April 20, 2020: The real tragedy of the commons (April 2020)

April 2020 -- The tragedy of the Commons, as coined by William Forster Lloyd, and later used by Garrett Hardin, the term and concept of the tragedy of the commons describes a situation where individuals acting independently and rationally according to each's self-interest behave contrary to the best interests of the whole by depleting some common resource. In 1833 Lloyd, the Victorian economist, wrote and essay on the effects of unregulated grazing on common land and made widely-known much later by an article written by Hardin in 1968. "Commons" in this sense has come to mean such resources as atmosphere, oceans, rivers, fish stocks, an office refrigerator, energy or any other shared resource which is not formally regulated, not common land in its agricultural sense.

The tragedy of the commons concept is often cited in connection with sustainable development, meshing economic growth and environmental protection, as well as in the debate over global warming. It has also been used in analyzing behavior in the fields of economics, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, game theory, politics, taxation, and sociology.

The 'environmentalist' Derrick Jensen claims the tragedy of the commons is used as propaganda for private ownership.[11] He says it has been used by the political right wing to hasten the final enclosure of the "common resources" of third world and native indigenous people worldwide, as a part of the Washington Consensus. He argues that in true situations, those who abuse the commons would have been warned to desist and if they failed would have punitive sanctions against them. He says that rather than being called "The Tragedy of the Commons", it should be called "the Tragedy of the Failure of the Commons".

The greatest tragedy of the commons is the misapplication of the metaphorA ‘commons’ describes a resource publically shared and not privately owned. It best applies – if at all – to the atmosphere, oceans, and space, all of them natural, limited resources. A privately owned resource is more likely to be sustained than the publically owned resource. To wit, when everyone is repsonsble for magaing a resource, no one ends up acting responsibly. The shared problem is always someone else’s problem. See the Russian horror of Magnitogorsk for a compelling example. A variation on this theme today can be found in the Kyoto agreement, where many governments ‘pledge’ to reduce their carbon footprint, there is little incentive and no accountability or obligation to do so. Or in the case of the Swedish teen advocate for ‘fighting’ climate change, she shares her message with those with either little impact or making progrewss, ignoring the countries that are needed to make a difference. Worse, multinational firms will succumb to political pressure and make decisions that harm shareholders, the economy, and their profits, often with little sustainable progress to show for it.

The ‘commons’ in the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is tragic because there is a private, market solution. Second, the ‘commons’ concept relies on a fixed amount of wealth concept, where resources can not be increased, and the gain of any party can only be at the expense of another. Third, the tragedy metaphor unwittingly condemns socialism while generally being accepted as a critique of capitalism, especially the idea that capitalism – unlike socialism, of course – promotes and is based on greed. Capitalism is not about hoarding or acquiring capital; capitalism is about invetsting and growing capital. Fourth, the tragedy metaphor ignores the possibility of a private solution to a ‘public’ problem. Government and regulation are not necessary for a solution to the commons problem. Finally, there is a simple but timeless aphorism, “When everybody is reposnble, no one is responsible.” Assigning collective responsibility creates incentives for free riders, finger pointing, and shunning of responsibility, i.e., “Someone else can do it, not me.” It also underscors the fundamental error in socialism: To assume that producers and responsible parties will contine to produce and be responsible without being able to retain a reasonable amount of the fruits of their labor. This applies to the factory worker as well as to the entrepreneur and the corporate CEO.

In 1974 the general public got a graphic illustration of the “tragedy of the commons” in satellite photos of the earth. Pictures of northern Africa showed an irregular dark patch 390 square miles in area. Ground-level investigation revealed a fenced area inside of which there was plenty of grass. Outside, the ground cover had been devastated.

The explanation was simple. The fenced area was private property, subdivided into five portions. Each year the owners moved their animals to a new section. Fallow periods of four years gave the pastures time to recover from the grazing. The owners did this because they had an incentive to take care of their land. But no one owned the land outside the ranch. It was open to nomads and their herds. Though knowing nothing ofKarl Marx, the herdsmen followed his famous advice of 1875: “To each according to his needs.” Their needs were uncontrolled and grew with the increase in the number of animals. But supply was governed by nature and decreased drastically during the drought of the early 1970s. The herds exceeded the natural “carrying capacity” of their environment, soil was compacted and eroded, and “weedy” plants, unfit for cattle consumption, replaced good plants. Many cattle died, and so did humans.

The rational explanation for such ruin was given more than 170 years ago. In 1832 William Forster Lloyd, a political economist at Oxford University, looking at the recurring devastation of common (i.e., not privately owned) pastures in England, asked: “Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bare-worn, and cropped so differently from the adjoining inclosures?”

See also, the famous Ehrlich - Simon wager.