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Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives

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An Adam Grant Spring Book Pick
Finalist for the Next Big Idea Club


A must-read this spring -- a fantastically well-written exploration of our need for ownership and the costs of greed.
--Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of Far From the Tree


A hidden set of rules governs who owns what--explaining everything from whether you can recline your airplane seat to why HBO lets you borrow a password illegally--and in this lively and entertaining guide, two acclaimed law professors reveal how things become mine.

Mine is one of the first words babies learn. By the time we grow up, the idea of ownership seems natural, whether buying a cup of coffee or a house. But who controls the space behind your airplane seat: you reclining or the squished laptop user behind? Why is plagiarism wrong, but it's okay to knock-off a recipe or a dress design? And after a snowstorm, why does a chair in the street hold your parking space in Chicago, but in New York you lose the space and the chair?

Mine! explains these puzzles and many more. Surprisingly, there are just six simple stories that everyone uses to claim everything. Owners choose the story that steers us to do what they want. But we can always pick a different story. This is true not just for airplane seats, but also for battles over digital privacy, climate change, and wealth inequality. As Michael Heller and James Salzman show--in the spirited style of Freakonomics, Nudge, and Predictably Irrational--ownership is always up for grabs.

With stories that are eye-opening, mind-bending, and sometimes infuriating, Mine! reveals the rules of ownership that secretly control our lives.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published March 2, 2021

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About the author

Michael A. Heller

5 books20 followers
Michael Heller is the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of Real Estate Law at Columbia Law School. He teaches property, land use, and real estate law and has served as the school’s vice dean for intellectual life.

Heller has been a visiting professor at UCLA School of Law (2006-07), Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2004-05), visiting professor at NYU Law School (2001), Olin Senior Fellow at Columbia (2000), and visiting lecturer at Yale Law School (1991). From 1994 to 2002, Heller taught at the University of Michigan Law School where he received the L. Hart Wright Award for excellence in teaching. He co-directed corporate governance research at the University of Michigan Business School’s William Davidson Institute and was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. During 1990-94, Heller worked at the World Bank on post-socialist property law transition. He clerked for the Honorable James R. Browning, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Harvard College.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 254 reviews
Profile Image for Mackenzie - PhDiva Books.
616 reviews14.4k followers
July 10, 2021
I was hooked by the airline teaser about reclining seats since I not only work for a major airline, but I am a strong supporter of the side of “it is airplane etiquette not to recline your seat!” I was interested in this book because I do a lot of coaching at work and in consulting I do on the side, and a common theme of these conversations at work is around ownership with work projects, particularly when many of their projects involve cross-functional teams.

Full of interesting stories, both large and small, this book really delves into the complicated way we all let ownership influence our lives. I am the first to admit that I get territorial at times. Maybe this comes from having several siblings and having to share so much growing up, or maybe I’m just (as most humans are) a bit selfish! There is a comfort that comes from ownership, right? It is related to psychological safety. If we own something—it something is ours—there is a feeling it is more stable. That it gives us value.

I’ll be honest, the fact that the authors didn’t support my notion of the wedge of space behind an airplane seat clearly belonging to the person sitting in the seat behind felt like someone stole my identity. I loved reading about the different ways people, companies, and organizations have played with the concept of ownership—and the ambiguity of it—to manipulate all variety of situations!

Covering everything from the most trivial of disputes to the much larger topics of inequality and gender discrimination, this book is the perfect mix of engaging examples and deep conceptual discussion that makes it fly by while also profoundly impacting your world view. And by the end, I can’t imagine any reader not finding some ways of recognizing the way these “rules” or ownership apply to their own life. Just maybe, we can use that knowledge for positive change!

Thank you to Double Day Books for my copy! Opinions are my own.
Profile Image for Lorie.
61 reviews16 followers
January 22, 2024
Things that make you go hmmm this books provides an ah ha! Thought provoking.
Profile Image for Chris Boutté.
Author 7 books204 followers
March 7, 2021
This is one of the most fascinating, thought-provoking books that I've read in a long time, and I couldn't put it down. Who technically owns digital media once you hit the "buy" button? Who own's the space around a seat on a plane? The recliner or the person with the leg room? Who owns intellectual property and for how long and is it fair? Most of all, who profits from how ownership works? These are all questions asked in this book as well as much more. Heller and Salzman had me hooked by covering a wide range of topics regarding ownership that really had me thinking, and if you want to get your wheels turning, you need to get this book.
Profile Image for Alina Rozhkova.
224 reviews7 followers
May 4, 2022
Дуже цікава, гарно написана, з купою класних життєвих історій про судові позови стосовно того, чи має мій сусід спереду в літаку право розкладати спинку свого сидіння на мої коліна
1 review
March 3, 2021
This book reads like Freakonomics and gave me the same sense of being able to look at the world differently. Focusing on the different ways people own things explains everything from arguments over whether you can recline your airplane seat to slowing deforestation. This is a well-written, fun and eye-opening read.
Profile Image for Oleksandr Zholud.
1,216 reviews120 followers
December 5, 2021
This is a non-fic about the ways we decide that something belongs to someone. ‘Mine!’ is one of the first words children learn, but how we define the limit between mine and not mine? I read it as a part of monthly reading for November-December 2021 at Non Fiction Book Club group.

The authors are professors of law in the US academia and therefore, their story mostly concerns the US and a point of view of lawyer, as opposed to say economists or psychologists, even if in the middle they mention Coarse and ideas of transaction costs and externalities, even if not mentioning them explicitly.

They outline six pathways to claiming ownership:
first-in-time, or first in a queue, first come, first served. There are some problems with it, from professional people to stay in line to get to the Supreme Court or Disneyland or a concert or a play, to sell their places, to software bots that may buy tickets faster than any human.
possession is 9/10 of the law. The case of the parking chair - space-savers to hold spots e.g. leaving a chair on a parking lot or a cloth on a chair in a theater to show that it is occupied. However, what can be used to occupy and for how long differs.
labor - rip what you saw. It works well with physical produce, but less so with intellectual, authors rights and such. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speech “I Have a Dream” is copyrighted (and all his speeches) and cannot be reproduced. Disney pays a lot to extend royalties – first hey were to 1984, then to 2003 (and Pluto to 2005, Goofy to 2007, Donald Duck to 2009), now to 2023. Mikey is the wealthiest imagined celebrity.
attachment - it is mine because it is linked to mine, e.g. air above my property that can be used to fly drones, or a treasure found on your land. Problem with it that the rich get richer, their property begets new property. Externalities – pumping water at my land, takes your water from the common underground aquafer, and the owner of the fastest pump wins. Problems of overfishing and beach erosion - Florida alone has spent $1.3 billion to nourish 237 miles of its beaches over the past eighty years. In 2017 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dumped hundreds of thousands of tons of sand to shore up just one three-thousand-foot stretch of Miami Beach, with an $11.5 million price tag paid by local, state, and federal taxpayers. The most extracted mineral in the world today, exceeding by weight all the fossil fuels we pump, is sand and gravel, used for beach nourishment along with fracking, land reclamation, concrete, and glass. Sand has become scarce; extracting it is imposing ever-escalating environmental harms.
self-ownership why it is ok to sell blood but not a kidney, why using your womb to gestate someone’s fertilized egg is prohibited in many countries? Is selling what your body produces/has a slavery?
family inheritance and the surprising fact that the Founding fathers were afraid that it can restore aristocracy. Through careful ownership design, England’s wealthiest families were able to perpetuate themselves as an elite class that has endured for centuries. A recent study showed, remarkably, that many of the most powerful English family names in 1170—decades before the Magna Carta—still enjoy high social status more than eight hundred years later. And England is not alone: the richest families in Florence, Italy, today substantially overlap with the richest in 1427. By the end of the nineteenth century, America had drifted far from a country of yeoman farmers to the Gilded Age—lorded over by John Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and other robber barons—concentrated wealth to an extent that the country had never before seen and that the Founders had labored to prevent. by the end of the nineteenth century, America had drifted far from a country of yeoman farmers. It increasingly resembled the aristocracy and landed estates of old England. The Gilded Age—lorded over by John Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and other robber barons—concentrated wealth to an extent that the country had never before seen and that the Founders had labored to prevent. Teddy Roosevelt, making full use of his bully pulpit, called for both a progressive income tax and an inheritance tax.

A very interesting overview with one important downside – concentration of the USA.
Profile Image for Daniel.
653 reviews85 followers
May 8, 2021
Who owns what? It’s much more complicated than we think. Nothing is absolute and the court generally decides what decision will result in the greatest common good.

1. First come, last served: people generally follow queue in Disneyland. Unless you are rich enough to pay for the VIP tour at $400-$600 an hour. People also buy queue places all the time, for example into Congress hearings, or new IPhone launches.

2. Possession is one tenth of the law. Who owns the space between rows of airline seats? The person in front or the one behind? Enter the knee guard that locks the recliner of the seat in front, causing two passengers to fight and that airplane to land in emegency. Airlines do not mandate ownership on purpose so that the total perceived space is higher.

3. I reap what you sow: Intellectual property laws are complicated. Disney had extended the patent of its characters from the original 15 years to eternity and beyond; paradoxically too strong an IP law can stymie new creations. New medical products not made because there are so many patents of the product metabolic pathways held by different entities. Many books with patent are not published. Collages of songs are not made because of the need to pay every single person who owns a bit of the song.

4. My home is not my castle. Well, not all the way to the sky anyway. How about below? When resources were plentiful, it didn’t matter how much water you pump from under your land. Industrial bottled water production is something else altogether: it can drain your neighbours’ water supply dry.

5. Our bodies, not our selves: it’s not legal to sell a person, and also not ok for anyone to sell one’s organ. However, it is ok to rent out the womb (surrogacy), sell eggs and sperms.

6. The meek shall inherit very little: the rich sets up trusts to avoid taxation forever. Farmlands of African Americans are taken over by Whites because as time goes on, each descendant inherits less and less and unanimous action becomes almost impossible. Primogeniture inherited from the Old World helps preserve aristocracy’s hold on land owned.

7. The future of ownership: if we buy a book, we can use it however we like, lend it or resell it. Not so an e-book. Sometimes e-movies and ebooks we ‘bought’ can disappear and we certainly can’t resell an ebook that we’ve finished. Common ownership saved the fish stock im many parts of the coast.

So ownership is never straightforward; and it has to be discussed and thought through and updated as time goes on.

This book is full of interesting examples and make ownership law fun, actually
Profile Image for Nadia.
89 reviews7 followers
February 1, 2024
Upd: прослухала другий раз на книжковий клуб Клятого раціоналіста.

Дуже цікава книжка.
Якби автори жили в Україні, то аналогічна книжка на українських реаліях була б наповнена набагато більш феєричними прикладами.
Profile Image for Ali Sattari.
125 reviews34 followers
July 11, 2021
My intro to ownership design, pretty good narrative with abundant real life examples.
Profile Image for Crystal.
285 reviews11 followers
November 21, 2021
Non-Fiction>Psychology/Law/Sociology/Economics
The authors review the various ways we think of things as 'ours' and how societies have dealt with ownership of everything from our own hair to a property to the air we breathe. Reading this has been a very interesting philosophical thought exercise...of course the issues with what is 'mine' arise for all of us on a pretty regular basis, I think most people are like me and never thought of it as a mostly fabricated concept that is constantly being constructed by social and legal rules.

The authors explain and expand on the various means by which we think things belong to us. Being the first there to claim it, actually having physical possession of it, working for it, it being attached to something that is already ours, it's on/in my body, my family has owned it. During the examples of what makes us think we own something, they talk about the ways we sort out or prove that we do.

My favorite section was probably the one about new ideas of ownership developing now. The 'gig' economy allows easier sharing of everything from tools to purses to cars (and charging for it). How is this going to effect our understanding of value of ownership? The limited licenses that digital platforms sell to us under the auspices of "Buy it Now"--- we don't own it, it can be altered at any time, it could disappear from our usable library at any time, and it doesn't really work the same way as buying a physical book or CD but the companies doing the selling don't want us to see the differences.

I read this with the Non-Fiction Book Club for Nov/Dec 2021.

"Ownership is the endpoint, not the start, of analysis."

"People may complain about wealth inequality in America—everyone can point to causes, from tax policy to racial discrimination. But few think about the role of attachment, the ownership mechanism that tends to concentrate ownership in fewer and wealthier hands."

"Between hair and slavery—that’s the contested terrain for claims to bodily resources deriving from self-ownership."

"There’s a lot of meaning built into the phrase ‘buy now.’ It’s not saying ‘rent now.’ It’s not saying ‘gain conditional access.’ It says ‘buy,’ and that means something very specific to most consumers—something that, in the case of digital content, isn’t true."

"Lawyers sometimes describe ownership as a bundle of sticks. This metaphor was introduced about a century ago, and it has radically transformed the teaching and practice of law. ... the sell stick, the rent stick, the right to mortgage, license, give away, even destroy the thing."

"Often, though, we split the sticks up, as for a piece of land: there may be a landowner, a bank with a mortgage, a tenant with a lease, a neighbor with a right-of-way easement, a plumber with a license to enter the land, an oil company with mineral rights."

"In short, today, you buy just a limited-use stick. Apple, Amazon, and Google hold the rest of the bundle. And they even keep a string attached to the stick you bought, so they can take it back if it suits their purposes."

The Toddler's Rules of Ownership: "If I like it, it’s mine. If it’s in my hand, it’s mine. If I can take it from you, it’s mine. If I had it a little while ago, it’s mine. If it’s mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way. If I’m doing or building something, all the pieces are mine. If it looks just like mine, it is mine. If I saw it first, it’s mine. If you are playing with something and you put it down, it’s mine. If it’s broken, it’s yours."

Profile Image for Ben.
969 reviews110 followers
March 28, 2021
A good compendium about different facets of ownership. The problem for me was that I had already heard of all but one or two of the examples. I would rather it had gone a little more in depth.

> Among the states that recognize publicity rights, there’s wide variation on whether they survive death and for how long. In Tennessee, rights last ten years after death; in Virginia, twenty years; in California, seventy; and in Indiana, one hundred. New York terminates them when the owner dies. So when Marilyn Monroe died as a New York resident, her heirs could not cash in. Why such variation? California has many notable dead celebrities whose heirs succeeded in pushing the state for lengthy ownership. … In the plastic King bust case, the Georgia Supreme Court neglected to specify an end date for the posthumous right of publicity it created. Nor did it craft a “fair use” exception, as in copyright law, that allows for educational uses, criticism, or parody without payment to, or permission from, the copyright owner. The court created a flawed, overly expansive ownership form—with national consequences. King Inc. keeps suing everyone who uses King’s likeness, though he’s been dead more than fifty years.

> Texas is the only oil-producing state not to require compulsory unitization—surface owners can voluntarily create a unit, but only if they all unanimously agree, and that’s hard to achieve. Instead, Texas adopted and has stuck with a more collectivist ownership form to address the commons tragedy—an odd choice for a state that prizes individual autonomy. Since the late 1930s, the Texas Railroad Commission (by a quirk of politics) has controlled oil production through “proration” rules: the state agency sets production caps for individual owners each month and it enforces well-spacing rules.

> One hundred forty-two countries, including well-off ones like Japan and Chile, say underground natural resources belong to the state as part of the common wealth—flowing oil, gas, and water are like the air we breathe or the oceans we fish. Landownership means you control certain rights on the surface and close to it, but attachment does not reach much below ground.

> American law makes everything about managing co-owned property difficult, not just repairs. It can be impossible to get a loan with just a partial ownership interest, so the land remains undeveloped. Often you can’t get disaster relief either. Following Hurricane Katrina, up to $165 million of recovery funds went unclaimed because of difficulty in proving ownership of heir property. As a result, heir property often remains run-down and unimproved

> In practice and often in law, courts usually prefer to order the land partitioned by auction sale, especially if there are many heirs. Money is easier to split. But this administrative ease comes at a cost. According to one analyst, the purchasers at these sales “ are almost always white persons, frequently local lawyers or relatives of local officials, who make it their business to keep abreast of what properties are going to auction and who attend the auctions prepared to buy.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture says such sales are “the leading cause of black involuntary land loss.” As a recent magazine feature on this practice explains, in one North Carolina county, “forty-two per cent of the [heir property] cases involved black families, despite the fact that only six per cent of Carteret’s population is black.”

> What can be done to prevent future loss of heir property farms? Ownership design, which created the problem, is the key to solving it. Many European countries have social policies and laws that help keep family farms intact. German law requires immediate reimbursement when one co-owner makes essential repairs, in sharp contrast with the American rule that reimbursement comes after partition.

> Primogeniture was a powerful tool for aristocrats aiming to avoid fractionation among heirs, the outcome inflicted on Black and Native American owners—and on the Irish. Fractionation was in part responsible for the Irish Potato Famine and the resulting wave of immigration to the United States. Following the Popery Act of 1703, England did not allow primogeniture for Catholics in Ireland, so their farms fractured as generations passed. Plots shrank to the point that planting a diversified range of crops became impossible. Eventually, potatoes were the only viable, nutrient-dense food that could be farmed.

> That’s why, to this day, you probably mail your credit card payment to a South Dakota P.O. box (or maybe to Nevada or Delaware, which gutted their usury laws to compete with South Dakota).

> Community property includes most of the assets a couple acquires in the state, during their marriage. It protects spouses from disinheritance by automatically making them both present and equal owners, no matter whose name is on the deed or account. On divorce or death, each spouse simply gets half. Today if you happen to live in one of the nine community property states, you are automatically enrolled in America’s most egalitarian marital ownership regime. … California—also a community property state

> Because of a glitch in the federal tax system, if you own a large, highly appreciated stock portfolio, it’s better to die with those assets governed by community property law than by common law. Your surviving spouse and later beneficiaries avoid certain capital gains taxes. Alaska lets you retitle precisely the assets that maximize tax avoidance—and you don’t have to be married in Alaska or even bother visiting the state

> Allow couples to check either a community property or common law box when they get their marriage licenses, like the choices couples make when they click through pro-or-con screens regarding options for tax deductions. No lawyers, no bankers, no fees. The marriage menu could perhaps extend further. Maybe let couples choose their preferred rule on increased earning capacity and other key aspects of marriage. Maybe let couples amend their selections after major life events. A well-crafted menu would allow all marrying couples—not just the wealthy—meaningful choices in writing their own marital story.

> The first trial in Alaska began in 1995 in the halibut fishery. Derby fishing had gotten so bad that there were only three twenty-four-hour windows of halibut fishing allowed per year. It wasn’t much better for Alaskan king crabs, but crab boat owners resisted ownership innovation. Grudgingly, after waves of bankruptcies and deaths, the fleet accepted the catch share strategy in 2005, just six months after Deadliest Catch went on the air. The results have been remarkable. No more frantic free-for-all on the Bering Sea. The crab season lengthened from three days in 2004 to three months in 2006. … catch shares have been adopted in forty countries and already account for about one-fifth of the global catch. It’s no surprise the strategy has been called “the greatest unknown policy success of our time.”

> Just one HFC-23 molecule causes as much global warming as 11,700 molecules of carbon dioxide. The manufacturers spotted an opportunity with CERs. Five years into the trading program, it emerged that these companies had doubled their output and had earned roughly half the world’s total CERs. The market for refrigerants had not grown, though, so why had they ramped up production? These companies had changed their business model. Their profit no longer came from producing and selling refrigerant. What they now cared about was producing and destroying the HFC-23 by-product. They duly incinerated every pound of HFC-23 they created. And for every pound of super greenhouse gas they destroyed, the companies were awarded CERs—which they then sold to polluting countries and companies in Europe and Japan.
Profile Image for Sarah.
409 reviews12 followers
December 24, 2021
Wow, I LOVED this! This book has everything I look for in a quality piece of non-fiction:
- Authors that are well-qualified experts in their field
- Narrative oomph with compelling examples and brisk pacing
- Insight into a topic that I know little about
- Thoughtful structure and a clear thesis
- Responsible situation within a context of social justice
- Revelations that are powerful enough to change my worldview for the rest of my life

The concept of ownership design was honestly mind-blowing. OF COURSE ownership is socially constructed, predicated on multiple conflicting, strategically selected “stories”—it makes so much sense, but it’s not something I had ever really interrogated before! The accompanying examples do such a good job underscoring the high stakes when ownership design goes wrong, as well as the opportunity in arenas like racial justice, climate change, and taxation of the wealthy. And narratively, the examples absolutely sparkle—they are so relatable, diverse, and engaging. The sheer humanity of the Knee Defender—just *chef’s kiss.* I applaud Heller and Salzman for doing great work AND doing a great job writing about it, and would love to read more legal scholarship in this vein!
March 8, 2021
Mine! Ownership may seem an intuitive concept, even an instinctual one, but as often the case were law, society, and business converge, there is more here than meets the eye. Thankfully, co-authors Heller and Salzman provide a lively and inspired exploration of one of a fundamental questions: who owns what and why? The law professor pair take their extensive legal expertise and then deliver their ideas in engaging plainspoken prose with a bevy of intriguing examples. There's something exhilarating in a book that can clearly explain everything from HBO passwords to Disney cue lines, gene editing debates to chairs propped in a parking space. That something is the ability to see the world in a new light--one of the best gifts a book can offer.
Profile Image for Matthew Cory.
Author 5 books4 followers
March 20, 2021
This is a fantastic book. Written in the style of Malcolm Gladwell combined with David Cay Johnston, this book makes connections about ownership that most of us don't think about. Who owns unclaimed precious metals unearthed from your property - you or the contractor who dug them up? Who owns the space above your airline seat - you or the person who wants to recline into it? Who owns the iTunes song you purchased - you or Apple?

I especially enjoyed hearing the authors' personal opinions; they have a populist mentality combined with an eye towards making lasting positive changes in society.

A strong contender for best book of 2021.
Profile Image for Amy.
276 reviews7 followers
March 17, 2021
Definitely a book that will have you challenging your beliefs on what you thought the definition of "mine" aka ownership means. I learned so much in this book. There were places I was sitting there with my mouth wide open like, "you've got to be kidding me?!?" and a few other places in the book where I was a tad infuriated in disbelief. If you think you know what you own, you don't! Get this book and be prepared to learn a thing or two.
Profile Image for Pete.
969 reviews61 followers
September 27, 2021
Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives (2021) by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman is an excellent book that examines the law of ownership. Heller teachers at Columbia and Salzman at UCLA. Just as we’ve had many popular science and popular economics books Mine is a popular law book. It’s a gem of a book that elucidates a concept we tend to take for granted through many varied examples.

For anyone interested in the book there is an excellent episode of the Econtalk podcast with the authors.

The book starts by looking at how people clash over the ownership of the space of a reclined chair on a plane and looks at other examples that they use to show how ownership is a concept that we have different rules over and how those rules are judged to work in different cases. Car spots that have been shoveled, treasure discovered, our DNA, copyright, patents, the airspace above people’s land and the mining rights below are just some of the examples that Heller and Salzman examine.

The book states that there are six ownership principles that are used to adjudicate ownership, they are “first-in-time, possession, labor, attachment, self-ownership, and family”.

Mine is a really an excellent book. The two authors know their subject deeply and by going through various examples make the reader think and provide really good explanations for what they are describing.
Profile Image for Jarrett Bell.
148 reviews4 followers
January 15, 2024
Cleverly written, “Mine!” explains how we define ownership in the law and our society and how those changing definitions impact us. Whether it’s groundwater in Texas or fish in the Bering Sea, digital media or copyrights, theme park lines or wills, Heller and Salzman explain how different ownership structures benefit some more than others and sometimes lead to adverse conditions (e.g., right of capture incentivizes Texas farmers to pump as much groundwater as they can before their neighbor drains their shared aquifer). On the flip side, “Mine!” also explains how we can tweak ownership structures and markets to promote outcomes we desire (e.g., cap and trade to reduce emissions). Entertaining and insightful, “Mine!” is well worth a read.
Profile Image for Ihor Horovyi.
11 reviews1 follower
April 22, 2022
Цікава книга щоб задуматись що на справді є твоїм а що ні. Всі пприклади наведині з Американських законів і сторії.
Profile Image for Igor.
109 reviews20 followers
May 8, 2022
Пізнавальна книжка про парадокси, колізії, конфлікти, непорозуміння тощо, повʼязані з правом власності в усіх його проявах. Це все ілюструє купа цікавих історій, здебільшого з американського досвіду.
Profile Image for Bogdan Korytskyi.
140 reviews1 follower
November 2, 2023
Цікава книга, що розширює сприйняття власності,різних способів воложіння і як вони впливають на наше життя
Profile Image for Tiffany.
12 reviews6 followers
March 17, 2021
So thought-provoking!!! Mine! felt like a college semester course—not like the long boring classes— like the ones with the cool professors that show how laws/arguments affect YOUR life. I appreciated that the authors share their pov, but ultimately give you space to come to your own conclusions.
379 reviews23 followers
April 1, 2021
For the moment, consider this definition: Popular educational nonfiction is writing (a book in this case) that informs or instructs, meant for the average reader, not a professional training to be a lawyer or doctor. To be successful, the book needs two main ingredients, knockout ideas and eye-catching examples. Slot Heller and Salzman's Mine! into this category; it more than qualifies, specifically...

The ideas in Mine! are thought provoking, enlightening, and useful for understanding everyday life. Often I found myself saying "Aha!" or "Never thought of it like that" or even "No way! That can't be." From idea to idea, chapter to chapter, Mine! is a revealing intellectual ride. That said, those ideas are not isolated, disparate concepts; the authors continually make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. After finishing the book, I left better informed and more aware of the intricate importance of ownership in our lives.

The examples in Mine! are superb, often the highlight of each explanation. They are mind bending and emotion arousing, sometimes serious, sometimes humorous. For instance, who owns the space behind/before your airplane seat, and what role does strategic ambiguity play in determining the answer? Can you shoot down a drone flying over your property when you can't shoot down a plane? What body parts can you sell (a kidney? sperm? eggs?) and should the rule be the same for each? Why did the Native Americans and European settlers define land ownership differently? Can the association control the cats in my condominium? And speaking more generally of the book's examples, who knew so many people sued so many people in so many ways?

My only quibble. Sometimes Heller and Salzman overwork the discussion with too much “if this, then that” or “if that, then this.” At times, the book feels more like a law school tutorial than education for the average reader. The weighty sections are only occasional, but they do slow the book down from time to time.

Back to the main point: Thought provoking ideas intertwined with enjoyable examples is my standard for what I'm calling "popular educational nonfiction." Mine! has just the right ingredients expertly blended, and those ingredients make for excellent reading.

Bonus ownership question: Having seen Heller and Salzman describe Mine! on a webinar, I immediately reserved the book at the library so I borrowed the book at no cost to me and no benefit to the authors. Some might say I should have bought the book and owned it for myself as a form of repayment to the authors. Others might say I was being a savvy consumer; borrowing it temporarily was ownership enough to meet my needs. I leave it to others to decide. To hint at my answer, I'm embarrassed to tell my story.

Profile Image for Jacob.
131 reviews16 followers
April 19, 2021
This is one of those books that makes you see things through a completely different lens. Ownership is something that seems basic enough on the surface but actually, is quite nuanced and foundational to a lot of our social systems. There are many different types of ownership justifications - for example, you own something because you were there first, you put in labor, it’s attached to a thing you own, etc. The authors provide lots of interesting examples to illustrate different questions of ownership claims, like:

- whether someone should be allowed to recline their seat on an airplane
- how long we should allow IP rights to persist for new pharmaceutical drugs, TV characters, etc,
- the legality and morality of markets for buying and selling organs
- what happens when one neighbor has redwood trees and the next-door neighbor has solar panels that are being blocked by them
- whether a spouse is entitled to future earnings if she helped support her husband through graduate school, he lands a high-paying job, and they get divorced

In some cases, these questions vary by state since there is often no federal ownership guidance. That said, the authors argue that ownership design in the US is one hidden but important driver of inequality we see today.

At the end, they discussed how ownership of digital goods is quite different from physical goods, even though the digital marketplaces design the shopping experience to appear similar. For example, Amazon can remove a Kindle title or audiobook from a user’s device, but of course they cannot come to your house and take a paperback from your bookshelf. Often, “owning” a digital movie or book actually means you have a limited, conditional license to stream it, but only on your device.

They also briefly touch on the sharing economy at the end, although I would have enjoyed hearing more about that. All in all, this book was a great read and I highly recommend checking it out.
46 reviews4 followers
June 16, 2021
The thread of ownership binds this book together as the authors attempt a Freakonomics project by going through a long list of examples of ownership working and not working. I only give it three stars because the tone of the book comes off as Law School professors explaining how ownership works to the uneducated masses, complete with some terms defined in italics. The authors also chose to provide their opinion on the examples in some cases, but not in others. So they are fine with Disney charging for VIP passes (tough luck if you can't afford those) but they get sentimental when talking about Uber and how it does not replace the feeling of owning a car.

There are some good parts to the book, especially the chapters on copyright and family ownership of assets through generations, but taken as a whole it was an uneven read.
March 8, 2021
I really enjoyed this book, and the audio version is a great listen in the car. Plenty of real world and practical examples of ownership that are contrary to what you would ordinarily think. And the topic, it turns out, is a lot of fun--not too legal and with enough data points to keep it real.
I might compare it to some of Malcolm Gladwell's works, but with more humor. I've been in several Book Clubs and I'm sure Mine! would make a great choice.
Profile Image for Richard Thompson.
2,190 reviews106 followers
October 29, 2021
I have often thought that Prudhon had it right when he said that property is theft. And, if property is theft, then intellectual property, on which I acknowledge with a bit of shame I have made my career, is grand larceny. Yet we do have basic instincts of ownership that are deeply culturally ingrained and might even be genetic. In a just society, I might be willing to give you the clothes off my back, but I'd still have a sense that they were my clothes that I was giving to you.

This book points out that there are basic theories of ownership that pervade all systems of property - I got there first, I possess it, I earned it, etc. In simple situations, most of us agree on the basics of what is fair, but there are many many situations where a basic appeal to fairness isn't enough, where different concepts of fairness come into to conflict with each other. And in these situations, as Mr. Heller correctly points out, the assignment of property rights to one person or the other is a social choice. Notwithstanding theories of property of Locke and other philosophers, the choice is essentially arbitrary. There is no such thing as a natural law of property.

Mr. Heller suggests two factors to consider in resolving property conflicts - (i) what choice will increase the probability of a negotiated solution (with balanced bargaining power), so that conflict will be reduced and we will less frequently need to appeal to some sort of judicial system, and (ii) what choice will tend to create a society that we would like to have, which may be, but is not necessarily, a utilitarian idea of greatest good for the greatest number. I like this. It's smart thinking. It's too bad that the typical resolution of property conflicts is in favor of the rich and powerful so that the basic rule is "I already have more than you, so I should have still more and you should have less." The bigger problem that this book barely begins to address is how we could establish a property system that can be fair in practice as well as in theory, though the book does at least gesture in the right direction in suggesting that we should scale back on protection for intellectual property and in suggesting that some of the newer ideas of about a sharing economy could point to a new way of thinking about property.
Profile Image for Rob.
141 reviews
August 9, 2021
I enjoy subjects such as this one, where you go in presuming to know what is “mine” and what is not mine. The authors do a great job of articulating just how non-binary this topic is, and demonstrate all the ways that there is either large amounts of grey between the black and white, or how some people automatically see something as black and others will swear something is white—is the person who catches and drops a baseball the right owner, or the person who claims the dropped ball as the right owner as the last in possession?

The book is best when the topics are general and relatable: queuing for a theme park (Disneyland), the space between seats (airlines or otherwise), ownership of words such as Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech. The book gets a little lost in the 3rd quarter, where it becomes too specifically American, going into state laws. I feel this is a failing, regardless of whether the reader is American or not, because the book is strongest when the topics are generic rather than legal nit-picking.

The book finishes well with a topic for the modern age, the concept of “owning” digital content such as e-books and movies, which whilst we click the “buy” button, we technically only rent from Big Tech.

The book should have had a better conclusion or penultimate chapter rounding off the core ideas of the book, but otherwise very informative. I found this to be really interesting coverage of topic which receives little oxygen.
Profile Image for Rhiannon.
219 reviews35 followers
November 9, 2023
This is one of the best non-fiction books (if not the best) I have read all year. I am sure I am not the only person who came to this after listening to the 99% Invisible podcast episode on ownership in which the authors were interviewed, and I'm so glad I decided to check out the book instead of calling it good with the podcast episode and moving on.

Back in high school, my AP government teacher (a queen) summed up politics in a simple way that has been seared into my brain ever since: politics is who gets what and how and when and how much. This book really cemented that basic idea in the me in a way that was both entertaining and enlightening.

The authors move through different rules/methods/myths of ownership. Each one is explored and challenged through research findings, legal cases, and anecdotes, which tend to range from amusing or annoyingly familiar to downright disturbing for societal well-being. Ownership is a hugely important topic, and more convoluted than ever. This book gave me far more perspective on it, and the approach from the authors is very creative. Everybody should read this book.

I listened to the audiobook, which I recommend! Low-key wish I had a physical copy for reference, though.
413 reviews
April 3, 2022
i thought this was a really fun, accessible read that basically explains property law (principles and actual statutes/case law), as well as general legal concepts, using a wide range of examples. i was probably familiar with about ~1/2 the material (from a mix of LLB, LLM, bar prep, internships, work), and still found it enjoyable / a nice refresher, and i liked the way the authors tied different concepts or examples together. agree with this review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... there were also a lot of new topics that i learnt about for the first time, including duke's practices re: basketball tickets, laws around native american land, egg/kidney markets, unitization, 1913 alien land law, evolution of US estate law. would totally recommend to everyone/anyone. reading this book was akin to the feeling i sometimes had in law school where i was like "woah, i feel like i suddenly started understanding a lot more about how things/the world works."
Profile Image for Elaine Ruth Boe.
606 reviews34 followers
October 4, 2021
This book was fascinating and made me think about something I hadn't ever really considered in depth--why do I think about who owns what the way that I do. Heller outlines how there are 6 main competing reasons for ownership claims, all of which can feel obvious and straightforward to someone and outrageously counterintuitive to someone else. A great example is who "owns" the space on an airplane where a seat can recline. If the airline sells that space twice, to the person with the tray table and the person with the recliner button, both parties can claim ownership by different principles.

1. first come first served
2. my home is my castle
3. possession
4. you reap what you sow
5. something is attached to me so it's mine
6. the meek inherit

After reading this book, I'm starting to question why I adhere to certain unspoken rules of ownership. So much of ownership is based on social assumptions and niceties and who can spin a convincing story.
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