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Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

climateandcapitalism.com

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Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#21

Post by dnautics »

stult wrote: post #7
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…

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 recog…

'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).

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#22

Post by dnautics »

legitster wrote: post #14

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 a…

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.

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#23

Post by cmurf »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #6
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 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…

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.

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#24

Post by AnthonyMouse »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #6
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 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…

> 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.

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#25

Post by Ygg2 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #19
frabbit wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

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.

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#26

Post by factoring_ta »

dnautics wrote: post #22
legitster wrote: post #14

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 a…

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…

But how could privatization work without regulation?

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#27

Post by skummetmaelk »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #24
skummetmaelk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#28

Post by mannykannot »

frabbit wrote: post #12
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...

That is an argument that probably could, and therefore should, be made without making it dependent on the tragedy of the commons being a fallacy.

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#29

Post by frabbit »

mannykannot wrote: post #28
frabbit wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That is an argument that probably could, and therefore should, be made without making it dependent on the tragedy of the commons being a fallacy.

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.

Re: Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008)

#30

Post by frabbit »

legitster wrote: post #14

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 a…

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.

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