Gridlock Economy

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Book: Michael Heller. “The Gridlock Economy,”

URL = http://www.gridlockeconomy.com [1]

= about the Tragedy of the Anti-Commons


Summary

"In his new book, Gridlock Economy, Columbia University Law School Professor Michael Heller paints a scary picture in which property rights—copyrights, patents or individual parcels of land—strangle the economy and stifle innovation. In Heller’s world, new cures for Alzheimer’s remain in the lab, films flounder unreleased and even hip-hop albums go unrecorded because it’s simply too hard to buy off all the owners who are in a blocking position with their pesky property rights." (http://www.forbes.com/2008/08/29/legal-intellectual-property-biz-beltway-cz_df_0902property.html?)


Review

James Surowiecky in the New Yorker:

"The situation that grounded the U.S. aircraft industry is an example of what the Columbia law professor Michael Heller, in his new book, “The Gridlock Economy,” calls the “anticommons.” We hear a lot about the “tragedy of the commons”: if a valuable asset (a grazing field, say) is held in common, each individual will try to exploit as much of it as possible. Villagers will send all their cows out to graze at the same time, and soon the field will be useless. When there’s no ownership, the pursuit of individual self-interest can make everyone worse off. But Heller shows that having too much ownership creates its own problems. If too many people own individual parts of a valuable asset, it’s easy to end up with gridlock, since any one person can simply veto the use of the asset.

The commons leads to overuse and destruction; the anticommons leads to underuse and waste. In the cultural sphere, ever tighter restrictions on copyright and fair use limit artists’ abilities to sample and build on older works of art. In biotechnology, the explosion of patenting over the past twenty-five years—particularly efforts to patent things like gene fragments—may be retarding drug development, by making it hard to create a new drug without licensing myriad previous patents. Even divided land ownership can have unforeseen consequences. Wind power, for instance, could reliably supply up to twenty per cent of America’s energy needs—but only if new transmission lines were built, allowing the efficient movement of power from the places where it’s generated to the places where it’s consumed. Don’t count on that happening anytime soon. Most of the land that the grid would pass through is owned by individuals, and nobody wants power lines running through his back yard.

The point isn’t that private property is a bad thing, or that the state should be able to run roughshod over the rights of individual owners. Property rights (including patents) are essential to economic growth, providing incentives to innovate and invest. But property rights need to be limited to be effective." (http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/08/11/080811ta_talk_surowiecki)