http://www.loukidelis.com/on-land-ownership.html

David Loukidelis

Art by Callie Silverton

Seeing Like a State, Progress and Poverty, and Owning Land

August 19, 2022

    Negara mawi tata, desa mawi cara (The capital has its order, the
    village its customs).

--Javanese proverb

I have recently been reading Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, a
book about ways in which governments create simplified schemas in
order to make complex systems "legible"; i.e. understandable,
measurable, manipulatable. It's also about how these schemas, applied
by the power of the state, actually end up shaping what they measure,
usually along the lines of creating an optimization process for the
metric or narrow set of metrics being measured, often at the expense
of the system as a whole. For example, if you were a state managing a
forest for lumber, you might track the number of trees of a certain
variety and their heights and diameters as a way to know how much
lumber you might expect to be able to extract from the forest per
year, and ignore such things as the density and diversity of
undergrowth, animals that live in the forest, etc. However, this
might lead you to begin planting rows of trees of all the same
species to replace the old growth forests you cut down, because
according to the way you "see" the forest this is optimal for
maximizing lumber. Your schema for seeing the forest ignores the
necessity of its diversity, and this results in some unforeseen
side-affect like disease destroying your whole crop of planted trees,
or declining soil fertility which results in poor yields several
generations down the line.

Scott applies this lens to land use, which is where this book gets
really good. As the modern state developed, it was tasked with
"somehow attaching every parcel of taxable property to an individual
or an institution responsible for paying the tax on it" in order to
be able to collect taxes on land. This was not really
straightforward, because land use customs (not laws; they were
flexible and usually not written) varied so much across different
localities and were ever-changing. He provides an illustration of a
hypothetical "traditional" land use scenario. I'll quote the whole
thing because I found it really interesting:

    Let us imagine a community in which families have usufruct rights
    to parcels of cropland during the main growing season. Only
    certain crops, however, may be planted, and every seven years the
    usufruct land is redistributed among resident families according
    to each family's size and its number of able-bodied adults. After
    the harvest of the main-season crop, all cropland reverts to
    common land where any family may glean, graze their fowl and
    livestock, and even plant quickly maturing, dry-season crops.
    Rights to graze fowl and livestock on pasture-land held in common
    by the village is extended to all local families, but the number
    of animals that can be grazed is restricted according to family
    size, especially in dry years when forage is scarce. Families not
    using their grazing rights can give them to other villagers but
    not to outsiders. Everyone has the right to gather firewood for
    normal family needs, and the village blacksmith and baker are
    given larger allotments. No commercial sale from village
    woodlands is permitted. Trees that have been planted and any
    fruit they may bear are the property of the family who planted
    them, no matter where they are now growing. Fruit fallen from
    such trees, however, is the property of anyone who gathers it.
    When a family fells one of its trees or a tree is felled by a
    storm, the trunk belongs to the family, the branches to the
    immediate neighbors, and the "tops" (leaves and twigs) to any
    poorer villager who carries them off.

    Land is set aside for use or leasing out by widows with children
    and dependents of conscripted males. Usufruct rights to land and
    trees may be let to anyone in the village; the only time they may
    be let to someone outside the village is if no one in the
    community wishes to claim them. After a crop failure leading to a
    food shortage, many of these arrangements are readjusted.
    Better-off villagers are expected to assume some responsibility
    for poorer relatives--by sharing their land, by hiring them, or by
    simply feeding them. Should the shortage persist, a council
    composed of heads of families may inventory food supplies and
    begin daily rationing. In cases of severe shortages or famine,
    the women who have married into the village but have not yet
    borne children will not be fed and are expected to return to
    their native village. This last practice alerts us to the
    inequalities that often prevail in local customary tenure; single
    women, junior males, and anyone defined as falling outside the
    core of the community are clearly disadvantaged.

Seeing Like a State, page 53.

Scott is quick to mention that this scenario itself is a
simplification, and creates the false impression that these customs
are fixed, when they are closer to a living, negotiated set of
practices continually adapting to ecological and social
circumstances. Because this type of thing can't be encoded in a set
of laws, and because customs varied so widely from village to
village, this way of dividing and using land could not be "legible"
to the state. These fine-tailored and context-dependant land use
practices are opaque to an outsider, so land cannot be managed from a
centralized authority, and it cannot be taxed as effectively.
According to Scott: "Indeed, the very concept of the modern state
presupposes a vastly simplified and uniform property regime that is
legible and hence manipulable from the center." To fix this, the
state (Scott mostly focuses on Russia and France for these chapters)
undertook a scheme to introduce individual freehold tenure, where
"Land is owned by a legal individual who possesses wide powers of
use, inheritance, or sale and whose ownership is represented by a
uniform deed of title enforced through the judicial and police
institutions of the state." This idea is obviously quite familiar to
a 21st century Western reader. In fact, any other way of dividing
land feels quite foreign to me, so it was surprising to learn that
this was a relatively recent development.

Another book that I read recently is Progress and Poverty by Henry
George, which is also about land use. George basically deconstructs
all of our accepted ideas about land ownership. He claims that they
have no basis in nature, showing how traditional societies did not
have a concept of single ownership of land (he uses Native American
societies for his argument). He points out that there are no
"legitimate" claims to land ownership; all land ownership has its
origin in bloodshed, whether in the New World, where Europeans
appropriated land that had traditionally been lived on and used by
Indigenous peoples, or in the Old, where land ownership has always
come from conquest and war. George's philosophy is that man is
entitled only to what he produces through his own labour, and since
land (and the value of land) is not created by man, it cannot be the
entitlement of anyone.

Unlike Scott, George is mostly focused on land use in modern, urban
environments. George shows how, in cities, since new land cannot be
created, land values will increase as the wealth of the city grows.
As a downstream consequence, rents will rise to eat up any increase
in wealth produced by the labour of the people of that city. Land
owners, while producing no wealth, will be able to appropriate the
wealth produced by others due to their monopoly on land. This book is
almost 200 years old, but this situation sounds familiar doesn't it?
Now, I don't know if I agree wholeheartedly here. It seems to me that
if housing is abundant enough, say because land has been developed to
higher intensification as the city has grown, then landlords will not
be able to gouge their tenants, as long as the market is competitive.
Still, George makes a solid argument that land speculation and rent
gouging are the two main causes of the economic ills of industrial,
urban society. You can read a much more detailed summary and review
of Progress and Poverty on AstralCodexTen by Lars Doucet, here.

Ok, so Henry George convinced me that our system of land ownership is
unjust; and George and Scott together convinced me that it isn't
inevitable. So what's the alternative? The kind of anarchistic form
of negotiated and customary land use described by Scott is does not
easily translate to a modern industrial city setting. Besides, the
peasants described by Scott still owned and had full control over
their own houses in the village, it was the "common land" whose use
was more complex and communal. I'm not sure how much this philosophy
of the commons is relevant to urban areas. In my mind it makes more
sense that a single government representing the people should decide
how common land should be used. I do think that privately owned land
should have a lot more flexibility in how it is used and built upon
in urban environments, but that is slightly tangential.

To resolve the issue of private land ownership, Henry George proposes
a land tax, which he says would eradicate land ownership in practice
by making it impossible to profit off of the value of land. The
government would assess land values and tax land owners at 100% of
the value of the land. That way, people would be free to "own" land
in the sense of having their name on a deed and autonomy over its
use, but they would have to pay the value of that land back to the
commons in the form of a tax. We kind of already do tax land. We have
property taxes. The difference is that property taxes are levied on
the value of the land and the improvements on the land. So, if you
buy land and then build a house on it, your tax bill will increase
since the property value has increased. Also, property taxes
generally don't capture anywhere near 100% of the property's land
value.

I like this idea a lot, but I don't think it will ever be politically
popular. People like to own land. It gives them a sense of security
and pride. You can imagine how a land tax could undermine this. For
example, say I'm Carl Fredricksen from the Pixar movie Up. I bought
my house 55 years ago, and in the time that I've lived in it the city
has grown up around me so that the plot of land that my house sits on
is now extremely valuable. In our existing system of modest property
taxes, I can continue to live in the house as long as I can stomach
paying a slightly larger tax bill each year. In some places (like
California), I'm actually exempt from property tax increases; so it's
very unlikely that I'll ever have trouble affording to stay in my
home. If I was being taxed at 100% of the land's value, the pressure
to sell or try to develop my land would become massive as the land
value appreciates. Remember that Carl's house is flanked on each side
by high-rises, implying that a lot of value (in the form of rent)
could theoretically be extracted from his land. It is safe to say
that in a 100% land tax system, Carl would be forced off his land.
This kind of possibility makes people very uncomfortable. The movie
actually demonstrates a way that this tension could be resolved. Carl
doesn't like living in a busy construction zone, but he is
emotionally attached to the house he shared with with deceased wife
and can't let it go. For this reason, moving the house - accomplished
in the movie by attaching a clump of balloons to it and making it
float away - eases the tension. Carl gets to keep his house, and
presumably the land underneath it gets put to better use.

Carl Fredricksen's house in Up.

Carl Fredricksen's house in Up.

So Scott shows us how the modern state created freehold land
ownership to make land use more "legible" for taxation. George starts
with the system of freehold tenure, but shows us how we might co-opt
it and give the wealth back to the common good. One thing to point
out here is that Seeing Like a State is overflowing with historical
examples of governments expanding their power and wealth and using
their increase for anything but the common good. Scott's book is
fairly wary of large-scale government intervention in general, a
sentiment backed up by example after example of governments using
taxation, or increased information about their citizens, to wreak
havoc on social systems that are illegible to them. Can we believe
that a 100% land tax would, as George hopes, be used in place of all
other taxes? George envisions that the revenues from this tax would
be invested in public works and distributed as a "dividend" to all
citizens - a universal basic income. Whether this would happen in
practice I imagine Scott would be highly doubtful. Still, a land tax
seems like the only way we could "eliminate" land ownership without
restructuring society.

To summarize how these two books have changed my thinking on land
ownership, I would firstly say that both books have worked together
to convince me that the system of land use and ownership that
dominates the world today is actually an historical anomaly (not land
ownership itself of course, but the system of deeds and cadastral
maps that we moderns are familiar with). This opens the door to
accepting that current holders of land, and the laws that back them,
are not standing firmly on a foundation dating back to the dawn of
civilization as they might want you to believe. That truth probably
should have been more obvious to me as a Canadian citizen; a nation
founded on land that had been used by other people for tens of
thousands of years prior to European settlement. Every land deed in
this country should have the world's largest disclaimer attached to
it. Yet, as Henry George points out, the institution has a shady
history no matter where in the world you look. In this spirit, I
think our social discourse should have more willingness to explore
alternate ways that our land could be used and shared, with a
philosophy that land should serve the common good foremost.

Seeing Like a State on Goodreads.

Progress and Poverty on Goodreads.

P.S. Scott Alexander (of AstralCodexTen) wrote a good book review &
summary of Seeing Like a State that I read long before I read the
actual book. You should give it a read if you want to understand the
main points of the book without reading the whole thing.

You can get emails when I post new content by adding your email
address here:

[                    ] Subscribe