Partial Common Ownership

Description

"A better approach is to find a way to balance the demands of investment efficiency and allocative efficiency. We will call this approach “partial common ownership”—a halfway house between common ownership and traditional private property. Partial common ownership optimizes allocative efficiency and investment efficiency within a single property regime, as the common ownership can deter monopoly power while the private ownership encourages investment."

(http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s11222.pdf)

Discussion

Matt Prewitt and Jack Henderson:

"Most other calls to rethink capitalism recognize as we do that important sources of value and productivity are “upstream” and non-marketized factors like physical and social infrastructure, invisible work within families and communities, etc.—which are much more distributed and networked than the wildly distorted and inequitable outcomes in capitalism lead us to believe.

But they do not question conventional ownership itself. Instead, they usually seek to either divide and fractionalize ownership (i.e., give more or different people a share of conventional ownership); or consolidate ownership (i.e., place it in the hands of some representative of the public, like the state). Both of these approaches often do good, but they are only band-aids. Fractionalizing ownership just “spreads around” the same old extractive incentives of conventional ownership, while consolidating ownership “puts all the eggs in one basket,” intensifying the risks of institutional capture and illegitimate representation.

PCO takes a different path. It is based on the idea that temporary use licenses, subject to community governance and what we call “self-assessed” fees, are both a fairer and more efficient way of distributing power than conventional ownership. This matters, because the most compelling justifications for conventional ownership rest on the supposition that it incentivizes owners to invest in the things they own. PCO speaks not only to social justice and environmental concerns, but also to the same efficiency concerns that are usually cited to support the status quo."

(https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/pco-a-new-model-of-ownership/)

More information

• More at [1], pp. 52+

* Article: PCO: A NEW MODEL OF OWNERSHIP. Matt Prewitt, Jack Henderson. February 20, 2024

URL = https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/pco-a-new-model-of-ownership/

"In this piece, we step back and describe a broad vision for how PCO could help weave a fairer and better-governed society. We’ll begin by comparing conventional ownership and universal forms of communication, discussing how both oppress complex networks as much as they may connect them. We’ll then describe why PCO offers a gentler, less “noisy”, and more “layered” alternative to conventional ownership. We’ll conclude with a few words about how super-powerful AIs might make PCO more workable; and conversely, PCO might make a world of powerful AIs more just and livable."