Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources
di Brett M. Frischmann (Autore)
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.
