List Price:$26.00
Our Price: $17.16
You Save: $8.84 (34%)
Prices subject to change.
Availability:Usually ships in 24 hours
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: July 07, 2008
Publisher: Basic Books
Sales Rank: 69320
Studio: Basic Books
Related Items:
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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.
Amazon.com Review:
Lawrence Lessig on The Gridlock Economy
Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society, as well as CEO of the Creative Commons project and the author of Code, Free Culture, and The Future of Ideas. In an exclusive guest review for Amazon.com, Lessig shares his praise for The Gridlock Economy and its sizable contribution to the economic policy debate.
For forty years, 'the tragedy of the commons' has set the frame for an extraordinary range of social, economic, and legal thought. It oriented policy prescriptions. It set the baseline on reasonable policy alternatives. Its strong conclusion in favor of assigning property rights whenever possible has had a profound effect on everything from intellectual property policy to spectrum regulation. Its simple, intuitive analysis became second nature to a generation of policy makers.
Heller's book, The Gridlock Economy, completely inverts this framework for some of the most important policy questions we will face in the digital age. His clear and beautifully crafted analysis is absolutely compelling, and will fundamentally change the debate in core policy areas. There are very few books that reorient a field. Almost none that reorient many fields. This is in that 'almost none' category: Paradigms will shift. Many of them. --Lawrence Lessig
Customer Reviews Average Rating: 
Rating:  - How to do property right
The idealized free market can be framed in a number of ways, but the Coase Theorem is one of its more intuitive pillars. The idea is that, *under certain well-specified conditions*, property lands in the hands of those who value it most, regardless of who gets that property at the beginning. Now you need to specify those conditions. One is that it's costless for sellers to find buyers, and costless for them to carry out the sale. Under these conditions, I sell my property to person A, who sells it ... Read More
Rating:  - How overly granular ownership creates mirror problems to when there is no ownership
This is a fascinating book.Michael Heller says he got the key insight to the problem he describes in this book in the faulty way the old Soviet Union tried to create private property upon its dissolution.For example, let's say you have been operating a store and with the return of private property, you might expect that you would either get the store or be able to buy it from the state or some such process that would let you continue operating the store.However, you forget that all those Soviet ... Read More
Rating: - Illuminates what Econ 101 leaves invisible...
An excellent book.The chapter on Russia's efforts to adopt property rights in the retail and apartment markets alone is worth the price.
Heller's main thesis is that too much ownership can work to 'gridlock' economic progress, investment and innovation.This is explored in how granting too large a bundle of rights for patents has hobbled many high-technology, biotechnology and pharmaceutical development efforts, threatening U.S. prosperity and consumer well-being.
Also, a ... Read More
Rating: - Great read
I enjoyed reading this book. A lot. I've worked in the high-tech business and can vouch for many of the things presented throughout the pages. I did find that the book repeated many points, seemingly unnecessarily, and I do wish that more time would have been spent on ideas for how to solve the problems that exist.
Rating: - Changes the way we see the world
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 ... Read More
The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives |
