The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives

Tuesday, November 18, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required (rsvp@cyber.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET.

Every so often an idea comes along that fundamentally changes how we understand innovation and the economy. Columbia Law School Professor Michael Heller has discovered such an idea, a market dynamic no one knew existed.  Private ownership usually creates wealth, but too much ownership has the opposite effect—it creates gridlock. This free market paradox is at the center of Heller’s new book, The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives.  In this discussion, Heller will draw on everyday experiences to show how the structure of ownership matters more than people may realize. Why has America fallen off the global leading edge in wireless broadband? How come Chuck D of Public Enemy no longer raps over a collage of sound? Where are the cures promised by the biotech revolution? Turns out all these problems are really the same problem, one whose solution could unleash trillions in lost productivity and jumpstart our ailing economy.  Tim Wu says, “Heller has managed to pull of one of the most perceptive books on property since Das Kapital.” And Larry Lessig writes, “There are very few books that reorient a field. Almost none that reorient many fields. This is in that ‘almost none’ category.”

About Michael

 Michael Heller is the author of The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives (Basic Books 2008, www.gridlockeconomy.com) and the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of Real Estate Law at Columbia Law School. His scholarship explores diverse ownership puzzles, ranging from Corporate Governance Lessons from Transition Economy Reforms (Princeton University Press, paperback 2008) to the use of Land Assembly Districts (Harvard Law Review, 2008) as a solution for eminent domain abuse. Prior to joining Columbia in 2002, Heller taught at the University of Michigan Law School where he received the school’s top teaching award. From 1990-94, he worked at the World Bank on post-socialist reforms. Heller clerked on the Ninth Circuit and is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Harvard College.

Links

• Ethan Zuckerman liveblogged the luncheon
• David Weinberger liveblogged the luncheon

Download media from this event here.