Book Review: Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives

WINTER 2021/22

Ownership seems straightforward, doesn’t it? We all know what’s “mine”, and we’re prepared to vigorously defend our right to keep and protect it. If other people don’t respect those rights we get very angry, very quickly.

Take the man who was annoyed by the drone hovering over his garden, so he went to get his shotgun and blast it out of the sky. His view is simple: it’s my garden, I can do what I want with the air above it. But the person who was flying the drone has a different point of view: you’ve damaged my property, and I want compensation.

Who’s right? Well, as the authors point out, that’s actually far from clear. We often use competing stories about ownership that lead us to different conclusions. The book boils it down to six:

First come, first served
Possession is nine tenths of the law
You reap what you sow
My home is my castle
Our bodies, our selves
The meek shall inherit the earth

In this fascinating book, they argue that these stories are frequently wrong, that disputes over ownership mostly come down to competing stories, and that the rules which settle ownership act as a “remote control” for our lives, societies, and economies. “Ownership design” captures this idea that the rules we agree about who owns what have powerful, often unforeseeable, effects.

“Ownership design is best understood as a social engineering tool designed to steer your behaviour, invisibly and decisively.”

This, for me, is the crucial takeaway from the book. It’s a really good illustration of a principle from systems thinking that, to quote Donella Meadows,

“If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules and to who has power over them.”

The example from the book that gets most attention is the dispute over the rights and wrongs of reclining your seat on an aeroplane. I heard an interview with the authors in which they said that, when they speak at conferences, audiences split about 50:50 down the middle on this…so I turned to our panel to see what the UK public made of it all.

It turns out that it really is a question which splits us 50:50, with just under half thinking it’s selfish and rude, although at least the recliners do say they consider the person behind them!

The point is not which of these positions you’re more inclined to agree with, it’s that the airline has exploited the ambiguity to, effectively, sell the air between your face and the seat in front of you twice (once to you and once to the person who wants to recline into it). Needless to say, it’s the airlines’ frontline staff who have to defuse the conflicts that result from this.

“Possession forms a secret language… Hundreds of times each day we unconsciously evaluate possession claims in parking lots, cafeterias, elevators, playgrounds, everywhere.”

The conflicts between different stories of ownership may come to a head soon, as problems like growing inequality, climate change, and online privacy can all be better understood when you examine the rules of ownership at play. As the authors point out, we’re encouraged to believe that we “own” much more in the digital realm than we really do.

“Pick any newspaper. We’re 100 percent confident there’s a major headline today…whose meaning snaps into focus if you understand the hidden rules of ownership.”

Mine! goes into quite detailed analysis of legal questions, but it’s key message is super-simple: we get the kind of world that we allow those with their hands on the “remote control” of ownership design to create. If we want to understand our customers, our suppliers, and our markets better, then understanding the ownership stories at play is one very useful lens to bring to bear.