Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

climateandcapitalism.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 32 posts

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#11

Post by rayiner »

simias wrote: post #3

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…

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.

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#12

Post by frabbit »

simias wrote: post #3

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…

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...

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#13

Post by greenshackle3 »

A much better article on this topic:

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.

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#14

Post by legitster »

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.

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.

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#15

Post by pcarbonn »

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".

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#16

Post by vanderZwan »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #5

I think the mental model is useful. 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…

> 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]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

[1] https://captaingames.itch.io/freeways

[2] http://dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#17

Post by aurizon »

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...?

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#18

Post by wang_li »

simias wrote: post #3

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…

> 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.

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#19

Post by bryanrasmussen »

frabbit wrote: post #10
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"as long as there is no controller of the commons that prevents these abuses they probably would happen" That is exactly the opposite of what the article argues.

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.

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#20

Post by stretchwithme »

rayiner wrote: post #11
simias wrote: post #3

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…

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…

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.

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.

Post reply on HN