I
Genes Own and Survive Us
Ownership as a biological instructionEvery life form protects and defends property: the gene is wrapped in DNA, DNA is walled in a nucleus, the cell is skinned by a membrane, and the family is housed. Ownership is not an invention of law; it is an instruction written into living matter.
Required reading
The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins
Chapters 1–3, plus a cell-biology primer on membranes and cell walls
Objectives
- Describe the nested boundaries that protect a replicator.
- Explain why the gene, not the organism, is the unit that persists.
- Show that cells cooperate — and that cooperation needs a boundary first.
Answer before next class
1.List the boundaries that protect what sustains you — physical, legal, financial. Which is weakest, and why?
Week I, Plate 1: the nested boundaries from gene to home.
2.Give one example, from biology or your own life, where cooperation inside a boundary created capability neither party had alone.
Week I, Plate 3: endosymbiosis and the mitochondrion.
3.Explain in your own words why ownership can be called an instruction rather than a privilege granted by law.
Week I, Plate 6: boundary → ownership → natural right → institution.
II
The Natural Rights Foundation
Free choice and the fruits of laborLocke argued that life, liberty and estate are not gifts of government. Mixing your labor with the world makes the product yours, and government exists to protect that — by consent, under law, funded by lawful tax.
Required reading
Second Treatise of Government
John Locke
Chapters 2–5 and 11
Objectives
- State the labor theory of property in your own words.
- Distinguish a natural right from a granted benefit.
- Explain the citizen's side of the bargain: lawfulness and tax.
Answer before next class
1.Name one thing you own outright and trace it back to the labor that produced it.
Week II, Plate 2: Locke's chain of title.
2.Where is the line between a lawful tax and an excessive taking? State your test and apply it to one real tax.
Week II, Plate 5: consent, representation, and what the proceeds buy.
3.Describe a right you hold on paper but cannot presently exercise. What would make it real?
Week II, Plate 6: held rights vs. exercised rights.
III
Survival of the Fittest
Selection, the struggle — and Darwin's blind spotDarwin gave scientific evidence for natural selection based strictly on genetic self-interest. Fitness is not strength or virtue; it is the reproductive edge a trait confers in a specific environment. And as Frank Ryan argues, cooperation is one of the most powerful of those traits.
Required reading
On the Origin of Species / Darwin's Blind Spot
Charles Darwin; Frank Ryan
Origin Ch. 3–4, plus Darwin's Blind Spot Ch. 1–4
Objectives
- Define variation, heredity, and differential reproductive success.
- Correct the common misreading of 'survival of the fittest'.
- Explain what 'environment' means when the players are institutions.
Answer before next class
1.Describe an institution that was well fitted to a vanished environment. What changed around it?
Week III, Plate 2: fitness is relative to the setting.
2.Give an example of cooperation as a fitness strategy — not as generosity. Who gains, and how?
Week III, Plate 3: Ryan's symbiosis cases.
3.Pick one policy lever from Plate 5 and predict which citizen strategy it would make more profitable.
Week III, Plate 5: policy is environment design.
IV
The Prisoner's Dilemma
Nash, and the logic of defectionNash showed that rational players in tension settle at a point where no one can improve by moving alone. In the Prisoner's Dilemma that point is mutual defection — worse for both than cooperation. Understanding why is how you learn to change it.
Required reading
Non-Cooperative Games and Equilibrium Points
John Nash
Nash's 1950–51 papers, plus a Prisoner's Dilemma primer
Objectives
- Read a payoff matrix and find the equilibrium.
- Explain why mutual defection is rational and still bad.
- Name the three levers that turn defection into cooperation.
Answer before next class
1.Write out the payoff matrix for a real negotiation you are in. Where is the equilibrium?
Week IV, Plate 2: the Prisoner's Dilemma matrix.
2.Which of the three levers — horizon, visibility, shared stake — would most change that negotiation, and why?
Week IV, Plate 5: change the game, not the virtue.
3.Apply Nash's test to an arrangement you rely on: can any single player gain by deviating?
Week IV, Plate 6: stability is the property to test for.
V
The Evolutionarily Stable Strategy
Invadability as the testA strategy is evolutionarily stable when, once common, no rare alternative can invade it. Representative democracy has passed that test for two and a half centuries. The claim of this course is that an Ownership Society is the next stable mutation of it.
Required reading
The Logic of Animal Conflict / SuperCooperators
John Maynard Smith & George Price; Martin Nowak
ESS primer plus SuperCooperators Ch. 1–2
Objectives
- Define an ESS and apply the invadability test.
- Explain why command economies were invadable from within.
- State the Ownership Society claim in ESS terms.
Answer before next class
1.Pick an arrangement you rely on. What rare strategy could invade it, and what would stop it?
Week V, Plate 1: the invadability test.
2.Why were command economies invadable from within? Answer in terms of payoffs, not politics.
Week V, Plate 3: withheld effort and captured allocation.
3.State the Ownership Society claim in ESS terms, then name the invader you think is hardest to rule out.
Week V, Plate 5: testing the claim.
VI
The Five Rules of Cooperation
Nowak's mathematics of working togetherA cooperative act costs C to its performer and yields B to its recipient. Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics has shown five conditions under which cooperation beats defection — and each maps onto win-win public policy.
Required reading
SuperCooperators
Martin Nowak
Chapters 3–7
Objectives
- State all five rules and what each variable means.
- Identify which rule a given policy is using.
- Explain why cooperation needs a mechanism, not an appeal.
Answer before next class
1.Take a policy you support. Which of the five rules does it rely on? Does it satisfy the inequality?
Week VI, Plate 1: the five thresholds.
2.Describe a relationship in your working life where raising W would change behaviour. How would you raise it?
Week VI, Plate 3: direct reciprocity, B/C > 1/W.
3.Which rule do you think an Ownership Society leans on most heavily, and what is the risk of relying on it?
Week VI, Plate 6: from rules to policy.
VII
Capital, Labor, and Why Pure Capitalism Is Not Stable
The win-lose cycle of mutual exploitationAdam Smith's invisible hand assumed enlightened self-interest. What the last half-century produced instead is a repeated game in which capital and labor each extract from the other — a Prisoner's Dilemma neither side is winning.
Required reading
The Wealth of Nations (selections)
Adam Smith
Book I Ch. 1–2, 8; Book IV Ch. 2
Objectives
- Describe the feedback loop between wage suppression and demand.
- Explain capital's mobility advantage over labor.
- State the diagnosis the Ownership Society is proposed to cure.
Answer before next class
1.Where in your own working life have you seen the extraction loop run? What broke it, or didn't?
Week VII, Plate 3: the extraction loop.
2.Fill in your own household figures from Plate 5. What is left to invest, and what is crowding it out?
Week VII, Plate 5: fixed costs compounding against a flat wage.
3.Do you accept the diagnosis that this is a distribution-of-ownership failure rather than a production failure? Argue your side.
Week VII, Plate 6: diagnosis and prescription.
VIII
Compound Capital Appreciation
The arithmetic of independenceOwnership plus time is what retires a household without dependence on government. It requires no unusual return — only a share that appreciates, and the years in which to let it.
Required reading
Compounding readings and The Citizen's Share (intro)
Blasi, Freeman & Kruse
The Citizen's Share, Introduction and Ch. 1
Objectives
- Compute what a modest share becomes over a working life.
- Explain why time in the market matters more than timing it.
- Connect compounding to the funding of limited government.
Answer before next class
1.Model your own share at 6% and 8% over the years you have left to work. What changes at each rate?
Week VIII, Plate 1: the compounding curve.
2.Compare two workers on identical pay, one with a vesting share. Where does the difference come from?
Week VIII, Plate 3: two workers, same pay.
3.Answer the access checklist honestly. Which single 'no' would you change first, and how?
Week VIII, Plate 6: access, not arithmetic.
IX
Micro Ownership Societies and Win-Win Policy
Places where it already worksVenture capital and labor have cooperated for decades: founders and employees take equity, investors take risk, and when it works both sides are enriched. That is a micro Ownership Society, and it can be generalised.
Required reading
The Citizen's Share
Blasi, Freeman & Kruse
Chapters 2–5
Objectives
- Describe how equity aligns investor and employee payoffs.
- Compare ESOPs, options and profit sharing as mechanisms.
- Map each policy proposal to one of Nowak's five rules.
Answer before next class
1.Design a share plan for an organisation you know. Who vests, on what schedule, and why?
Week IX, Plate 2: four mechanisms compared.
2.Take one policy lever from Plate 4 and show which of Nowak's rules it uses. Does it clear the threshold?
Week IX, Plate 4: levers and the rule each uses.
3.Name every party to your proposal and show that each one's payoff rises. Where is that hardest to show?
Week IX, Plate 5: win-win means no one is expropriated.
X
Going Back to Our Future
The whole argument, in one lineAn Ownership Society is the evolutionarily stable next mutation of democratic capitalism: it honours the founding instruction, satisfies the mathematics of cooperation, and reliably funds a limited government that protects both fundamental rights.
Required reading
The Evolution of an Ownership Society
Walter Barry
The full essay, plus your own notes from Weeks I–IX
Objectives
- Reconstruct the argument from biology to policy without notes.
- Apply the invadability test to your own proposals.
- Commit to one action at household, firm, and civic scale.
Answer before next class
1.Write the argument in 300 words for someone who disagrees with you. Then answer their strongest objection.
Week X, Plate 1: the chain of nine links.
2.Which link in the chain is weakest, in your judgment? What evidence would strengthen it?
Week X, Plate 4: objections, taken seriously.
3.Commit to one action at household, workplace, and civic scale. What will you have done within 30 days?
Week X, Plate 5: three actions.