Emergence of Sago Palms as Private Property: An Extension of Demsetz’s Thesis of the Origins of Private Property
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Harold Demsetz (1967. “Towards a Theory of Property Rights,” The American Economic Review 57(2): 350), in a seminal paper, developed an economic thesis of the emergence of private property: “[P]roperty rights develop to internalize externalities when the gains of internalization become larger than the cost of internalization…. [G]iven a community’s tastes … the emergence of new private or state-owned property rights will be in response to changes in technology and relative prices.” Demsetz used his theory to explain anthropologist Leacock’s findings about the emergence of private hunting grounds for fur-bearing animals among the Canadian Montagne Indian tribes living in Quebec. In a more recent paper, Demsetz (2002. “Toward a Theory of Property Rights II: The Competition between Private and Collective Ownership,” The Journal of Legal Studies 31: S653–72) broadened his theory to include the emergence of private property from state enforcement of contractual rights. In this paper, I revisit Demsetz’s thesis by showing that there is another pathway to the emergence of private property. The facts I use to develop my law and bioeconomics-public choice theory of the emergence of sago palms as private property are based on anthropologist H. S. Morris’s (1976. “A Problem in Land Tenure,” in G. N. Appell (ed.) The Societies of Borneo: Explorations in the Theory of Cognatic Social Structure , pp. 110–20. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association) case study of Melanau hunter-gatherer-fishing tribal people living in Sarawak where individuals held sago palms as private property.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".