Michael Heller and James Salzman on Mine!

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2021

⏱️ 70 minutes

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Summary

Law professors Michael Heller and James Salzman talk about their book, Mine! with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Heller and Salzman argue that ownership is trickier and more complicated than it looks. While we tend to think of something as either mine or not mine, there's often ambiguity and a continuum about who owns what. Salzman and Heller explore a wide and surprising range of property rights from everyday life. The conversation includes a discussion of the insights of Ronald Coase on the assignment of property rights when rights conflict.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.8	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover
0:12.6	Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and
0:17.8	find links down there information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives,
0:23.2	but every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd
0:30.3	love to hear from you. Today is August 2nd, 2021 and I guess our James Salisman, the Donald
0:41.6	Brand Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law, which join appointments at the UCLA School
0:46.3	of Law and the Brand School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California,
0:50.7	Santa Barbara and Michael Heller, who is Vice Dean and the Lawrence Wean Professor at Columbia
0:56.1	Law School. Together they have written mine, and so with an explanation point, mine, how the
1:02.4	Hidden Rules of Ownership Control are lives. Jim, Michael, welcome to econtalk. Thank you.
1:08.4	It's great to be here. So this is a book that covers a lot of econtalk favorite topics.
1:15.2	Property rights is at the heart of this book, but what it's fun about the book is it is a
1:19.9	exploration of the subtlety of property rights and through I think the most human beings think about
1:26.0	the historical nature of property rights. See, it's something's either minor or it's not,
1:30.4	and it's that's like, you know, Mike, by house, as long as I don't have a mortgage. But we tend to
1:35.2	think of property rights as honor off, one zero. And what your book does beautifully is explore the
1:40.6	rich nuance and subtlety of property rights currently and in history. And I want to start with a
1:47.5	seemingly peculiar example, which is early on in your book, which I loved, which is the airline
1:53.3	seat. Michael, what is the story of the airline seat? Well, as we was the genesis of this book as
1:58.0	well, we were flying and this actually happened to Jim. The person in front leaned back. Jim was
2:04.3	actually preparing a talk to give. As he does a lot and someone leaned his, her seat right back
	...

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