The tragedy of the commons is a pernicious myth.
The demise of the commons of Britain and Europe wasn't the result of misuse by commoners, but enclosing by the landowners. The original hypothetical was made up for storytelling purposes, and the term was popularized by an ecologist with anti-immigrant and racist views.
Here is my recommended reading for heading into 2023:
https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth
@mulegirl Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for debunking this in 2009.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2009/ostrom/facts/
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2009 was divided equally between Elinor Ostrom "for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons" and Oliver E. Williamson "for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm"
@mulegirl if this is true, how do you explain the all too frequent occurrence of this phenomenon everyone in our society?
I'm talking about public parks turning into homeless encampments in many cities across the US, or websites like Twitter turning into cesspools of poo-flinging and generally debased and lowest common denominator behavior?
Is perhaps the opposite of Hardin's thesis true, that total privatization or total government control is what leads to tragedy, not common ownership?
@mulegirl this part of the article stood out to me, where Ostrom describes the necessary preconditions for a community-owned resource to flourish.
I don't think Hardin considered these, so is possible that both are right, and in an absence of any or all of these, the tragedy still occurs?
Clearly, both of the examples I gave are missing at least several of these features, so that may explain why they continue to deteriorate instead of flourish.
@bbak @mulegirl as I’ve said in my second root on this subject (https://mstdn.social/@ligma/109624214614685665), I’m not expecting to find a SINGLE root cause to blame here, and in fact, there appear to be several factors at play.
My main point however was that it is somewhat reductionary to simply state “the tragedy of the commons is a myth”, when there are clearly a variety of observable examples of it present in our society.
Attached: 1 image @[email protected] this part of the article stood out to me, where Ostrom describes the necessary preconditions for a community-owned resource to flourish. I don't think Hardin considered these, so is possible that both are right, and in an absence of any or all of these, the tragedy still occurs? Clearly, both of the examples I gave are missing at least several of these features, so that may explain why they continue to deteriorate instead of flourish.
@bbak @mulegirl that is, of course, unless the evidence shows that the facts are fundamentally reversed — i.e. it is really a “tragedy of exclusive ownership”.
If that’s the case, we should seek to overturn that phrase entirely instead of simply labeling it a myth, because even myths tend to contain at least a kernel of truth in them, while falsehoods contain none.
Ostrom's point wasn't that it doesn't take work.
As Ostrom observed (see quote below), you need specific structures to cooperate over common resources. But you don't need to follow Garrett Hardin's prescriptions.
@attentive funny you should mention that, because I literally quoted the same passage in my followup toot: https://mstdn.social/@ligma/109624214614685665
Sadly, there hasn't been much discussion about the question(s) I raised in that post, perhaps you have something insightful to add here?
Attached: 1 image @[email protected] this part of the article stood out to me, where Ostrom describes the necessary preconditions for a community-owned resource to flourish. I don't think Hardin considered these, so is possible that both are right, and in an absence of any or all of these, the tragedy still occurs? Clearly, both of the examples I gave are missing at least several of these features, so that may explain why they continue to deteriorate instead of flourish.
Sure, if you like.
The post I replied to mentions "public parks turning into homeless encampments" as exemplifying Hardin's "tragedy".
However, the narrower conditions Ostrom theorised for the successful management of common resources—that we both cited—won't encompass a society which permanently excludes some members from access to housing via the instrument of private property.
Housing might be a question of resource access that shows up the flaws in Hardin's logic.
@attentive okay, not bad, but assumes that the resource being managed is not just the park, but land in general.
Which raises the question, what would a solution potentially look like in which all of Ostrom's premises were satisfied?
Please pay particular attention to the question of the community having clearly defined boundaries, as I have a feeling that's going to be the most contentious.
Okay, I'll cite a more moderate example that clearly sits between Hardin's two poles.
Sweden has a system of over 300 municipally owned and managed companies, each providing public housing locally as a utility to renters. Use is open to municipal residents rich or poor—to be clear, each "community" of access is spatially defined, not by citizenship, wealth etc.
The system accounts for half of all rental accommodation, and 20% of overall housing stock.
Sweden has about a 0.006% by population of people living unsheltered, compared to roughly 0.06% in the United States, so 10x better.
Swedish public housing users have access to subsidies, but legally are just tenants. There are waiting lines for access.
Public housing companies are accountable municipally, not nationally, and are financially independent.
I guess the usual tenants' tribunals apply in case of violations. I think all of Ostrom's conditions are met.
@ligma By the way, I didn't assume "the resource being managed is not just the park, but land in general."
My point: in citing homelessness as a problem with public green space, you'd inadvertently brought two separate resources—one common, one almost entirely privatised in many places—into overlap.
But this problem isn't caused by the management, however achieved, of public green space. It's caused by the privatisation of almost all housing.
@attentive interesting. Thanks for the followup, as I wasn't particularly familiar with your example.
Just curious though... where do people live while they are in line for public housing?
Good question! I imagine there's a great answer, if one's an expert on Nordic houselessness, as opposed to a person with broad general knowledge being challenged by a stranger in the replies to a post about starkly different and very far-reaching theorisations of the sociopolitical conditions for efficient resource allocation.
Housing is a complex topic. There's no getting around that. It is fraught round where I live.
Peace out mate, thank you for the dialogue. 🌈
Aye, no worries!
Parting shot: San Francisco has about 0.6% of its population living unsheltered. 10x again the average rate in the United States: a fact often observed with discomfort by visitors and wealthy locals.
Meanwhile, 12 megalandlords now own the majority of the Bay Area.
Before we slouch toward declaring the "tragedy of the commons", let's make sure we're not misattributing some epiphenomenon of deeper principles of political economy.
@attentive well, just like with the public parks problem you analyzed, this might be an issue of what the resource in question (i.e. the "commons") actually is.
In a democracy, government itself is, in fact, a common. And while there are rules and counterbalances in place that were supposed to prevent the deterioration of that resource through misuse and abuse, these rules have been systematically abolished, dialed back, or circumvented.
@ligma Not no longer, never was.
A Marxist theorises the State as a brokerage to capital, managing the continuation of a kernel of premises:
* protection of private property ("nine tenths of the law", violence and policing)
* the "freedom" of (necessity for) workers to earn a wage
* final say about land use
* primitive accumulation (domestic and foreign imperialism and theft)
Such a State simulates representation and neutrality where they don't contradict the above.
@attentive well, the problem with Marxism has always been that it has the right diagnosis, but prescribes the wrong cure, as history has repeatedly shown.
As long as there is a government — that is, a class of people who freely gets to violate the same laws they are supposed to be protecting, there will always be an incentive to abuse that power.
Right, so we agree then comrade: we must keep the guillotines well oiled and work in earnest on perfecting our revolutionary prescription.
@ligma Yes, one need only examine the response to crisis and upheaval—whether it's the GFC, climate change or the current wave of inflation—to uncover whether there is a "reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants" … but equally, Hardin's political nationalism—or "lifeboat capitalism"—is a dead end in resisting a globally distributed system of production.
Fascinating read around these topics here from one of my intellectual heroes, Angela Mitropoulos:
1. Category Storms At the time of writing, Hurricane Florence is gathering off the coast of the Carolinas. A compulsory evacuation order has been issued. Those who could not make their way out of the path of surging waters due to the prohibitive costs of transport, incapacity, imprisonment, or some other form of confinement, or for whom taking shelter in public emergency facilities might precipitate deportation, have been left to survive a disaster defined as natural. These compulsory evacuation orders are not the empowerment of movement. They are the stratified distributions of risk and loopholes of liability—the speech acts of ...
@zephyranth @mulegirl Air pollution, waste in the seas, reduced bio-diversity and a lot of other, more concrete examples exist, where society failed and fail to protect very important even crucial shared resources.
Hence, viable solutions to this obviously still existing problem are badly needed.
@mulegirl 17th century rhyme
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.
@mulegirl
The Tragedy of the Commons is not a "pernicious myth." While not all commons have experienced the tragedy, many have and many will. Those who wish to preserve a commons should be well aware of the inherent danger and work hard to prevent it.
To attack or discredit the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons is counter-productive.
@mulegirl Yes, Hardin's paper is one of the most often quoted and the less read of all papers. If people were to read it, they would probably disagree with his views on advertisment and many other things.
Another good critic of this paper, in French: https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/billets/la-tragedie-des-communs-etait-un-mythe
La propriété commune d’une ressource conduit nécessairement à la ruine de celle-ci, concluait en 1968 un biologiste dans la revue Science. Son article, « La tragédie des communs », a façonné les raisonnements économiques et politiques de ces dernières décennies. L’historien Fabien Locher nous expose les enjeux de ce débat et en souligne les limites dans le cadre d’une pensée de l’environnement. Ce Point de vue fait partie du Top 10 des articles les plus lus sur notre site cette année.
@mulegirl just read the article. Its brilliant. In my field, which combines system dynamics (figuring out complexity & its drivers) with Urban Design/“development” to achieve better outcomes than what we see all the time today, we run into similar roadblocks as Ostrom.
At its most basic the simplistic “tragedy of the commons” is an excuse or rationale for oiligarch-run authoritarian regimes. I think that understanding complexity and using it is key to any functioning democracy
"Even in the darkest times, Ostrom’s work reminds us that the future is unpredictable and full of opportunity."
Ostrom's Law: "A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory"
"It is nearly impossible to overstate the significance of Elinor Ostrom’s work for legal thinkers working on property rights and resource dilemmas." are the first lines in Fennell, L. A. (2011). Ostrom’s Law: Property rights in the commons. International Journal of the Commons, 5(1), 9–27. DOI: http://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.252
@mulegirl critique is the easy step, doing something different is the hard step.
This is a long standing "native" project on this subject looking for devs https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody/wiki/01.-Online-Governance
Please boost and share #OGB
Public goods are produced at all levels of the biological hierarchy, from the secretion of diffusible molecules by cells to social interactions in humans. However, the cooperation needed to produce public goods is vulnerable to exploitation by free-riders — the Tragedy of the Commons. The dominant solutions to this problem of collective action are that some form of positive assortment (due to kinship or spatial structure) or enforcement (reward and punishment) is necessary for public-goods cooperation to evolve and be maintained. However, these solutions are only needed when individual contributions to the public good accrue linearly, and the assumption of linearity is never true in biology. We explain how cooperation for nonlinear public goods is maintained endogenously and does not require positive-assortment or enforcement mechanisms, and we review the considerable empirical evidence for the existence and maintenance of nonlinear public goods in microbiology, cancer biology, and behavioral ecology. We argue that it is time to move beyond discussions about assortment and enforcement in the study of cooperation in biology.
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