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4 - Real Estate’s Intricate Tangle of Public and Private

from Part II - Policy Realms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2021

Karen Eggleston ,
John D. Donahue  and
Richard J. Zeckhauser
Karen Eggleston
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
John D. Donahue
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Richard J. Zeckhauser
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
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Summary

One stormy night in our species’ long prehistory, somebody got tired of sleeping in the rain and couldn’t find a cave. She leaned a well-leafed broken branch against a big rock, or maybe bent a low-hanging bough to the ground, weighted it with a stone so it would stay put and crawled in out of the worst of the weather. This unnamed innovator slept a little drier that night, and in the process invented real estate. Fossil evidence makes it clear that that this happened 30,000 years ago at the very latest, though humans may well have been building shelters as early as they started wearing clothes 140,000 years before that.

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The Dragon, the Eagle, and the Private Sector
Public-Private Collaboration in China and the United States
 , pp. 76 - 102
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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