may sell their hair to a wig maker, donate blood for a transfusion, or sign a card to be an organ donor upon death, thereby making these body parts commodities. But while they are a part of the person, they remain “personal, thus seemingly not property.” The same is true in reverse with artificial parts like a replacement hip joint. When it is inserted into the body it goes from being a fungible commodity to being constitutive of the self and “no longer property at all.” Elder-Vass (2016) emphasizes that the donation of blood or organs is not an economic transaction at all and that traditional economics cannot account for such behaviors. Further, these attachments, detachments, and reattachments cast doubt and sow confusion on Wilson’s extended self line of evidence.

Kopytoff (1986) suggests that objects have a “biography.” They may go back and forth between being saleable commodities and singularized personal possessions. Singularized personal possessions like your wedding ring or a family heirloom (Türe and Ger, 2016) enter a sacred realm of being possessions that are above and outside of market and exchange value (Belk et al., 1989). It is within this status that possessions come to be seen as inalienable, by individuals or groups (Weiner, 1992). They are seen as being constitutive of the person or group. Radin (1993, p. 2) notes that in teaching property law she found again and again that students, judges, and teachers weighed personal attachment to property as more significant than mere monetary attachment to property held as an investment, even though legally the two claims to ownership are equal. I found the same thing among collectors who saw investor/collectors of an object, whether fine art or comic books, as lacking the passion of “true” collectors. Instead, they were apt to buy art sight-unseen and to lock it up in a vault rather than enjoy it. They were disparaged because they had made a saleable commodity of that which the collectors felt should be part of an inalienable personal collection (Belk, 1995, 1998). These examples of diverging valuations of legally equivalent objects weaken confidence in Wilson’s legal precepts line of evidence.

Another topic that does not appear in Wilson’s book is the gift. Gift-giving, and especially agapic gifts are given only to bring the recipient pleasure; these too are not economic transactions (Belk and Coon 1993). Economists (e.g. Kolm and Ythier 2006a; 2006b) as well as many sociologists (e.g. Elder-Vass, 2016; Zelizer, 1994), and anthropologists (e.g. Godbout and Caillé, 1998; Mauss, 1925/1967) see the gift as not fully escaping the logic of the market because a gift demands a counter-gift and until this occurs the recipient is in debt to the giver. But there is a difference between the economic and the sociological or anthropological perspectives. The economist Waldfogel (2009) argues that because, based on empirical reports, recipients value gifts less than what they cost the givers, gift-giving is wasteful and we should therefore stop spending on gifts and instead spend the money on ourselves in order to achieve greater happiness (economic utility) for all. This entirely misses the fact that gift-giving is a ritual that creates, perpetuates, and reinforces social bonds. Like the wedding ring example, to see gift-giving as a purely economic exchange is a basic misunderstanding. Anthropologists Godbout and Caillé (1998, p. 189) observe that while both giver and recipient recognize the rules of reciprocity, they pretend the transaction is a one-way gift with no expectation of reciprocity. This is because making reciprocity explicit “kills the gift and can even result in non-reciprocity.” But much giving, as for instance with families’ generous gifts to children (often disguised through magical gift-givers like Santa) are truly one-way without expectations of return (Clark, 1995). Like sharing, much gift giving contradicts Wilson’s assumptions that humans are inherently selfish individualists interested in maximizing only their own pleasure to the full extent that society and the law allow.

Wilson also cites and describes simulations and experiments demonstrating that theft and disrespect of owner rights to private property can be mitigated if participants see a greater advantage in not stealing. Here too the assumption of selfish individualism is built into the design of the studies. Rochat (2014) gives a counterexample in more group-oriented communal Samoa. When the anthropologist Brad Shore complained to his “father” that one of his “brothers” had stolen money out of his wallet, the father chastised him for having tempted his brother by leaving his wallet unattended causing inescapable envy. Thus, seen from a less individualistic cultural perspective, the thief becomes the victim. Similarly, in a Trinidadian garment factory studied by Prentice, 2009, the low-paid female workers’ theft of patterns and materials, and their use of factory equipment to make their own garments was seen as the opposite of stealing. It was instead a case of “everyday resistance” celebrating local values of self-reliance, autonomy, and cleverness in the face of oppression. It was a form of retributive justice that in the workers’ minds made it a form of “moral thieving.”

Another important limitation of Wilson’s approach to property and ownership is that it focuses on legal ownership rather than psychological ownership (Peck and Shu, 2018; Pierce and Jussila, 2011). To be fair, Wilson attempts to ground his argument that “It is mine” as the basis for property and ownership on an older summary paper about psychological ownership by Pierce et al. (2003). But the very premise of psychological ownership is that it differs from notions of legal property and ownership. An example of the difference is found in the “endowment effect.” Unlike classical economic theory, the endowment effect shows that the difference between the price that people are willing to pay for an object versus the price they are willing to sell it for depends on feelings of attachment, regardless of whether it is actually owned or not. For instance, giving someone an object to hold or even having it near them creates feelings of possession such that the person values it more highly (Peck and Shu, 2018; Reb and Connolly, 2007). It is also possible to create the endowment effect by “touching” an online object on a touch screen, but not with a mouse or keyboard interface because they are too distanced and “hands off” (Basel and Gips, 2014). Such findings defy economic precepts of legal ownership and private property and further weaken confidence in Wilson’s economic line of evidence.

Where Wilson attempts to discuss the symbolic meanings of property using Peircean semiotics he gets into further trouble. He partially misuses Peirce’s distinctions between icon, index, and symbol. An icon directly represents its referent as when a school crossing sign shows a silhouette of children crossing the street. An index is a sign that is directly related to its referent as with smoke indicating fire. And a symbol is a human convention like an R_x to indicate a prescription. Wilson gets some of this right. But he calls the sound of a siren of an emergency vehicle iconic (it is indexical and was initially symbolic). He says that words indicating objects are indexical (they are symbolic). And he says that drawings of objects like cows and potatoes are the objects themselves (they are iconic representations). Wilson also calls the relationship of the words “cows” and “potatoes” to the objects they reference indexical (it is symbolic). These mistakes undermine confidence in his semiotic analysis of property, which was referred to above as his linguistic line of evidence.

Wilson cites Penner (1997) who “…rejects the claim that property is a culturally relative conception … [rather the] ‘idea’ of property transcends local customs” (p. 123). There is strong evidence to refute this claim (e.g. Hann, 1998). The land appropriations and reformulations of property by European colonialists in North America (Greer, 2018; Wagoner, 1998), Australia (Bhandar, 2018; Meek, 1949), Africa (Burke, 1996; Ramamurthy, 2003), and India (Neal, 1962; Nichols, 2020) are prime examples. For instance, when Europeans first came to Australia using the doctrine of terra nullius (nobody’s land), they ignored the Aboriginal inhabitants who had been there for the past 65,000 years and who had rich and complex property relations. This fiction was not overturned until 1992 with the (Eddie) Mabo court decision recognizing, posthumously for Eddie, that he had an ancestral claim to a portion of land.

Rochat (2014) details how cultural differences are also revealed in children’s constructions of property, ownership, and sharing. For example, 3-7-year-old Chinese and Indian children in same–sex pairs were more likely to share than comparable age children in the United States. But there are variations within cultures as well. Israeli 1-3-year-olds in kibbutzim showed fewer conflicts over ownership among peers if they were raised in 24/7 communal care than if they were raised in daycare. Thus, the culturally universal nature of property that Wilson proclaims in his fourth premise is challenged by developmental studies with children in different cultures. This casts doubt on his child development line of evidence.

Polanyi (1944) contends that during “The Great Transformation” of the 19th century, land, labor, and capital were made into “fictitious commodities” whereas they were previously public, personal, and social necessities respectively. More recently increased globalization and dematerialization of property have caused further changes, reminding us that cultures and their rules for property ownership and sharing differ not only over places but also over times as well (e.g. Kadomskaia et al., 2020; Rose 2004). Property laws and norms are far from being culturally universal as claimed.

Besides errors of commission, there are also errors of omission in Wilsons (2020) The Property Species. Prominent here are the erasure of women, colonial subjects, and minorities as well as the book’s very brief dismissal of property in people, including women, children, and minorities, but also slaves, servants, trafficked persons, and refugees. For example, the legal doctrine of coverture that existed in England for most of the 19th century meant that upon marriage women were subsumed by their husbands. The husband and wife became one and that one was the husband. Only he could incur financial obligations, sign contracts, and vote. If a wife was allowed to work, her wages were the property of her husband. Like a slave, she was little more than chattel property. In the US it was only in the 1960s and 1970s that women were allowed to have their own bank accounts and credit cards. Mauss (1925/1967) tells us that women were the original gift object and that for most of history they could be given by one clan or village to another, typically for marriage, but also sometimes as slaves. That is, they were property.

There are concepts that are missing as well, some of which have been noted above. Others include the relationships of property and social status (e.g. Kalish and Anderson, 2011), envy (e.g. Smith, 2008), social conflicts over property (e.g. Ross et al., 2011), attachment (e.g. Kleine and Baker, 2004), provenance (e.g. Friedman, et al., 2011), grave goods (e.g. Dawdy, 2013), stewardship (e.g. Schneewind, 1996), moral economy (e.g. Klamer 2004), charity (e.g. Buchanan, 1996), the commons (e.g. Ostrom, 1990), and debt (Graeber, 2012). Each of these is a topic unto itself, but they do heavily impinge upon understandings of property and deserve to be acknowledged. They also can help interrogate the legalistic and economistic framing of Wilson’s treatment and acknowledge the richer and more entangled topics from the behavioral sciences, social and religious embeddedness, and the political economies of property regimes.

As has been noted with sharing, gift-giving, collecting, singularized personal possessions, and organ donations, there are many things that lie outside market-driven economic calculation. Elder-Vass (2016) goes farther and also includes family businesses, home care, provisioning, cooking, subsistence agriculture, charitable giving, and the creation of digital resources like YouTube videos, all of which he argues lie outside of market logic. He even suggests that such non-market economy may be larger than the market logic of property and profit. Taken together there is much that we need to study with a broader lens than is provided by Wilson’s focus on private property.

Conclusion

Consumer behavior is seldom as simple as economic models portray. Nor is it as culturally universal. Wilson’s The Property Species is an interesting neoliberal provocation. On the positive side, it is not purely theoretical; it draws on historic, archaeological, experimental, and other evidence. But there is a larger negative side in that Wilson ignores a wealth of more granular historical and behavioral evidence. Cultures are not uniform in their understandings of property and ownership, rules of distribution, or degrees of individualism. As a start towards a correction, rather than simply framing property as “yours and mine,” the addition of “ours” offers a more promising set of property alternatives.

We are so used to private ownership of property today that we either ignore cases of joint ownership or assume that such property forms died with state communism. Sharing within the family is the best counterevidence to such assumptions. But Wilson’s economistic assumptions and the errors in his conclusions and intended proofs should remind us of why we are social scientists. Omissions of gift giving, sharing, and culture remind us why we do and should study these basic social practices. Nevertheless, our blindness to creeping neoliberalism and privatization in arguments like those of Wilson’s The Property Species challenge us to reconsider the book’s basic premise that we are selfish individualists who insist that “Its mine” might be a view of our future. Consider some of the objects that we used to refer to as family possessions: the family television (and before that the family radio), the family telephone, the family car, the family computer, the family vacation, and the family dinner. In the past few decades each of these has become more privatized and individualized and many are now contained in our smartphones. Privatization is also increased as single living becomes more common than joint and family living. And social media and selfie culture also champion the sovereign individual. At the same time, the so-called sharing economy, the streaming of music, films, and television, and the dematerialization of books, letters, and photos all suggest that we may increasingly value temporary or ephemeral access above ownership and tangibility. These trends suggest challenges to the very notion of property and are rich topics for further research.

Even our beloved smartphones are valued less for themselves than for the access and affordances that they provide. Otherwise, we would not be willing to replace them every few years despite their continued functionality. If all that we value is increasingly either ephemeral, temporary, or stored in the cloud, the new reality may be one of a post-ownership society. Therefore, I believe we should appreciate Wilson’s book less for what it tells us than for its alerting us to the need to rethink property in a digital and possibly post-ownership world.