politalX Politics Store - The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives
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List Price: $26.00
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Manufacturer: Basic Books
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.17
EAN: 9780465029167
ISBN: 0465029167
Label: Basic Books
Manufacturer: Basic Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: 2008-07-07
Publisher: Basic Books
Studio: Basic Books
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Editorial Reviews:
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25 new runways would eliminate most air travel delays in America. Why can’t we build them? 50 patent owners are blocking a major drug maker from creating a cancer cure. Why won’t they get out of the way? 90% of our broadcast spectrum sits idle while American cell phone service lags far behind Japan’s and Korea’s. Why are we wasting our airwaves? 98% of African American–owned farms have been sold off over the last century. Why can’t we stop the loss? All these problems are really the same problem—one whose solution would jump-start innovation, release trillions in productivity, and help revive our slumping economy. Every so often an idea comes along that transforms our understanding of how the world works. Michael Heller has discovered a market dynamic that no one knew existed. Usually, private ownership creates wealth, but too much ownership has the opposite effect—it creates gridlock. When too many people own pieces of one thing, whether a physical or intellectual resource, cooperation breaks down, wealth disappears, and everybody loses. Heller’s paradox is at the center of The Gridlock Economy. Today’s leading edge of innovation—in high tech, biomedicine, music, film, real estate—requires the assembly of separately owned resources. But gridlock is blocking economic growth all along the wealth creation frontier. A thousand scholars have applied and verified Heller’s paradox. Now he takes readers on a lively tour of gridlock battlegrounds. Heller zips from medieval robber barons to modern-day broadcast spectrum squatters; from Mississippi courts selling African-American family farms to troubling New York City land confiscations; and from Chesapeake Bay oyster pirates to today’s gene patent and music mash-up outlaws. Each tale offers insights into how to spot gridlock in operation and how we can overcome it. The Gridlock Economy is a startling, accessible biography of an idea. Nothing is inevitable about gridlock. It results from choices we make about how to control the resources we value most. We can unlock the grid; this book shows us where to start.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Changes the way we see the world
Comment: Every once in a while a gifted academic writes a book about a technical subject that changes the way the lay public sees the world. Michael Heller has written such a book. The Gridlock Economy illuminates by giving language to a phenomena that is all around us but we've had no word for. The stories he tells are chilling and heart wrenching. But he gives us hope as well. By describing gridlock and why it happens - the word he coins is "anticommons" - Professor Heller lead the way to creative problem solving. This book is a must read for policy makers in all fields.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Heller's Gridlock
Comment: Michael Heller's Gridlock Economy is this year's must-read popular economics book. As reviewers at Slate, Time, and elsewhere have noted, Heller's book compares well to 2005's mega-hit Freakonomics, as well as Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, James Surowiecki's (of The New Yorker) The Wisdom of Crowds, and Chris Anderson's The Long Tail.
Gridlock Economy shares two important characteristics with those books: a compelling central organizing idea and great writing. The central organizing idea is that "too much ownership" can stifle economic innovation. By "too much ownership," Heller is referring to the kind of situation that arises with increasing frequency across all the key sectors of the new economy including biotechnology, software, computer hardware, music, movies, and finance. Our efforts to promote innovation by granting patents and copyrights (and other government-sponsored forms of intellectual property protection) can often come back to bite us.
Heller provides dozens of interesting examples across the entire range of the new economy. His lead example involves the difficulties that a researcher at a big drug company is having pursuing a promising cure for Alzheimers. To make headway, the researcher needs to purchase or license a host of patents held by a not small number of competitors. Our current patent system gives --for better and, in this case, for worse-- gives each patent holder involved the capacity to hold up this important research. If we're lucky an entrepreneurial "patent bundler" will come along and piece together the necessary patents and licenses. Meanwhile, we're stuck in Heller's gridlock.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Essential reading for IP scholars
Comment: I teach university courses on Copyright and Intellectual Property. In the past, I've assigned Heller's Science article explaining how the "anticommons" has prevented new and important pharmaceuticals from being developed. However, this book offers an infinitely more readable, entertaining, and nuanced argument. I will certainly be adding it to my syllabus this Fall, and recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading the works of Lessig, Gladwell, and the like.
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Summary: The Gridlock Economy
Comment: I'll give you an example of a gridlocked economy. How about eliteist university presses who think their e-books are worth double the price of most others. Ironic to say the least.
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Summary: Ownership Gone Awry
Comment: This book arrives at a very auspicious moment. The key concept is that property ownership is not an unmitigated good, and, worse yet, it can lead to economic gridlock and underutilization of resources. In a rising economy, with property values going upward, this book would probably not sell too many copies; but in a declining market, with many homeowners stuck with adjustable mortgages greater than the value of their homes, the downside of property ownership is now more manifest.
Michael Heller teaches real estate law at Columbia University Law School and he is considered one of the foremost authorities on property law. In the current work, he discusses what he calls the tragedy of the anticommuns. The expression "tragedy of the commons" goes back as far as Aristotle, referring to the absence of individual property rights. Heller's "tragedy of the anticommons" refers to uncontrolled proliferation of individual rights, all clamoring for their own stake with total disregard for the common good. He correctly claims that too many property rights can strangle the market. This is an unpopular and inconvenient idea that runs counter to one of the most fundamental beliefs of capitalism.
Heller argues that property rights create gatekeepers. A gatekeeper is someone whose permission we need to get something done. Modern society is complex, and with more and more gatekeepers, the chances of getting things done becomes more difficult all the time. This sounds like commonsense, and economists have traditionally called this the burden of transaction costs. Heller's take on this issue is new and refreshing in that he creates a new vocabulary in describing it.
One of the examples Heller uses to illustrate his thesis is the gridlock that is taking place in the pharmaceutical industry. Many important drugs remain off the market because there are too many owners of patents all claiming rights to future profits.
Another example is the current mortgage crisis. In the old days when banks made loans and kept them on their books until they were paid off, ownership was clear and simple. Now, after loans have been repackaged and sold to investors many times over, ownership is multiple and no longer clear, making it virtually impossible to restructure them.
Although possibly trendy and definitely contrarian, this book does not give any solutions to the problem, other than understanding them better. Property rights are the cornerstone of capitalism as economists and philosophers since Adam Smith have argued, and as Heller himself argues. However, sometimes respecting everyone's rights strangles the economy and something needs to be done for the common good. This book is an interesting discussion of this dilemma.
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