Justin may have a column in this week’s magazine, but I have a 200-word book review. Here, I’ll give you the whole thing:
When no one owns a resource, we tend to overuse it–winding up with polluted skies, fished-out oceans and battles over access to freshwater. But too much ownership leads to problems too. A pharmaceutical company is stymied by a web of patents and doesn’t make a drug. An airport can’t buy land for a new runway to ease congestion because dozens of people own slivers of property. A production house, faced with a mishmash of music-licensing rights, keeps an old sitcom from DVD.
In THE GRIDLOCK ECONOMY (Basic Books; 259 pages), Columbia Law School’s Michael Heller documents such “wasteful underuse” and the straitjacket it puts on innovation. His examples resemble pastures in which each square inch is owned by a different rancher: useless.
The solution, free-marketeers will be glad to know, isn’t less ownership but better ways to aggregate it. Consider the patent pool created in 1917 that let airplanemakers swap technology and share profits without threat of litigation. For property use, Heller imagines something like a co-op board for landowners. Suddenly, there’s someone in charge to talk to–and maybe that airport gets its runway.
You might recognize that first notion—people overusing resources no one owns—as Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons.” Hardin, a biologist, first used the term in a 1968 article in Science.
In homage, Heller calls his idea the “tragedy of the anti-commons,” a term he first used in the Harvard Law Review in 1998. (You can read that article by going here and linking to the PDF at the bottom of the page.)
One of Heller’s big hopes is that by giving a name to this habit of underusing resources that have too many owners, we might start noticing the pattern where we had previously overlooked it. Kind of like the term “tragedy of the commons” helped feed the environmental movement. Or, more recently, how you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a “tipping point.”
It’s interesting to think how wordedness determines the way we process the world. Okay, I think it’s interesting. And so does Michael Heller. When I took a trip up to Columbia to chat with him, he pointed out that the word “underuse” is only now working its way into parlance—it appears in some dictionaries but not in others. For Scrabble players, it became an acceptable move just three years ago. Maybe the revolution starts with The Gridlock Economy.
While I was up at Columbia, I grabbed some video of Heller talking about his book. For your viewing pleasure:
