There is no such thing as the tragedy of the commons: a thread.

The oldest published reference to the idea is in a lecture by an early political economist at Oxford, William Foster Lloyd, in 1832 titled "On the Checks to Population." Lloyd first articulated the argument that many of us have been taught as an inevitable and immutable fact of economic life: that any resource owned in common will be exploited to the point of ruin.

"Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so hare-worn, and cropped so differently from the adjoining inclosures? No inequality, in respect of natural or acquired fertility, will account for the phenomenon."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1972412

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#capitalism #commons #tragedyofthecommons #anticapitalism #ostrom #anticapitalism #anarchism

It's not clear what, if any, empirical research Lloyd made into the status of England's remaining commons at the time of his writing, and he doesn't seem to have accounted for the fact that English landlords had been privatizing the commons for centuries, leaving increasingly marginal land for the commons.

Lloyd's idea was championed by ecologist Garrett Hardin who, in 1968, published an essay in the journal Science titled "The Tragedy of the Commons." In it, Hardin framed Lloyd's argument in the context of global overpopulation, arguing that common property inevitably and inexorably led to resource exhaustion and advocating for total privatization of all resources as a remedy.

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"[T]he rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another...But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit--in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."

Hardin, casually and without evidence, dismisses the existence of commons that did not fall victim to this ostensibly inevitable tragedy: "Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast below the carrying capacity of the land."

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Hardin's solution? "The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion..." Hardin believed that privatization, with its attendant exclusionary violence, was the only solution to the tragedy.

https://pages.mtu.edu/~asmayer/rural_sustain/governance/Hardin%201968.pdf

This story has been taught to countless students in countless economics and other classes. It is taken for granted and repeated endlessly. It has been gleefully embraced by the propertied class, because it works to ideologically justify their ownership of the world's resources as necessary for the common good. It is rarely presented with any evidence, because it is assumed to be so logical, so self evidently true, that it does not need any.

The logic is airtight. People are utility maximizing, rational machines. When presented with a shared resource, of course they will exploit it to exhaustion. Of course. Even if most people were angels, Hardin argued, all it would take is one defector to start the race to over-exploitation. In the face of even one over-exploiter, each individual would have a rational incentive to also begin over-exploiting for personal gain. Every actor knows this choice will lead to eventual ruin for all, but if any one actor waits, they risk being left without even the tiniest share. Of course.

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The first problem with Hardin's tragedy is that it's not true. The second problem, which helps explain the first, is that Hardin was a racist ecofascist who hated nonwhite people, blamed them for ruining the planet, and advocated strongly for their exclusion from western countries, what he called "lifeboat ethics." There simply weren't enough resources for everyone, he argued, so he wanted to prioritize white westerners. "Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all" is a line from his essay that people don't like to teach when they push the myth of the tragedy.

The Southern Poverty Law Center maintains a profile on Hardin, who advocated for, among other things, segregation, eugenic forced sterilization, and ethnic cleansing. He likened nonwhite people having many children to a "passive" genocide of white people. He was, in short, a monster. We should understand his evidence-free arguments for a tragedy of the commons through this lens: Hardin was a racist and eugenicist who believed most people were too stupid not to over-exploit resources and had to be violently contained to ensure enough would be left over for the "right" people. This is not a work of ecological science or even economics, but rather white supremacist propaganda.

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Then along came Elinor "Lin" Ostrom and her 1990 work "Governing the Commons." In it, Ostrom presented game theory approach to commonly owned resources, explaining how people as self-interested rational actors could avoid the logical trap of over exploitation. And then she did Hardin one better: she detailed the workings of actual extant commons which, according to Hardin and every neoliberal since, should not exist.

Ostrom illustrated what anthropologists and people in stateless societies have known for generations: people are perfectly capable of working out rules to sustainably manage shared resources. In her book, Ostrom detailed one common pasture in Switzerland that has been in continuous use since the 1500s. She also described shared fishing rights in Turkey, shared agricultural and forest land in Japan, and shared irrigation systems in Spain. There is no tragedy.

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This is not to say that establishing and maintaining systems of shared property is trivially easy or inevitably successful. There will be times when these systems fail. There are probably some scales at which coordination becomes impossible, such as at the level of the atmosphere or the world's oceans at a global scale. Commons management takes constant work and is often very hard. But over-exploitation is not logically and inexorably inevitable. There is no tragedy.

Hardin eventually revised his argument, in light of Ostrom's work, explaining that what he should have called it was the tragedy of "unmanaged" commons, which is to say, those resources with no absolutely no owners at all. The fact remains, though, that a major and widely believed idea in neoclassical economics is both wrong and the product of ecofascist propaganda.

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