Ownership
2026-04-06
I just watched this video by Gary Stevenson about the economic effects of the Iran war. This can be roughly summarized as follows:
1. The naive solution to rising costs of living is to subsidize things like energy and food. This is not sustainable, and similar to the analysis posed in this podcast it states that this is a temporary fix that leads to long term degradation of government wealth.
2. Another solution is the investing in your own production and infrastructure. Gary however argues that this is not sufficient, as even with local production, the prices of these goods are determined on the global market, and as such local producers will export their goods when offered a higher price. As such local consumers still have to compete with global prices.
3. His final point is that the only real way to deal with this is to ‘own’ your own energy, food etc. He talks about how governments should own energy production (as opposed to simply ‘investing’), I am not sure how he feels about consumer ownership, e.g. batteries and solar panels.
At present this analysis seems reasonable to me, if a government owns the means of production of basic (homogeneous) goods, I do not really for see big issues. I do however see a possibility that this might end up being a money sink and result in more conservative parties constantly attacking this.
I do however see an interesting link to the digital world, which is the world I would consider myself a bit better versed in. In general the digital world is also plagued with this issue of ownership, or rather the lack of it. From devices to operating systems to user facing software, it seems that the most ‘products’ every day humans interact with are not their own.
On a financial side, one could argue that this is in fact a boon. Many consumers would not like to pay the money advertisers pay on their behalf. Operating systems like windows and MacOS can be effectively free since Microsoft and Apple can simply make money off cloud-subscriptions, software plans and in the case of Apple maybe the hardware.
I am skeptical of this idea1, but even if we accept this proposition we still have plenty of issues which can be boiled down to perverse incentives. To name an example:
Advertisers pay on your behalf, this means that advertisers would like something in return. Which is you buying their products. To this end no means will be spared to advertise to you as effectively as possible, there by not only violating your privacy, but also degrading your experience on the web, for example by hogging your attention to show your more products to buy.
This is a informal analysis (I am not even sure how a formal economic analysis should be performed), however based on this quick idea I feel these two problems are two sides of the same coin. An attack on consumer (and government) ownership of their goods. In both cases it leaves the consumer/government at the whims of the providing party and induces extreme friction in becoming self-sufficient2.
Is this really a nail?
In an attempt to challenge the typical ‘ah your issue is really my issue in a different jacket’-reaction that typically happens in these issues I want to take some time to ponder how these two issues are still meaningfully different.
Firstly, there is an obvious difference in the necessity of the commodities. Energy and food are vital, digital goods are typically more of a luxury good. I do think this distinction is not as big as it may seem. I provide no data for the following claim, however access to digital technologies is extremely broad. In the western world at least most people have a phone and use it. Phones have become a large sink for people’s free time. This affects the mental and physical well-being of populations. Of course this is not making any claims about the elasticity of either. Energy and food are notoriously inelastic, necessities need to be met no matter the cost. As for the digital goods I am not sure this applies, as people tend to see many digital goods as ‘free’.
Less obvious is the implicit assumption I have made that Gary extends the ownership to consumers. In the digital world government ownership of services is not really an improvement, with many concerns around tracking/privacy turning to ‘big brother’-esque scenario’s of mass surveillance. Therefore, consumer ownership is seen as the best solution. When it comes to energy and food the comparison breaks, energy and food should probably be centralized to some (large) degree.
Finally, Gary mostly focuses on tax. Tax to him is a way of redistributing wealth. I think I agree in principle, though taking wealth quickly becomes very tricky, but I digress. Tax does not seem to be a part of the solution to the digital problems, instead much of the advocacy around these problems seems to be around raising awareness and showing alternatives, and constructing legislation that disallows practices such as forced arbitration, limiting right-to-repair, etc.
There are likely many more issues with the comparison, but these are the ones I could think of that.
If you don’t own it, they own you
To conclude I want to paraphrase Gary, owning is security. This does not mean one has to own everything – I still happily have a library card, instead one should take care to only surrender one’s ownership when one does not mind being extorted by the provider. If my library is unreasonable I will simply buy my books.