Scrooge McDuck and the Big Inch

In a 1956 comic book,  Scrooge McDuck finds a deed to a square inch in his “Canny Brannie” cereal and heads to Texas to find his fortune.  When a prairie dog pops out of the inch with oil on his feet, Scrooge decides to buy millions of neighboring inches so he can drill.  He overcomes gridlock effortlessly, it being a cartoon, but then the oil is not what it seems.  “Faulty Fortunes” is a great gridlock tale!  Thanks to Noel Nyman for pointing me to this story.

Canada Business News TV interview

Amanda Lang, host of “Taking Stock” on Canada TV’s Business News Network, interviews me about the book.  To watch the interview, click on the link, wait for the 10 second ad to play, then move the toggle switch under the video to the 18:50 min/sec mark.  The interview runs for about 7 minutes.

Toronto’s Globe and Mail Feature

John Allemang writes an in-depth and wicked smart feature story about the book in Toronto’s Globe and Mail.  A brief quote:

Prof. Heller is that rare thing, a critic of the free-market economy from a free-market perspective. A skeptic in a world of economic true believers, he has looked upon the business model we’ve been following so fervently and spotted its basic flaw.

Authors@Google Talk Posted on YouTube!

If you want to hear about The Gridlock Economy, check out my recent Authors@Google talk. Google does a wonderful public service posting their book talk series on the web for all to see. Serious discussion of new books is moving from book reviews and book store talks to places like Google and YouTube.

My colleague Tim Wu introduced me; I talk for about 30 minutes; then there are about 30 minutes of Q&A from Google staff. I hope you enjoy!

Boing Boing Notice

The great Boing Boing — A Directory of Wonderful Things — says the Gridlock Economy “sounds like a terrific read.”  Yep, it is.  Thanks to Cory Doctorow for the shout-out!

Listen to WHYY’s Interview by Marty Moss-Coane

Hi, I’m back from Philadelphia where Marty Moss-Coane and I spent an hour talking about the book on her WHYY show “Radio Times.” Marty is one of the best in the interview business — it’s pleasure to be a guest on such a well-produced, well-run show.

If you’ve got 50 minutes, you can listen to the interview or download it as a podcast (includes caller Q&A) here .

James Surowiecki Reviews the Book for the New Yorker!

Wow. James Surowiecki is one of my writer heroes. He’s among the very best in conveying complex economic ideas to a wide audience. Having spent a few years now trying to do that in the Gridlock Economy, I appreciate more just how hard it is to achieve at all, and how much harder it is to do week after week. Surowiecki writes:

“The more we divide common resources like science and culture into small, fenced-off lots, Heller shows, the more difficult we make it for people to do business and to build something new. Innovation, investment, and growth end up being stifled.”

You can read his full Financial Page story on The Gridlock Economy here. Also, I love the graphic that accompanies the story. It’s perfect:

State Attorneys General and Gridlock

A big motivation in writing this book was to reach new audiences with the ideas I am most passionate about.  Here’s a review aimed at state attorneys general by James Tierney on his WeblAG blog.

Attorneys general struggle with the issue of ownership everyday. The implications of Kelo v. City of New London continue to trouble all aspects of state regulation. I suggest that the attorneys general give themselves a break and pick up Heller’s new book. I suggest that they focus on the chapter entitled “The New Lexicon” and the chapter that deals with the spectrum issues. In doing so, leave your personal prejudices at the door and get into the new place that Heller will take you.

A thoughtful review of Gridlock Economy

David Bollier at On the Commons blog writes a detailed review of the Gridlock Economy from the perspective of someone concerned with understanding and promoting the role of commons institutions in governing scarce resources.  The On the Commons blog is a great resource for activists and citizens concerned with assembling resources for positive change.  I encourage you to read the entire, thoughtful review.  Here’s an excerpt:

The Gridlock Economy is a refreshing book because it draws upon the deep knowledge and authority of legal scholarship without getting mired in pedantic, inside debates. It speaks to the concerned citizen and policymaker, and grounds its arguments in vivid, concrete stories that anyone can relate to.

Gridlock in the open source world

I’ve thought of open source as a solution, but this blogger at Kompimi Public Domain Code notes that the accumulation of open source licenses can itself cause gridlock.  Fascinating.

The original BSD license is another example of gridlock: the license included a seemingly innocuous term requiring any advertisement for a product incorporating the code to credit the original authors. This sounds innocuous until you assemble a multitude of BSD license modules, and realize that there’s no longer room on your advertisements for anything else. The result is that companies avoided using any BSD-licensed code. This was repaired in the modified BSD license used today.

Software today is in a similar gridlock: there is an immense body of code out in the world, but it is impossible to legally combine code released under incompatible licenses, and even where licenses are compatible, it rapidly becomes infeasible to keep up with an increasingly long and complex list of requirements. When you build a product out of two or three large open-source systems, this isn’t a problem; when you build it out of 200 small open-source modules, each by a separate author, you end up deciding you really ought to have written it yourself. This pushes more and more code into the proprietary space that has long since been written before and should have only been written once.