Interesting article, I didn't know that "tragedy of the commons" was used to argue in favor of private ownership, rather I always thought it was used to demonstrate the need for some amount of regulations for things that cannot be meaningfully privatized (the quality of the air we breathe, the water we drink, the streets we use etc...). So pretty much the opposite of what the original author argued for apparently.
It's also interesting that the article points out that in practice communities self-regulate to avoid the issue of over-using a shared resource. It seems it doesn't work so well in a globalized economy. While social ties might work well enough in rural England in the 17th century to self-regulate sheep herding it doesn't seem to translate very well to our modern society where the "commons" is the great coral reef dying or coastlines getting submerged tens of thousands of kilometers away from me.
Came here to say the same - easier for farmers to self regulate number of livestock allowed on a patch of land, harder for "global citizens" to self regulate global carbon dioxide emissions, air quality, etc. and many of the largest corporations have no reason to do so
> It seems it doesn't work so well in a globalized economy.
It doesn't work because we are essentially at the stage where nations take on the role of the individuals in the original example. Countries have much to gain by quickly exploiting the resources common to all countries before the others can. This leads to the tragedy of the commons on a global scale.
We need world government with real power in order to solve this problem, just as national government has solved it for more local issues.
Nationalism is in direct conflict with a world government. Even if we take the lightweight version of this in the form of the U.N. - nations do not universally accept the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Wealthy+industrialized+militarized countries who are U.N. charter and Geneva Convention signatories, violate those agreements when it suits them.
The conditions by which nations voluntarily joined the League of Nations (what eventually became the U.N.), and were willing to ceded national sovereignty, was WWI and WWII. All deaths are measured in the millions: just the Axis military deaths was multiple millions, total causalities upwards of 80 million.
A world government will take two things, in my opinion: an event that demonstrates such betrayal by national governments, that makes them partly or entirely illegitimate by their very nature; the ensuing catastrophe is not so bad that organizing a world government is rendered impossible.
> We need world government with real power in order to solve this problem, just as national government has solved it for more local issues.
The problem with world government is that you would need sign on by literally everyone, permanently. As soon as you had a serious disagreement and tried to enforce it against a sufficiently powerful country without their consent, we would have at best the dissolution of the world government and at worst World War III. The American Civil War at world-scale is not a pretty picture.
The system we have now works much better than that. When someone is cheating, the countries that don't like it put sanctions on them until they stop. The sanctions aren't severe enough to fight a war over but they cost more than the cost of doing the right thing, which resolves things for all but the most obstinate countries.
The problem with climate change seems to be that countries lack the will to actually use those methods. If most of Europe and China got together and signed an agreement to all put sanctions on any country that didn't meet a per-capita carbon emissions target, that would be the end of it. But apparently they don't have the stones to actually do it.
> If most of Europe and China got together and signed an agreement to all put sanctions on any country that didn't meet a per-capita carbon emissions target, that would be the end of it.
Which would be the beginning of world government. Agreed upon rules with clear consequences for breaking them. Right now there are consequences for doing what the major players do not like, but the rules are not written down beforehand.
> Which would be the beginning of world government.
No it wouldn't, because it isn't a government, it's a relationship between fully independent states.
If a federal judge orders an Alabama school superintendent to do something as a matter of federal law, that superintendent is either going to do that thing or be arrested by the feds, and nobody is going to stop them. That's what a government looks like.
If the EU tells the US to cut carbon emissions or face sanctions and Donald Trump tells them to piss off, nobody is going to arrest Donald Trump and anybody who tries to is going to be met with force. Europe can then impose the sanctions, and the US can either give in or suffer the ramifications as a country, but at no point is anyone who refuses to comply going to be held personally responsible by an external governing body.
Moreover, each government's tools against the others are roughly symmetrical. If the EU wants to put sanctions on the US they can, but the US can just respond in kind. That hurts both of them and they both know it, so (absent corruption) they won't do it unless it's something sufficiently important. Which means you don't get the insane policies like we have in the US where the feds start micromanaging everything just because they can get away with it.
The argument can be used for both or either purpose. However, the modern popularizer of the term, ecologist Garret Hardin, lamented that the idea is widely misinterpreted. He claimed that he should have called it "the tragedy of the unregulated commons."
I suppose if you just hear about the idea briefly during a single lecture of an intro econ course, it's easy to grasp the benefits of private ownership without recognizing the limitations. Specifically that some common resources are not susceptible to private ownership, such as those you list, but are still susceptible to the tragedy of the commons when left unregulated. Hence the widespread misreading of the hypothetical.
'land ownership' is a totally artificial construct. We can create (and have created) private ownership models that work extraordinarily well. For example, NOx and SOx emissions permits in the US are issued as simple, auctioned tokens. That is a propertization model.
Generally, the simpler these models are, the better, because complicating matters generally creates opportunities for bizzare arbitrage. By contrast, the proposed CO2 cap and trade (in the US) has so many well-intentioned loopholes with credits and the like that it will almost certainly cause unintended consequences like where an Indian manufacturer created and then sequestered a high-greenhouse-potential gas, resulting in a net emissions of CO2 (as well as a pointless use of resources).
Yes, as long as there is no controller of the commons that prevents these abuses they probably would happen; interestingly the first time I heard about it was in Junior High when it was definitely sold as "This is why socialism doesn't work kids!" and I remember being confused because my media-fed understanding of rural England in the timeframe was that whoever tried something like would end up inside the Wicker-Man.
No - quote from article "Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real commons: self-regulation by the communities involved." it argues that Hardin, to make his point, ignored that of course there was a controller of the commons - the communities involved, as communities will, kept control and did not allow any single member of the community to abuse them.
Yeah, but the enforcement of the right either leads to governing my implicit enforcement based on trust, and which eventually devolves into enforcement using punitive measures.
AFAIK, ocean fisheries are clear evidence of what you are saying. In this article, and even more so in its follow-on, the author seems to be mostly occupied with criticizing Hardin's paper, as if that alone was the only word on the issue.
Tragedy of the commons is used to describe negative externalities: where private parties get the benefit of using a shared resource, but socialize some of the costs of that activity. Since the party getting the benefit doesn’t bear all the costs, they will do more than an economically efficient amount of the activity.
Private ownership and regulation are just different solutions to that same problem. So you can have a regulated amount of grazing (where in theory scientists decide what level the land can sustain), or you can privatize the land and force the grazer to absorb the loss in land value from his activities, thus internalizing the externality.
That out of the way, I don’t think the article is correct. History is replete with societies whose self-regulation mechanisms failed and resulted in environmental disaster.
Living in the Bay area, I found the story of the filling in of the San Francisco Bay to be interesting. It used to be that you could not own part of the bay, but you could fill part of it in and own the new land. And many did. Had nothing been done to stop that, it would have been filled in by now.
I believe strongly in private property and think if you can use it to solve such a problem, you should. But not all problems can be solved that way. Regulation stopped the filling in of the Bay, which, if allowed to continue, would have been an enormous loss. It was certainly the only solution people could see at the time. And I can't envision an alternative that would work.
Other problems, like overfishing, can be solved with property. The right to harvest a particular population at a particular time (and that can be bought and sold) creates an incentive not to overfish.
But not all types of ownership make sense. A resource owned by many people, all competing to extract all they can before the other owners do is itself just like a tragedy of the commons. Water rights often work this way. Better for these folks to have shares in a corporation that owns the resource. Better for them and better for the long term use of the resource. Even public ownership would be better than a privately owned tragedy of the commons.
Peter Linebaugh in "Stop Thief" expands the argument and claims that the "globalized economy" is just another move towards enclosure, which results in the inevitable destruction of the resource by a mechanism over which the affected communities have no control. https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Thief-Commons-Enclosures-Resista...
Except that the critique of Hardin is that he actually inverts the cause of the tragedy. It should be "Tragedy of the Enclosures". The article argues that this inversion is what has allowed people to ignore the huge chicken which is just now coming home to various roosts.
The tragedy of the commons does not justify either the enclosures or its modern incarnation. That is the fallacy that the author should take on. To attack, instead, the notion of tragedy of the commons itself risks losing the argument on the grounds that, if you look more thoroughly, there is actually better evidence for it than the author is claiming.
> It's also interesting that the article points out that in practice communities self-regulate to avoid the issue of over-using a shared resource.
The article may say that, but it's objectively true that there are failure modes to this self-regulation. You can see it in the West Coast's response to homelessness. Which is to say, that they completely fail to regulate the public spaces because the elected government doesn't have the character to properly fund the proper services and engage in involuntary commitments of people with mental disorders into hospitals where they would get care.
I think of it every time I stand at one of those coveyer belts to pick up luggage in an airport and the crowd slowly creeps in closer, each person trying to get a better view by standing in front of someone else, who then does the same.
Always fascinating to observe the group dynamics and the designs (like a painted line to show you how far back to stand) used to try to informally enforce the norm that helps everyone get their case easily.
I'm not sure you can abandon every good idea that's been abused, even if it's got a weird origin story. But I've not personally witnessed it being used to support privatization, I can see how someone would get annoyed if they kept seeing that happen.
> the designs (like a painted line to show you how far back to stand) used to try to informally enforce the norm that helps everyone get their case easily.
There's two layers to your example: the part where the conveyor belt itself and its affordances[0] encourage certain group dynamics, which you can change through design (aka interaction design), and rules and regulations to discourage that without changing the affordance of the conveyor belt (the enforcing of good behaviour that you mention).
For example, to really speed things up you would need to parallelize: use multiple shorter conveyor belt loops, each handling with luggage from different sections of a plane (say seat 1 to 15, 16 to 30, etc). That requires organisational overhead though. It also wouldn't work in situations where everyone in the front of the plane had check in luggage, and only a handful of people in the back.
But that presume we want to optimise time for luggage pick-up. If we go back to the crowding behaviour you mentioned, the issue is everyone wanting to stand next to the belt, and close to the point where luggage is thrown on it.
The former can be solved by maximising conveyor belt length vs surface area by making it "snake" more, more people can stand next to it in the same area. However, lengthening the belt makes it take longer for luggage to move all the way around it, and you can't speed it up too much without making it difficult to grab the luggage. The second can be mitigated by having multiple spots through which luggage is thrown on the belts.
... you know what, now that I think about it, baggage carousel design could make for a fun little Indy game a la Freeways or Minimetro[1][2]
Any serious discussion of 'debunking' the tragedy of the commons should mention Elinor Ostrom, the only woman with a Nobel prize in Economics, which she won largely for her work on governance of the commons.
Summary: There is no way there could a commons could be abused because no one in a pre-capitalist society would be selfish enough to need to. Capitalism (privatization) only cares about short term gains. Tragedy of the commons is a political myth designed to extract resources.
I would make a couple of points.
1. This article quotes Marx unironically as an argument.
2. Even if I bought the argument that commons were actually great and capitalism ruined them, Tragedy of the Commons is still a useful way to describe collective action problems.
3. Corporations choose long term viability over short term profits all of the time. (A great example is Gifford Pinchot convincing the US lumber industry that it was in their interest to effectively manage forests long term).
4. Community ownership is not the same as government ownership.
I feel like framing environmental problems on capitalism is a big mistake (socialist countries arguably have had much, much worse track records). Good environmental policy is usually just that - good policy; not overtly socialist or capitalist.
5a. I think the NOx and SOx auctioning markets are also a great example of privatization schemes that have been wildly successful (there's basically no acid rain in the US anymore). There's an argument out there that privatization in these two markets has been no better than regulation, I mean but it's almost a silly argument, because in the US regulation had zero buy-in, but privatization was acted on, so it got the job done.
It's not arguing that "no one would be selfish enough". It's arguing that "if someone is selfish enough and everyone has control, then the negative feedback to the selfishness is effective."
"Privatization or local ownership" is a non-useful formulation. It mixes together two distinct ideas.
"Socialist" countries for the most part do not and have not existed: they have all been state capitalist. The comparison being made in this critique is between resource in which (to use Taleb's phrase) those with skin in the game get to make the decisions and those which don't.
Elinor Ostrom would agree. She received the Nobel prize in Economics in 2009 (after OP's article) for her work on "Common Pool Resources" and the institutions that successfully manage common resources.
Noticing that commons are not always managed to tragedy, as noticed by OP's article, her motto was "A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory".
Ha - Ha - Ha, some self serving debunk this is. Marxism is a failed theory - but the Tragedy of the Commons(TOTC) is an observation of reality - the reality of people whose grasp exceeds their ability to restore what they have consumed.
The TOTC is the truth of man's nature - that the nature of man is intrinsically corrupted by the same aspect of organic life as the urge of an amoeba to eat first and starve the other amoebas...?
31 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 74.6 ms ] threadIt's also interesting that the article points out that in practice communities self-regulate to avoid the issue of over-using a shared resource. It seems it doesn't work so well in a globalized economy. While social ties might work well enough in rural England in the 17th century to self-regulate sheep herding it doesn't seem to translate very well to our modern society where the "commons" is the great coral reef dying or coastlines getting submerged tens of thousands of kilometers away from me.
It doesn't work because we are essentially at the stage where nations take on the role of the individuals in the original example. Countries have much to gain by quickly exploiting the resources common to all countries before the others can. This leads to the tragedy of the commons on a global scale.
We need world government with real power in order to solve this problem, just as national government has solved it for more local issues.
The conditions by which nations voluntarily joined the League of Nations (what eventually became the U.N.), and were willing to ceded national sovereignty, was WWI and WWII. All deaths are measured in the millions: just the Axis military deaths was multiple millions, total causalities upwards of 80 million.
A world government will take two things, in my opinion: an event that demonstrates such betrayal by national governments, that makes them partly or entirely illegitimate by their very nature; the ensuing catastrophe is not so bad that organizing a world government is rendered impossible.
The problem with world government is that you would need sign on by literally everyone, permanently. As soon as you had a serious disagreement and tried to enforce it against a sufficiently powerful country without their consent, we would have at best the dissolution of the world government and at worst World War III. The American Civil War at world-scale is not a pretty picture.
The system we have now works much better than that. When someone is cheating, the countries that don't like it put sanctions on them until they stop. The sanctions aren't severe enough to fight a war over but they cost more than the cost of doing the right thing, which resolves things for all but the most obstinate countries.
The problem with climate change seems to be that countries lack the will to actually use those methods. If most of Europe and China got together and signed an agreement to all put sanctions on any country that didn't meet a per-capita carbon emissions target, that would be the end of it. But apparently they don't have the stones to actually do it.
Which would be the beginning of world government. Agreed upon rules with clear consequences for breaking them. Right now there are consequences for doing what the major players do not like, but the rules are not written down beforehand.
No it wouldn't, because it isn't a government, it's a relationship between fully independent states.
If a federal judge orders an Alabama school superintendent to do something as a matter of federal law, that superintendent is either going to do that thing or be arrested by the feds, and nobody is going to stop them. That's what a government looks like.
If the EU tells the US to cut carbon emissions or face sanctions and Donald Trump tells them to piss off, nobody is going to arrest Donald Trump and anybody who tries to is going to be met with force. Europe can then impose the sanctions, and the US can either give in or suffer the ramifications as a country, but at no point is anyone who refuses to comply going to be held personally responsible by an external governing body.
Moreover, each government's tools against the others are roughly symmetrical. If the EU wants to put sanctions on the US they can, but the US can just respond in kind. That hurts both of them and they both know it, so (absent corruption) they won't do it unless it's something sufficiently important. Which means you don't get the insane policies like we have in the US where the feds start micromanaging everything just because they can get away with it.
I suppose if you just hear about the idea briefly during a single lecture of an intro econ course, it's easy to grasp the benefits of private ownership without recognizing the limitations. Specifically that some common resources are not susceptible to private ownership, such as those you list, but are still susceptible to the tragedy of the commons when left unregulated. Hence the widespread misreading of the hypothetical.
Generally, the simpler these models are, the better, because complicating matters generally creates opportunities for bizzare arbitrage. By contrast, the proposed CO2 cap and trade (in the US) has so many well-intentioned loopholes with credits and the like that it will almost certainly cause unintended consequences like where an Indian manufacturer created and then sequestered a high-greenhouse-potential gas, resulting in a net emissions of CO2 (as well as a pointless use of resources).
That is exactly the opposite of what the article argues.
Private ownership and regulation are just different solutions to that same problem. So you can have a regulated amount of grazing (where in theory scientists decide what level the land can sustain), or you can privatize the land and force the grazer to absorb the loss in land value from his activities, thus internalizing the externality.
That out of the way, I don’t think the article is correct. History is replete with societies whose self-regulation mechanisms failed and resulted in environmental disaster.
There's a documentary about it.
http://savingthebay.org/
I believe strongly in private property and think if you can use it to solve such a problem, you should. But not all problems can be solved that way. Regulation stopped the filling in of the Bay, which, if allowed to continue, would have been an enormous loss. It was certainly the only solution people could see at the time. And I can't envision an alternative that would work.
Other problems, like overfishing, can be solved with property. The right to harvest a particular population at a particular time (and that can be bought and sold) creates an incentive not to overfish.
But not all types of ownership make sense. A resource owned by many people, all competing to extract all they can before the other owners do is itself just like a tragedy of the commons. Water rights often work this way. Better for these folks to have shares in a corporation that owns the resource. Better for them and better for the long term use of the resource. Even public ownership would be better than a privately owned tragedy of the commons.
The article may say that, but it's objectively true that there are failure modes to this self-regulation. You can see it in the West Coast's response to homelessness. Which is to say, that they completely fail to regulate the public spaces because the elected government doesn't have the character to properly fund the proper services and engage in involuntary commitments of people with mental disorders into hospitals where they would get care.
I think of it every time I stand at one of those coveyer belts to pick up luggage in an airport and the crowd slowly creeps in closer, each person trying to get a better view by standing in front of someone else, who then does the same.
Always fascinating to observe the group dynamics and the designs (like a painted line to show you how far back to stand) used to try to informally enforce the norm that helps everyone get their case easily.
I'm not sure you can abandon every good idea that's been abused, even if it's got a weird origin story. But I've not personally witnessed it being used to support privatization, I can see how someone would get annoyed if they kept seeing that happen.
There's two layers to your example: the part where the conveyor belt itself and its affordances[0] encourage certain group dynamics, which you can change through design (aka interaction design), and rules and regulations to discourage that without changing the affordance of the conveyor belt (the enforcing of good behaviour that you mention).
For example, to really speed things up you would need to parallelize: use multiple shorter conveyor belt loops, each handling with luggage from different sections of a plane (say seat 1 to 15, 16 to 30, etc). That requires organisational overhead though. It also wouldn't work in situations where everyone in the front of the plane had check in luggage, and only a handful of people in the back.
But that presume we want to optimise time for luggage pick-up. If we go back to the crowding behaviour you mentioned, the issue is everyone wanting to stand next to the belt, and close to the point where luggage is thrown on it.
The former can be solved by maximising conveyor belt length vs surface area by making it "snake" more, more people can stand next to it in the same area. However, lengthening the belt makes it take longer for luggage to move all the way around it, and you can't speed it up too much without making it difficult to grab the luggage. The second can be mitigated by having multiple spots through which luggage is thrown on the belts.
... you know what, now that I think about it, baggage carousel design could make for a fun little Indy game a la Freeways or Minimetro[1][2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
[1] https://captaingames.itch.io/freeways
[2] http://dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/284/5412/278.full
Any serious discussion of 'debunking' the tragedy of the commons should mention Elinor Ostrom, the only woman with a Nobel prize in Economics, which she won largely for her work on governance of the commons.
I would make a couple of points.
1. This article quotes Marx unironically as an argument.
2. Even if I bought the argument that commons were actually great and capitalism ruined them, Tragedy of the Commons is still a useful way to describe collective action problems.
3. Corporations choose long term viability over short term profits all of the time. (A great example is Gifford Pinchot convincing the US lumber industry that it was in their interest to effectively manage forests long term).
4. Community ownership is not the same as government ownership.
5. There are cases where privatization or local ownership can lead to great outcomes: (https://www.npr.org/2011/10/10/140445502/to-save-wildlife-na...)
I feel like framing environmental problems on capitalism is a big mistake (socialist countries arguably have had much, much worse track records). Good environmental policy is usually just that - good policy; not overtly socialist or capitalist.
"Privatization or local ownership" is a non-useful formulation. It mixes together two distinct ideas.
"Socialist" countries for the most part do not and have not existed: they have all been state capitalist. The comparison being made in this critique is between resource in which (to use Taleb's phrase) those with skin in the game get to make the decisions and those which don't.
Noticing that commons are not always managed to tragedy, as noticed by OP's article, her motto was "A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory".