I'd like to add yet another idea here. He suggests that landowners are and should be responsible partners, not simply stewards of the land. All these changes have stimulated a debate that has and continues to include discussion of how our economic, government and property institutions need to be changed. So what we're talking about here includes both the formalized set of rules we choose to live by and the informal, social norms we also live by. So it's this set of formal and informal rules that we're talking about when we use the word institution.
Property Let's talk about property as an institution.
Property is a cultural system of duties and privileges that defines what may be done with land and personal possessions. In this context we are speaking of property primarily as land. And this conception of property is socially defined and really amounts to a set of formal rules and a set of informal rules that vary somewhat by ideology. One very important idea with respect to property is that it is defined socially and culturally. This is evidenced by some changes we have seen in our conception of property over time.