When too many people own a resource, the resource will be underused. Cooperation will break down, wealth will be lost. That is today’s message of Michael Heller who is at Berkman to talk about his new book, the Gridlock Economy.

Explaining the economic meltdown as an example of a gridlock economy, he suggests that in the past there was a direct one-on-one relation between lenders and borrowers, that they knew each other. Banks lost money on foreclosures, they’d rather work out a deal with you. But in the new world, there are potentially several thousand owners, and it is much harder to re-negotiate a loan. Too many owners fragment mortgages.

The second example he gives is drug patents. He tells a story about an invention, a treatment for Alzheimer. But producing this treatment would touch upon a dozen patents. Imagine a room with a dozen start-ups, each of them thinking they are sitting on the patent that is key to treating Alzheimer. Imagine having to negotiate with all of them. The inventor decided not to go for it and put the treatment on the shelf. The deal could not be made. Heller is making the argument that this is not an isolated case. There is a huge increase and investment in invention and patents in the last thirty years, but there has been a decrease in discovery of major classes of new medicines, what he calls the drug discovery gap. Forcefully, he argues, we have drugs that should and could exist, but don’t. And it is not just drugs, but this problem exists all across the high-tech frontier.

He starts his third example by asking a question: what is the most underused natural resource in the United States? The answer is: spectrum. About 90% is dead air. The licensing of spectrum dates back to Coolidge and basically hasn’t been updated since. We have created a system of geographically fragmented licenses that are non-transferable, making it extremely difficult to assemble public or private networks. The United States has fallen in broadband from number 1 to somewhere number 15. Cutting high-tech will not occur in the United States, the next generation technology cannot emerge here, because it is so hard to find spectrum to facilitate high-speed transfer.

Fourth example: airports. Why do we have to spend so much time at airports? Why not build more airports? Thirty years ago, air traffic was de-regulated, yet Denver is the only new airport that has been built in the United States since 1978. The reason we don’t have more new airports is former real estate law, that allows every community to block the assembly of land you need to build new airports.

Heller concludes that these are essentially all the same problem. There is a change, a shift in the nature of innovation. There used to be a one-on-one relationship between patent and invention, between copyright and song. That is the old style economy. Now the new style economy is much more like a funnel, from many to one. That is to say, assemblage is needed for innovation. Big breakthroughs come from assembling multiple parts into one. Cutting edge is found in mash-ups, remixes, even in the case of resources like land.

He calls this the tragedy of the anti-commons. The tragedy of the commons is that no owners lead to overuse. It was a huge turning point for the environmentalism movement, a metaphor leading to a change in framing, of thinking about public good problems. It was key to a spur to privatization, seen as the solution to the tragedy of commons; that is to say, private property is a great engine to conservation.

But privatization can overshoot.The tragedy of the anti-commons is when too many owners lead to too little use of scarce resources. This is, contrary to the tragedy of the commons, an invisible tragedy - you don’t see when something is not appearing, is not being invented, is not being built.

Edit: See also the much more lucid and detailed blogging of this event by my esteemed colleagues David Weinberger and Ethan Zuckerman. In particular, check out the fascinating exchange on the nature of “property” between Michael Heller and Yochai Benkler that I was unable to capture in my blog. Too many bloggers clearly did not lead to the underblogging of this event, although clearly some blogs were better than others.

This Harvard Crimson interview with Girl Talk is quite good. Here’s a relevant gem:

13. FM: A significant aspect of the narrative out there about you deals with the legality of your music, which uses samples from other artists without permission. Have you ever even been sued?

GT: We’ve had no problems. I feel that it should be legal, so I’m not totally surprised. It’s exciting, though, and I think it could be a sign of the times. I think people are becoming more used to the idea of sampling. Artists, musicians, young people, old people, are recontextualizing and appropriating the media.

14. FM: Have you ever gotten feedback from artists you’ve sampled?

GT: I’ve never had any negative reactions, but I’ve had positive ones. I’ve had Sophie B. Hawkins’ manager contact me to see if we could possibly collaborate, a member of Yo Majesty told me they liked my stuff, Big Boi from Outkast came to a show of mine and came to talk to me. He was completely down with what I was doing.

My wife, Tina Collins, (who gets link credit) tells me he’s playing at Harvard on Thursday, November 20, before the Harvard-Yale pep rally. I’m so jealous. We saw him this summer at All Points West, and he rocked the house.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention that his “CD” is available for name-your-price download. Here’s the link from his MySpace page.

In a(nother) huge election day win, yesterday the FCC deregulated the “white spaces” between TV stations, allowing technology firms and enthusiasts the right to play around in these unused channels of high-quality spectrum.

In a 5-0 decision, the Commission issued a ruling allowing anybody to transmit messages in white spaces, within fairly limits on the generation of interference. By declaring the spectrum open to unlicensed experimentation, they’ve green-lighted the development of new technologies that some describe as “wifi on steroids.”

Unsurprisingly, Google is happy, and unless you’re invested in one of the incumbent industries on Wired’s list of losers (see first link), you should be, too.

Visit today’s FCC Daily Digest, where you can see the FCC press release and the five Commissioners’ statements.

Last night, a friend of mine claimed that blogs have no redeeming value. (He’d had a few beers, so the claim was a bit less, um, polite and articulate; he didn’t know I’m a blogger, so it may have been a good thing I was sober.)

While I’ll grant that many blogs do not have much to say, a good many do, and the very exceptional blogs break news stories by original reporting. Some bloggers actually go out into the field and conduct interviews, take pictures, and make observations. Others break stories by sifting through mountains of data (government documents, corporate reports, congressional hearings, etc.) for otherwise unseen patterns or unexpected tidbits.

FiveThirtyEight.com is the best campaign blog of the season, and it’s because they’ve done an outstanding job of both sifting through mountains of data (polls and demographic variables) and hitting the road to do original reporting. While the statistical analysis is what brought most of the readers to fivethirtyeight, the original reporting from the field is perhaps even more valuable.

Nate Silver, the number-crunching genius who built his reputation on inventive work with Baseball Prospectus, got millions of political junkies hooked with his superior statistical analysis–complete with “win percentages” based on ten thousand daily election simulations. While most news outlets will report their own episodic or tracking poll results, or cherry pick results based on their news value (often placing undue emphasis on outliers), Silver’s steady hand combines demographic data with a thoughtful, detailed poll of polls, at both the state and the national level, to give readers a solid understanding of the state of the election.

The addition of demographic data to the soup has made the site somewhat more sophisticated than simple poll-of-polls sites like Pollster and RealClearPolitics. The “win percentage” numbers are also quite helpful, providing a realistic understanding of what it really means to have an average polling lead of, say, 1.4% in North Carolina (Obama wins 65% of simulations), or a 4.9% lead in Georgia (McCain wins 91%). Silver also deserves much credit for total transparency as to his methods.

While Silver’s number-crunching has been the very best of the season, perhaps the site’s most important contribution has come in the site’s original on-the-ground reporting of both presidential campaigns’ ground games. It doesn’t take a statistical genius–indeed, it takes no genius at all–to know that the ground games make all the difference in close elections.

Here, 538’s On the Road series has been just about the only game in town. Reporter Sean Quinn and photographer Brett Marty simply got in a car and drove across the country, hitting swing state after swing state.

The result? Well, they’ve reported on explosive excitement and volunteer efforts at every Obama field office across the country. And in contrast:

But the other story, the story on which we’ve had a running eight-week exclusive in 36 separate On the Road pieces and counting, is that John McCain’s ground campaign is just not happening. It hasn’t been happening, without Sarah Palin there might be four or five volunteers across the entire nation left, and now, per Mosk’s piece at WaPo, it looks like it will be happening even less.

That a 3-person blog that didn’t exist until this March has this exclusive is amazing–and outrageous. It’s amazing that such a small operation can provide such important insights into what may be the story of the presidential election–the complete reversal of the major parties’ abilities to mobilize supporters on the ground. And it’s outrageous that not a single mainstream news outlet has covered this story, even when it’s been handed to them on a Silver platter. (Wokka.)

If that doesn’t illustrate the power of blogging–the awesome reporting and analysis that occasionally sprouts forth from motivated outsiders–then I don’t know what could.