The Tragedy of the Anti-Commons?

The perils of too much ownership:

It seems all too infrequent an occurrence that a law professor writes a thoughtful and accessible book about law for a lay audience. But Michael Heller has done just that with his new book, The Gridlock Economy, which hit bookstore shelves last week.

In the book, Heller, who teaches property law, real estate, land use and other topics at Columbia, presents a startlingly simple theory: “When too many owners control a single resource, cooperation breaks down, wealth disappears and everybody loses.” That is, the gridlock created by too much private ownership is wreaking havoc on our economy and lives. It’s keeping badly needed runways from being built, stifling high-tech innovation, and “costing lives” by keeping groundbreaking drugs from hitting the market.

We can attest that the book is quite readable and, well, certainly seems persuasive. Columbia’s Tim Wu likes it too. In a recent Slate review, Wu fits it squarely into a lineage of popular recent books that he deems “The Compendium of Counter-Intuition” — like Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds — that challenge conventional wisdom on a variety of topics. Writes Wu: “In an area that has generated very few nonacademic books, Heller has managed to pull off one of the most perceptive popular books on property since Das Kapital.”

More after the link, including an interview with Heller.

I'm heading to the bookstore tomorrow and hope to pick up a copy of this book.

See my previous post on Heller's book here.