Calling Dibs

The Micro-Property System We All Obey

Photo by Jadon Johnson on Unsplash

Happy New Year Everyone!

I just turned in a draft of a book about obligations to past people and our past selves, and a lot of it is about generational wealth. It required a brief foray into theories of property.

One of the things I discovered is that most very rich people hardly own anything. What I mean by that is, if you listed all of the rights you have to have in order to count as owning something, the list that legal theorists and philosophers spent decades coming up with, it turns out that rich people don’t have full property rights over most of their “net worth,” real estate, stocks, bonds, businesses, etc. This is mostly because rich people, at least the smart ones, manage their wealth in such a way so as to avoid taxes and avoid estate taxes upon death, and this requires them to do all kinds of things that make the legal status of their “property” not really their property. Instead, their assets are tied up as collateral to loans, their assets are in a variety of “irrevocable” trusts that remove them from their estates, shield them from creditors, all things that make them beneficiaries but not owners. These are all kinds of things I explain in great detail in the book. Knowing all of this about the assets of the wealthy has made me very bearish about the effectiveness of wealth taxes (You can’t tax billionaire wealth if you simultaneously give it a legal status where it isn’t their wealth, a subject for another post!)

Because of this brief foray, I decided to try and come up with an exhaustive list of relationships people have to stuff, concrete things like houses and cars, and abstract stuff like credit default swaps and the Beatles catalogue. The common sense categories are ownership and non-ownership, but there’s are far more interesting ones. Holding something as collateral, or having given things up as collateral is in between ownership and non-ownership. You don’t have some of the rights that are necessary conditions of property. So is trusteeship, conservatorship, guardianship, so is being a beneficiary, which is the biggest topic in the book.My philosopher friends came up with a few other very interesting ones I couldn’t get to in the book. The most interesting one to me is “calling dibs” on some item, which thereby gives you some kind of informal right of use.

Calling “dibs” is a very pervasive social phenomenon. In Boston, Chicago, and other snowy regions, you have dibs on a parking spot you dug out during a blizzard. You have dibs on items you put in your shopping cart at the supermarket before you pay for them. You have dibs when you have items placed on layaway at a store. If you put your sweater down on a chair at Starbucks and then get in line, you have dibs on the seat. Children have dibs on the driver’s seat when they “call shotgun.” Dibs is a cool little sublegal, informal practice of making a claim to some property you do not own and you do not otherwise have a right to use, but by merely doing some kind of conventional gesture, you thereby generate some kind of norm of exclusion; now other people have some kind of standing obligation not to interfere with your use of the item. Dibs is staking a property claim without thereby having the claim. Having dibs is being in an in-between state between having and not having a property right, and dibs is something no one believes ought to be elevated to the status of law and legal enforcement. Someone is definitely doing something wrong by taking items out of your shopping cart, but they aren’t stealing from you, nor from the store. Neither is parking in the spot you dug out, or moving your sweater to take your Starbucks seat. But they are definitely violating a norm.

Calling dibs and having dibs looks to me like a classic phenomenon admitting of conceptual analysis. Its the kind of phenomenon that admits of boundaries we all deploy without thinking about. We intuitively know when someone successfully calls dibs and when they have not (the felicity conditions on a speech act, as J.L. Austin named it). Relative to a community, we intuitively know the kind of things we are allowed to call dibs on, and things we aren’t. We all know where dibs end and ownership begins, and we instinctively have a sense about when dibs run out over time.

For example, having lived in Poughkeepsie, NY for sixteen years, if you’re not back in your street parking spot 24 hours after you’ve left it, you’re just plum out of luck. Digging out gives you dibs, but not for that long. If anything, I think it expires closer to the eight hour mark. Shopping carts are a little tougher. So long as you’re walking around with the shopping cart, for everything in it you have dibs. Even if you abandon it to use the restroom, you still have dibs. But I once stood behind someone in line who had to leave the entire shopping cart to the side because they forgot their wallet, and wanted to go home to get it. There’s got to be some time whereby the supermarket is allowed to restock the items or people can just pick stuff out of it they need to. If I had to ballpark an expiration time for shopping cart items, I’d say two hours.

Starbucks seats and other such examples are a tough call. I’ve been to a variety of festivals, open seating concerts, venues, public parks, and tennis courts, whereby some dibs behavior I thought of as perfectly legitimate, and some I deemed incredibly rude. How do we feel about large families setting down clothing items on two tables of ten, to have dibs on twenty seats while they all go get in line for food? Does it matter how busy the Starbucks is? What if the line is very long and you are at the end of it but you put an item of clothing down for dibs on a chair? Doing this feels inappropriate to me.

If I had to speculate a priori at the moment (I’m sure someone out there has written a paper doing a more precise analysis), dibs looks like a solution to a coordination problem, a particular strategy for dividing up the commons. Stuff is going to be distributed in the commons in some way. Calling dibs gives a tie-breaking reason to start in a particular way. “Shotgun” is the “first-come-first serve” way. If two cars show up at the same time to claim the same empty parking spot, the first car to signal gets dibs. The “digging out” method identifies labor as generating dibs. Dibs finds any salient solution as the arbitrary starting point for distributing resource. If this is right, it follows that you cannot call dibs whenever there is some already conventional system in place to distribute the common resource. If seating is explicitly first-come first-serve at a Starbucks, with a sign posted, then you are not allowed to called dibs by putting your sweater on a chair. If someone sees you doing it, they are allowed to pick it up and hand it back to you.

I have heard that there are three different conventions for getting onto a bus or train in different cultures around the world. There are “swarming” cultures, whereby once a bus arrives, everyone on the platform swarms it. There are “queuing” cultures, whereby once a bus arrives, people get into a line, but everyone tries to get as close to the front as possible . Then there’s “arrival-order” cultures. People in these cultures show up to the bus stop and pay attention to who arrived before them, and who arrived after them. When the bus arrives, people queue according to the order in which they arrived at the bus stop, and take it as rude or an affront when people try to jump their arrival order. Barry Schwartz describes this as a “normatively saturated queue.” and it amounts to using arrival times to call dibs on the order in which you board the bus.

All three boarding conventions tries to distribute bus-seating according to some kind of condition of fairness. In a swarm, everyone is in “the original position” as soon as the bus arrives. The competition is only one of speed, strength, and tolerance of physical discomfort. In a “loose queue,” everyone is equally entitled to jockey for position in the queue, but there are some norms of position and politeness. Once the appearance of a straight line is established, you are not allowed to jump the queue. In arrival-order cultures, everyone abides by the same impersonal rules and enforcement mechanism whereby if you arrive earlier you board the bus earlier. You are allowed to jump the queue if you called dibs on that spot in virtue of your arrival order. The swarming method privileges the physically strong, the fast, the aggressive. The loose queue method privileges people who are higher on the asshole-dimension, i.e., the social version of speed and strength. Arrival-order privileges temporal ordering, people who have the privilege of arriving early. The egalitarian ideal is that access to shared resources should not turn on morally arbitrary advantages. Arrival-order queuing and dibs aspire to that ideal by converting earliness in time into entitlement. For bus-queuing, this is in fact at least somewhat morally connected to entitlement to get onto the bus early.

Two other concepts that I’m writing a lot about in the book are expiration and assetization. If there is a convention of calling dibs, there should also be a convention of when dibs expire. The problem is that conventions for expiration are not nearly as clear as conventions for staking a claim. This is true as much for full property rights as it is for dibs. Famously, property rights were supposed to expire according to the Rule Against Perpetuities, lives in being plus 21 years. Now that that has been repealed in a variety of states and countries, there is a “wait and see” approach. For art and music, it is life of author plus 70 years. For dibs its going to be much shorter, minutes, or hours. It is interesting to think about why conventions for making claims are so clear but conventions for expiring claims is so murky.

As for assetization, there was a practice in Boston and Chicago, whereby people who dug out their parking spaces starting putting traffic cones in the spots, trying to turn “dibs” into a more formal arrangement, prompting city officials to have meetings about how best to respond. Some argued that dibs is an institutionalized process, so that it should be codified with formal enforcement mechanism so as to resolve conflicts. People get into fistfights and long-term neighborhood beefs over parking spot dibs and their violation. Others argued that the whole point of dibs is that it has to be informal, otherwise it turns into something uglier. Formalizing dibs makes possible for the commons becomes monetized and assetized, and then it is no longer the commons.

For example, people starting digging out parking spots, put a traffic cone on it, offers to sell it to a neighbor for a price. An app developer creates CONE-Spot, an app whereby those who dig out spots uploads the location the app then puts up for auction, giving the digger a market price minus a 10% commission that it takes. Venture capital puts money into CONE-spot requiring a 10x return. Now parking access on residential streets is no longer the commons, but a tradable asset.

Dibs is a little microcosm of informal claims to property that is both a precursor but also a kind of parallel practice to formal property rights. It also gives a model for how the commons disappear. Paid layaway practices for instance are a kind of intermediate practice between dibs and property rights.