Common sense is as useless as the Golden Rule. As I mentioned before, given that the antiques are coming from communially owned sources, the so-called looting will be at levels above what is optimal. But that doesn’t imply that selling antiques isn’t a good thing for Cambodia, or the world in general. As far as scientific knowledge goes, these trinkets aren’t going to give us a better polio vaccine, a more efficient engine, nor a better method for efficient resource use.
These antiques are a resource. Resources by definition are things that are to be exploited. While it is sad to see them go to private collectors, and thereby be lost to most of the world, putting them in museums doesn’t really make them available to the world either. It may be worth selling a few now for the income they provide. Let’s think about trinket X. X will bring some sum of cash today. At some unknown point in the future, it will bring in less than 1/n[sup]th[/sup] of the revenue of a museum with n items, since revenue will most likely be concave w/ respect to the number of items. What you are saying is that the present value of that income stream is larger than the amount of money some collector is willing to pay today. (That’s the crude way to put it. Many complications need to be added; but essentially the idea should be spot on.) That such is the case is neither common sense nor obvious.
If we consider X to be the representative item, the total value of that future income stream for all Xs will rise with the number of Xs out there. But the value of each X will get smaller and smaller as the number of Xs increases. Conversely, as the number of Xs available for public consumption decreases, the value of each X will rise. When the value of the representative X is equal to the value being paid today (doing all the appropriate discounting), the maximum number of “lootable” items will have been reached. As I mentioned, if these things are coming from publically owned sources, then the take will be above optimum. Same for ivory and redwoods, just as it is the same for any cattle herder, diamond mine owner, or baseball card trader.
What you (and everybody else) need to understand, and truly internalize is this:
To have value means that someone is willing to sacrifice for it. That sacrifice can be measured in terms of a numeraire commodity. That is, if saving the tigers is worth as much as a Big Mac a week, then we can use a third commodity that is a common measuring unit between all other commodities. That commodity is money. If I’m willing to give up a Big Mac a week to save the tigers, then we can fairly say that tigers are worth $150 per year to me. (However much Big Macs cost.)
A second important implication is that if the state or society forces a commodity to be priceless, then people who would otherwise value it no longer do. Elephants are a good example. It used to be that elephants were priceless. The locals had to compete with them for farming and grazing land, their relatives and mates were killed or injured when problem elephants came to town, and their livelihoods could be wiped out by a grazing herd. They had no use for elephants; however, they did have a use for poachers. In Zimbabwe, a program called CAMPFIRE was instituted. It applied to all (huntable) wildlife in the following manner. The community or communities that had “claim” to the area within a herd’s home range were granted “ownership” of the animals. They were then allowed to sell hunting rights. Through simple (and rather ingenous, IMO) demonstrations using the locals themselves, they were able to demonstrate the idea of a sustainable cull, and help them understand what cull rates an elephant (or gazelle, etc.) herd could sustain. Wealthy hunters would buy these hunting rights—IIRC, and elephant would bring in $10,000-$15,000. Now the locals had a stake even though :gasp: elephants were no longer sacred. Poaching dropped dramatically, problem kills dropped to almost nothing, the locals had a source of income based on their resource base (instead of the largesse of the state or aid agencies) that was significantly larger than it had previously been, and in the areas where CAMPFIRE was instituted the herds grew in size.
Obviously, Cambodian antiques aren’t a renewable resource like elephants, trees, or cattle. But that doesn’t mean that much. If it did, you would be talking about the looting of oil by OPEC when the long-term value of oil for plastics is worth more than its present value as fuel.
What I think is happening is that you have made these trinkets sacred in your mind, and that your arguments are ex post constructions to bolster that belief. The sacredness of these antiques virtually guarantees their near extinction for Cambodia’s benefit. I’m not a free-marketeer and I am not going to suggest that all archaeological (sp?!) digs should be in private ownership. I’m dumb, not crazy. But you do have to disabuse yourself of the sacredness of these antiques. Honestly, “looting” is hardly a fitting word here.
Surely these antiques are being overharvested. That is a shame. From that fact it doesn’t necessarily follow that Cambodians are suffering a net loss from the harvesting. They are poor today, and your indignance should be directed so as to maximize their benefit from the existence of these antiques instead of being directed to keeping this resource sacred. The latter will only make the world worse off.
