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How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives
Basic Books
July 2008
On Sale: July 7, 2008
304 pages ISBN: 0465029167 EAN: 9780465029167 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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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