> As for the tragedy of the commons being only transcended in small homogenous groups, that's stretching the definition of small and you can still have norms for larger groups without introducing tons of authority.
I'm not sure what's more of a stretch: defining "farmers in the Swiss Alps" as as "small" community, or suggesting that what works for farmers in the remote Swiss Alps necessarily works for New York City or London or Amsterdam. What happens when people leave their cars parked on the sidewalk? What happens when people litter their dockless bike/scooter-share wherever they please, with no repercussions? What happens when a bicyclist in Brooklyn gets run over by an SUV? What happens if I decide that I like your house, and take it from you by force with my big gun along with my big goon friends, or perhaps even kill you for it? Hell, I live in Brooklyn where there are actual laws and policing RIGHT NOW, and there's still trash littered on the ground, dog walkers occasionally leaving their poop un-picked, and cars sometimes parked on the sidewalk: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.681231,-73.974329,3a,75y,334...
The devil is in the details, and the circumstances that make something work in the Swiss Alps are important, confounding variables. At best, the evidence suggests that minimal order can work in rural agrarian communities, and we see a lot of that play out in rural parts of the US and the EU already.
> If authority turns out to be absolutely necessary, that's okay. It just has to be limited and kept in check.
The vast majority of people agree with this. The contention is at what point this actually turns out to be "absolutely necessary", that's where reasonable people disagree. In an increasingly urbanized and globalized world, the point at which that happens has long since passed. The argument that the GP commenter made can probably rephrased as "anarchy doesn't scale".