In Tokugawa Japan, fertilizers were so expensive that farmers and traders were looking for alternative. This incited households to sell feces and urine at very high prices. The commodification of shit and piss (yup) induced people to define, out of necessity, property rights over piss and shit. While you may find this unseemly, I do not. Property rights are costly to define. People will not define them if non-definition is not too costly (relative to alternatives). But give people even a small incentive to define them and they will. When I speak about markets in governance, this is what I mean. People have scarce resources to allocate to tons of things, including "governance goods" (of which there is a massive range). They will prioritize those that are most important first and the lesser ones later when constraints are eased or relative prices change. This case is a great example of this! #econtwitter #econhist