Contemporary Authors

• Golden Rules: The Origins of California Water Law in the Gold Rush University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2015

• Carleton - https://apps.carleton.edu/profiles/mkanazaw/

  Mark Kanazawa
  Wadsworth A. Williams Professor of Economics, Economics
  Office: Willis Hall 308
  Phone: 507 222 4106
  Email: mkanazaw@carleton.edu
  Profile Connections
  Education & Professional History
  Earlham College, BA; Stanford University, MA, PhD.

  At Carleton since 1985.

  Courses Taught This Year
  ECON 395: Advanced Topics in Economics of Sports (Fall 2016)
  ECON 329: Econometrics (Fall 2016)
  ECON 400: Integrative Exercise (Winter 2017)
  ECON 329: Econometrics (Spring 2017)
  ECON 400: Integrative Exercise (Spring 2017)
  ECON 262: The Economics of Sports (Spring 2017)
  ENTS 232: Research Methods in Environmental Studies (Spring 2017)
  As Listed on Department Faculty Pages
  Economics
  Mark Kanazawa (Ph.D. Stanford) has published research in the areas of American economic history, law and economics, new institutional economics, water policy, economics of sports, and the economics of natural resources. Golden Rules, his recently-completed book on water rights in the California Gold Rush, will be published in early 2015 by University of Chicago Press. His current research projects include a legal-economic history of groundwater rights in California, the impact of advances in science on the common law, the emigrant experience on the overland trail to California, and climate change impacts on communities along the north shore of Minnesota. He has held visiting positions at Stanford, UC-Berkeley, and the University of Illinois, and he has been awarded the Jacobs Fellowship at the Huntington Library and the Simon Fellowship at the Property and Environment Research Center. He teaches courses in environmental and natural resource economics, western economic history, economics of sports, econometrics, and research methods in environmental studies.

  Environmental Studies
  Director of the Environmental Studies Program from 2008-2011.

Kanazawa, Mark. Golden rules: the origins of California
water law in the gold rush
D.L. Feldman
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1241.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text: 
Kanazawa, Mark. Golden rules: the origins of California water law in the gold rush. Chicago, 2015. 351 p bibl index afp ISBN 9780226258676
cloth, $55.00; ISBN 9780226258706 ebook, contact publisher for price
53-3740
KFC162
2014-41296 CIP
Most scholars acknowledge the importance of law in determining why water conflicts in the American West are intractable. Kanazawa
(economics, Carleton College) reminds readers that water rights in this region originated in disputes over mining that determined how access to
water was negotiated and continue to influence water uses today. The peculiar rules governing water allocation and access in California, he
contends, originated in the mid- 19th century: the gold rush ensured that rules governing California's water would forever be connected to
economics--first, extractive activities, such as mining; later, land ownership and agriculture. For better or (often) worse, the precepts governing
water law in California are "the end result of an evolutionary path-dependent legal process." The value of Kanazawa's interpretation lies in its
unique interpretation of contemporary events. Where economic historians emphasize water scarcity as the primary driver of law, Kanazawa
argues that a sort of dialectical process of court-based legal rules emerged and shaped legislation. He concludes that individual plaintiffs
organizing into coalitions led to the ultimate triumph of prior appropriation. This is an invaluable addition to the literature on water rights and the
economics of law. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.--D. L. Feldman, University of California,
Irvine
3/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Feldman, D.L. "Kanazawa, Mark. Golden rules: the origins of California water law in the gold rush." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic
Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1241+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661871&it=r&asid=8b76c6a64a2d49fb1d8c632cdc801e9a. Accessed 5 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661871

• EH.net
  https://eh.net/book_reviews/golden-rules-the-origins-of-california-water-law-in-the-gold-rush/
  Word count: 1098

  Author(s): Kanazawa, Mark
  Reviewer(s): Allen, Douglas W.
  Published by EH.Net (October 2015)

  Mark Kanazawa, Golden Rules: The Origins of California Water Law in the Gold Rush. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. xviii + 351 pp. $55 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-226-25867-6.

  Reviewed for EH.Net by Douglas W. Allen, Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University.

  Mark Kanazawa, professor of economics at Carleton College, has been doing yeoman service in the study of water rights for a long time, especially in the context of nineteenth-century California. It is only fitting that he should bring his scholarship together in this well-written book, and explain the symbiotic origins of gold and water rights during the aftermath of the 1849 rush.

  An overarching theme of the book is that scholars, particularly institutional economic historians, have had a general and broad explanation of the evolution of Californian gold and water rights during the 1850s, but that this general understanding cannot explain many specific historical details. The major contribution of his book, therefore, is to provide a narrative of these details and to show how the evolution of rights (particularly water rights) contain an economic logic. At the end of the day, Kanazawa’s more finely told story is generally consistent with the broad economic understanding. Kanazawa’s contribution is to provide a detailed quantitative and qualitative account of events, and to link these events together in a cogent manner.

  A crude reckoning would divide the book into four parts. Chapter 2 provides an institutional economic framework with which Kanazawa navigates the historical details. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the history and evolution of mining, water, and ditching technologies from the discovery of gold in 1849 to about 1865. Chapters 5 and 6 examine the development of rights, both informally through mining camp agreements and formally through court decisions. Finally, chapters 7 to 9 examine the origins of legal prior appropriation for water and the subsequent caveats based on problems of water degradation and bursting dams.

  For those unfamiliar with gold mining, gold rushes, and the California gold rush, chapters 3 and 4 provide an excellent survey. Kanazawa has deep knowledge and respect for presenting the material in a complete way. These are chapters of context, however, and scholars in this field will find little they don’t already know.

  Things start to change with Kanazawa’s discussion of mining camp regulations and court decisions. The general story is familiar, but Kanazawa provides a level of detail not found elsewhere. He notes, for example, that miners were digging on public lands, and were legally trespassers. This fact plays a role in how the state was to deal with them, how miners dealt with private landowners, and how they dealt with each other. Kanazawa examines the Mexican “alcalde” legal system that carried over and acted as an early constraint on behavior. Most significantly, he recognizes and examines the interaction of mining norms and codes with the decisions made by the state courts. It is an interesting discussion, and the more Kanazawa scratches the surface, the more complications he finds.

  Kanazawa’s best scholarship is demonstrated in the final three chapters where he goes to great lengths to describe the evolution of water rights from open access to first possession with restrictions. He examines much of the case law in light of transaction costs that arise from establishing and maintaining rights to water in arid areas at a time when measuring water and water quality was extremely difficult.

  Scholars interested in gold or water rights will find much to like in Kanazawa’s detailed analysis. Economists and historians only familiar with the conventional Demsetzian understanding of the movement towards private rights in the context of increasing scarcity, and with only a peripheral interest in gold rushes, will probably find this book too much work for the payoff. I say this because of an irony in the book: the general Demsetz story still holds after an analysis of the legal, historical, and technical details.

  Which brings me back to Chapter 2, the theoretical framework of the book. Kanazawa, in my opinion, is correct in viewing the evolution of rights as a process of maximizing wealth net of transaction costs. In the simple Demsetz version of this hypothesis, transaction costs are generally treated as some simple monotonic cost that increases with the value of an asset. Hence, increases in asset value eventually lead to some form of private property, and that’s the end of the story. However, in reality, transaction costs are seldom monotonic in asset value, nor are they independent of changing technologies.

  Generally speaking, from 1849 to 1860, the gold fields were a place of increasing scarcity of gold-bearing land and water. As miners moved from the easy pickings to dry areas far from water, and as more miners continued to move in, technologies changed. These advances increased the gross values of land and water, but there were often associated increases in transaction costs. For example, dams and ditches allowed for the movement of water to arid lands, increasing their value, but they also broke, caused reductions in water quality, and often hurt downstream users. Not surprisingly then, given the variety of different circumstances, water rights grew in complexity over time. Kanazawa argues quite convincingly that this complexity has an economic logic, namely the rights were designed to maximize the total wealth subject to the specific transaction cost. In this respect, this book is yet another detailed study confirming the general institutional model started by Coase fifty years ago.

  I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Like Kanazawa, I’m two generations removed from an ancestor who rushed into the Klondike, and I grew up with stories of the rush for gold. Golden Rules, for me, was a source of leisurely consumption.

  Douglas Allen has written extensively on the economics of transaction costs, and has applied this methodology to contract choice and information sharing in the Klondike gold rush. Recently he published The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2012). He is the Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University, just outside of Vancouver.

  Copyright (c) 2015 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (October 2015). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://eh.net/book-reviews/