The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources
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Infrastructure resources are the subject of many contentious public policy debates, including what to do about crumbling roads and bridges, whether and how to protect our natural environment, energy policy, even patent law reform, universal health care, network neutrality regulation and the future of the Internet. Each of these involves a battle to control infrastructure resources, to establish the terms and conditions under which the public receives access, and to determine how the infrastructure and various dependent systems evolve over time.
Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources devotes much needed attention to understanding how society benefits from infrastructure resources and how management decisions affect a wide variety of interests. The book links infrastructure, a particular set of resources defined in terms of the manner in which they create value, with commons, a resource management principle by which a resource is shared within a community. The infrastructure commons ideas have broad implications for scholarship and public policy across many fields ranging from traditional infrastructure like roads to environmental economics to intellectual property to Internet policy.
Economics has become the methodology of choice for many scholars and policymakers in these areas. The book offers a rigorous economic challenge to the prevailing wisdom, which focuses primarily on problems associated with ensuring adequate supply. The author explores a set of questions that, once asked, seem obvious: what drives the demand side of the equation, and how should demand-side drivers affect public policy? Demand for infrastructure resources involves a range of important considerations that bear on the optimal design of a regime for infrastructure management. The book identifies resource valuation and attendant management problems that recur across many different fields and many different resource types, and it develops a functional economic approach to understanding and analyzing these problems and potential solutions.
Here is the abstract:
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"In Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources, Brett Frischmann's argument is timely and important. What he is attempting here is nothing less than a reimagining of how economics thinks about infrastructure. His argument ranges from intellectual property to telecommunications to the case for government investment in roads and bridges." --Mark A. Lemley William H. Neukom Professor, Stanford Law School Director, Stanford Program in Law, Science, and Technology Partner, Durie Tangri LLP
"Faculty and students across the social sciences and engineering will all find Brett Frischmann's new book to provide essential guidance for the analysis of diverse types of infrastructure resources and how policies affect the effectiveness, efficiency, fairness, and sustainability of outcomes. Rarely can one find such a broad and useful foundation for digging in and understanding the complexities of modern infrastructures. An extraordinary book." --Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University, Co-Recipient, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 2009
"In Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources, Brett Frischmann persuades us that infrastructure in its many guises is probably our most important national asset. Looking to law, economics, and regulatory structures, he helps us to define it, and illuminates the many ways it is funded and shared. This book might change the way you look at the economy." --Suzanne Scotchmer, Faculty Director, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology Professor of Law, Economics and Public Policy
"Brett Frischmann's excellent contribution to the policy debate surrounding the development and management of shared infrastructure is original, nuanced, and, in keeping with his own principles, accessible. It is important reading for anyone interested in economic policy and regulation." --Howard Shelanski, Professor of Law, Georgetown University
