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- Title
National wealth and private poverty through civil law? a review of the book "The Code of Capital" by Katharina Pistor.
- Authors
Schäfer, Hans-Bernd
- Abstract
The fact that personal data is de facto owned by internet companies and that the corresponding legal codifications of raw data have been willingly implemented by courts in the US and elsewhere, is compared by Pistor with the English feudal lords' violent seizure of land through "enclosures" ("We are now in danger of losing access to our own data"). Other authors, such as North and Thomas' "The Rise of the Western World", emphasise that this development triggered a surge in land and labour productivity through increased arable farming, which enabled the generation of a large agricultural surplus beyond levels of self-consumption within the agricultural sector itself and hence could feed a rapidly growing urban population.[10] These authors point out that countries such as Spain, in which the Crown was heavily dependent on the revenues of a "slaughter tax" and in which peasants' traditional rights to the land (commons) were protected and the land was prohibited from being converted into agricultural farm land, became relatively impoverished and that such countries were faced with an economic decline. However, as Pistor explains, it was accompanied by the activity of lawyers who carried out a recoding of land ownership rights and gradually shifted them towards the landed aristocracy, via court decisions, largely in the form of individual property as an absolute right. When Pistor writes about wealth via the recoding of legal norms, she does not distinguish clearly enough between (1) wealth in a patronage economy, which can only be established via redistribution and by making society as a whole stagnant or poorer, (2) increased wealth from institutions, that advance a country economically but can be detrimental by not compensating the losers from institutional changes, and (3) increased wealth without losers, which is beneficial to society at large, but at the same time increases inequality.
- Subjects
CIVIL law; PROPERTY rights; CRIME; CAPITALISM; LAW reviews; GOVERNMENT policy; BUSINESS failures; STUDENT loans
- Publication
European Journal of Law & Economics, 2022, Vol 53, Issue 1, p125
- ISSN
0929-1261
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s10657-021-09710-9