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How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives

Michael Heller and James Salzman
Doubleday, 2021
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As people fight for control of increasingly limited resources, entrepreneurs scramble to create the most compelling ownership stories they can, while searching for novel sources of profit, write law professors Michael Heller and James Salzman. They argue that veiled rules of ownership control much of your everyday life. The authors further discuss how the emergence of a sharing economy – in which ownership moves from the domain of the many to the few – could have a profound impact on communities of the future.

Summary

Invisible ownership rules govern your life and dictate losers and winners.

The primary function of human society is to help people navigate competing claims to limited resources. While many tend to have a binary view of what they own versus what they do not, rules of ownership prove ambiguous and complex. The ownership stories people cling to tend to embody common maxims, such as “first come, first served.” Often, dueling claims to the same resource arise, and the person or corporation society deems “an owner” turns out to be the one with the superior story.

Invisible ownership norms are the “remote control” for much of everyday life: People who own valuable resources steer people to behavior that benefits them. Ownership rules grow increasingly impenetrable today. For example, you might think you own the Amazon Kindle book you download, but technically, you only own a license to the book, which Amazon owns and can delete from your device. Ownership is a complex and evolving “social engineering tool” that drives people to internalize ideas about what they ought to do, then change their behavior without always consciously understanding ...

About the Authors

Columbia Law School professor of real estate law Michael A. Heller also authored The Gridlock Economy. James Salzman is a professor of environmental law at the UCLA School of Law and UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.

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