Product Description

25 new runways would eliminate most air travel delays in America. Why cant we build them? 50 patent owners are blocking a major drug maker from creating a cancer cure. Why wont they get out of the way? 90% of our broadcast spectrum sits idle while American cell phone service lags far behind Japans and Koreas. Why are we wasting our airwaves? 98% of African American-owned farms have been sold off over the last century. Why cant 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. Hellers paradox is at the center of The Gridlock Economy. Todays 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 Hellers 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 todays 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #255035 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Review
The last decade has produced enough books challenging received wisdom to fill a small--and stupendously popular library called the Compendium of Counter-intuition, [including Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink," James Surowiecki's "Wisdom of Crowds ," Chris Anderson's "Long Tail"]. The newest addition to the collection is "The Gridlock Economy," . . . The difference is that Heller, unlike most of the authors of counterintuitive books, is actually a leader in the academic field he is scrutinizing. . . . Heller has managed to pull off one of the most perceptive popular books on property since "Das Kapital,"" --"Slate Magazine"
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Customer Reviews

Tweaking ownership to optimize resource use
Michael Heller has provided an informative, thought-provoking contribution to the discussion of property rights. Using real-life examples, he demonstrates the disaster that happens when too many people own small portions of a resource. Like squabbling siblings who inherit the family home, one holdout can prevent anyone from using or selling it. No one benefits. That's gridlock. Similarly, overuse or neglect often spoil unregulated, unprotected public resources: Licensing requirements prevent companies from developing new drugs because all the potential components are separately patented. Overzealous trademarking and copyrighting undermine the traditions of fair use, blocking artists' creativity. Heller's book is surprisingly entertaining for a work on intellectual property, real-estate law and economics. After you read it, you will never think about resources and ownership in quite the same way again. getAbstract recommends it to lawyers, artists, economists, research and development professionals, and anyone who's been wondering why you rarely see the characters in a screen play singing the happy-birthday song when they blow out the candles. (Answer: It's under copyright until 2030.)

Understanding Underuse and the Tragedy of the Anti Commons
Michael Heller's `The Gridlock Economy' is a timely, groundbreaking and inspirational book. There will be many economists, lawyers and policy makers out there who need to read it, but don't yet know why.

The `tragedy of the anti-commons', where too many individuals have rights of exclusion (such as property rights) in a scarce resource, has affected society since the thirteenth century robber barons made shipping on the Rhine impracticable. Yet whilst `anti commons' situations can arise in technology, medicine, property and the arts - to name but a few - most of those who need to know what it is, how it can be identified and what can be done - simply don't. Heller's book goes a long way to correcting that, and he deserves every star Amazon has to offer for doing so.

The layout of the book deserves particular praise, in that it is structured in such a way that no one risks getting lost in complexity and everyone will be encouraged to think beyond the available 200-odd pages of text. Starting with historical examples, it then deals with language - or lexicon - before turning to case studies which range from spectrum to oysters. Concluding with a `solutions tool kit' - I would suggest that an extension to Heller's work would be to provide a `teaching note' so the concept and its cures can start entering the class room and lecture halls sooner, rather than later. For conservative academics out there, who don't like incorporating terms that are new to them into a rigid curriculum, Heller rightly points to the Scottish economist Adam Smith to show why the terms meaning has been with us for so long: `The navigation of the Danube is of very little use to the different states of Bavaria, Austria and Hungary in comparison of what it would be If any of them possessed the whole of its course till it falls into the Black Sea' - Wealth of Nations, 1776

Working as an economist in a copyright collecting society, I found the book particularly insightful - not just to the specific references to the way our organisations remove gridlock by patent pooling, but also through understanding the cost of gridlock when rights ownership becomes more fragmented. In Europe, collective rights management of digital music rights is currently offering an active case study for how gridlock can play out. Those who chose to buy this book would do well to follow events as parties opt for Pan European Direct Licensing, as opposed to Pan European Blanket Licensing, and increasing the risk of `gridlock' as a result. Heller offers me, and any other potential reader who can relate to the anti-commons concept, an array of solutions, ranging from: market driven solutions, property preventing patents, cooperative solutions and regulation. I found this part of the book the most rewarding - as it takes you from the theory to the application.

The book is also a natural extension to the growing literature on `two-sided markets' and `platform competition'. Two-sided Platforms have been with us for a long time, but the problem of how to regulate them has not gone away. For instance, the best example of a two-sided market is credit cards, which require consumers to use the card and merchants to accept it. The original price structure of 0% to the consumer and 7% to the merchant allowed this business to take off, yet the regulator will from time to time, view the fee structure as an example of price fixing. Of course price fixing is bad, but MasterCard wouldn't (arguably) be able to operate without it - and the consumer clearly benefits in taking a single payment card abroad, anywhere in the world. So, price fixing bad, but consumer welfare benefits that result - good. My point being, should regulators disrupt platforms due to the fact they don't dance to competition law in its current form, there's not just the risk of losing welfare benefits for the sake of a upholding a law (that may itself be out of touch with the market) but also - thanks to this book - the additional cost of gridlock that could arise as a result. After all, removing gridlock is what platforms do best, to all our benefit.

An apt conclusion to this book review would be to note that Heller gives a `nod' to Hernando de Soto when he notes that "de Soto argues that a vibrant underground economy should be viewed as an important contribution to overall economic performance, rather than a drain. But he [de Soto] contends that we should not mistake a vibrant scene for an optimal one. People create an underground economy because the law drives them to it". Even with the benefit of hindsight, when reflecting on the record industry's decision not to license the illegal P2P site Napster almost a decade ago, but then instead chose a route of litigation (arguably against its own consumers), meant that I found this observation particularly meaningful. Whilst I have not read Hernando de Soto's "The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else" - this book has led me to order it (from Amazon, of course) and would pre-emptivly suggest that it should be promoted as a suitable `pair' with the Gridlock economy, allowing the reader to get to grips with the often-overlooked-undercurrents that affect economics, law and policy in so much of everyday life.

Highly recommended

Will Page
Chief Economist
MCPS PRS Alliance
[Written and provided in my personal capacity]