Property rights, whether for real world things or for digital things, are the foundation of developed economies. Because if you don’t feel like your property is going to be safe and secure, why would you bother investing and trying to accumulate assets?
Above is a chart I found, in this great thought piece by Ryan Goldman, showing the direct relationship between “protection against risk of expropriation” and GDP per capita. The more protection, the higher the GDP.
This is, of course, fundamental to the way we live our lives offline. But it is also becoming increasingly important in the way we live our lives online. Because we now have digital assets that people actually care about owning and protecting. You know, like pictures of apes.
This market is only going to continue to grow and the above relationship between rights and economic development will certainly hold true. But I think the big question is whether there will be more distributed and equitable access to opportunities in this emerging world.
I hope that will be the case.
Architecture school has a way of indoctrinating you with an appreciation for the past. One of the ways that is done is through architecture history and theory classes.
In my case, I was taught to appreciate the work of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Adolf Loos, and many other influential architects from the 20th century.
It was okay to disagree with their ideas, but you at least had to learn about all of the important stuff that they had done and/or thought about. It’s a standing on the shoulders of giants kind of thing.
But as Witold Rybczynski argues in this recent post, it’s important to keep in mind that history and theories are written after the fact:
“Some buildings are, in a sense, experiments, and when something works, and is taken up by others, it eventually becomes a rule of thumb, perhaps even a theory.”
For me, this is yet another reminder that the world moves forward as a result of doing, creating, and making new things happen.
Sometimes you’ll get it wrong and do the wrong things. But sometimes you’ll do something wonderful that nobody else has thought of before.
And when then happens, the world will have moved forward such that it’s then possible to look back at what happened and make sense of it all.
