242. The 'Tragedy' of the Commons

Everyone's heard of the infamous "Tragedy of the Commons," but the real tragedy is that Elinor Ostrom's work refuting it isn't just as widely-known.

-Links for the Curious-

Carson, Kevin. n.d. “Governance, Agency and Autonomy: Anarchist Themes in the Work of Elinor Ostrom.”

Dietz, Thomas, Elinor Ostrom, and Paul C Stern. 2003. “The Struggle to Govern the Commons” 302.

Laerhoven, Frank van, and Elinor Ostrom. n.d. “Traditions and Trends in the Study of the Commons.”

Ostrom, Elinor, Joanna Burger, Christopher B. Field, Richard B. Norgaard, and David Policansky. 1999. “Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges.” *Science, New Series* 284 (5412): 278–82.

[cjortiz]

I felt that aftershock at 11:20: Using a particular game theory model may help us identify failure modes, but these are always subject to the particular 'game frame', and reframing allows us to hypothesize and test superior models, to discover a better 'game frame'.

[PatrickCapecci]

Dude, no joke. Good on you for all the years of great stuff. I probably subscribed 8 years ago and I'm always happy to see your videos pop into my feed. Respect.

[MrAwombat]

It seems like strong communities are really important with managing commons. The more diffused the responsibility, the harder it is to foster that community. There's not a lot of litter on my street but there's a lot on the highway. I wonder what we can do to make people feel community ties on a broader level.

[aBigBadWolf]

The 8 guidelines only work if there is communication between the parties. This might not be the case if they are too many or too far apart in space or time.

[infernalstan]

I mean it always has come down to a form of government control, be that an official government or just a group of locals who band together - they're functionally a form of government too

[TheGemsbok]

Very thorough presentation. I enjoyed it. Nice work, Josh!

[matthewbrunell]

It also assumes the cattle is privately owned but the grazing land isn't.

[bthomson]

Why does rule no. 3 remind me of what happened in Ohio vote recently! Keeping the simple majority to implement petitions to change rules rather than make it harder!

[DellaMirandola]

I have two interlinked thoughts on this. My initial thought is that the thinking of tragedy of the commons - not Hardin's work as such, but it reuse over time especially in economics - is rooted in a particular vantage point, which is the various societal systems of The United States. Though I could think of other systems, the first that come to mind is the political and civil judicial system of The United States. The political system is driven by "winner takes all" rules. And the civil judicial system is among other things driven by tort law, which grossly expands the opportunity and occurrence of litigation. Within both systems there is a very pronounced tendency to game the system at the expense of local cultural norms and values. So I don't find it surprising that the tragedy of the commons have had such a resounding impact on neoclassical economics considering the geographic origin of the latter.


My second thought was that while I agree that the tragedy is overstated to say the least, the American vantage point makes sense if one is talking about phenomena that embodies extreme/predatory capitalism, that is, where there is seemingly no friction of culture to ward (protect) a commons.

[Xob_Driesestig]

Freerider problems like the prisoners dilemma only work if you can't build up a relationship. Even in game theory, if you have an iterated prisoners dilemma with an unknown length, tit for tat, and thus cooperative relationships, can form. The graduated punishment is interesting because that would make tit for tat even more effective. If we imagine a scenario with two 'tit for tatters' but one starts out cooperative and the other starts out defecting, they get stuck in a destructive loop. However, with graduated punishment this cycle might be broken. If I observe that the other player is playing tit for tat, I might react to their 100% defect with a 99% defect, a trivial cost for me, but an invaluable signal that i'm willing to put the past behind us. If they respond with 98% we can climb ourself out of the spiral. I wonder if someone has written a paper on that.

On a more psychological note; I wonder if spreading the myth of the homo economicus, might make people act more like the homo economicus? Like, if you think everyone is out to defect, are you more likely to defect?

[johnhershberg]

This seems like the ol' Anarchy vs Authoritarianism debate. On the one hand you have people saying society needs strict rules, and therefore rulers, otherwise things will turn to chaos. On the other hand you have people saying humans are naturally cooperative and want to achieve good, so anarchy will produce the best result.

[jonstewart]

Quality video! I've basically always believed in TOTC as a fatal trap for humanity and never had that challenged convincingly. I will share this video widely!

[userMB]

The communities Ostram describes in her book, probably go back centuries. That's essential in understanding why tragedy of the commons is not an issue there.
Their whole identity is formed in relation to each other. Most likely Marriages between groups happened etc. Also they probably are bound to the land.
Being selfish in those communities is not being selfish in our individualistic society. For them it probably is a matter of honor and simply not worth the consequences.

[landspide]

"self-modifying social code"

[xoRial]

I thunk there are 2 major factors that make those communities work, but are sadly not present in some grand real-life situations: 1. effective communication is possible - they are small enough for majority of members to know each other and communicate. I would expect this to fail in a system with more then say 10k participants. 2. people have closely aligned interest. in the modern world the reasoning regarding whether or not to burn another 10000kg of coal might have very different for an middle class EU-citizen and starving farmer somewhere in rural India.

[adversary]

Love your content. Have you ever examined the infamous Rat Utopia experiments for methodology issues and flaws?

[anieldayyanelday]

If you can't come up with an intro pun, will you make the video?

[mauritsbol]

13:30 Solution, because you create COMMUNITY. WOW. We've done this for 2 million years, heck 300 million years, and humanity REINVENTS THE WHEEL! Everybody look at that. People are not assholes, but the people that assume the assholes, are in fact the assholes. WOW!

[Infantry]

the race to the bottom problem feels more like capitalism than socialism, particularly these days.
I like these 8 guidelines, they make a lot of sense to me. Will be sharing this vid with others to garner thoughts

[karthikboyareddygari]

Very well thought out video, and I won't dispute that most people understand the tragedy of the commons to mean that managing resources in common is untenable. It's a bit more nuanced than that since there are extra conditions which must be met for the tragedy of the commons to occur. Most in the comments mention trust and communication, which historically are effective methods of making communities work on all manner of levels. But it is bound to occur if there aren't sufficient connections within and controls upon the community, which Ostrum got a start on outlining. I think the best take away is to not underestimate the power of self-interest and to try to harness it whenever possible rather than fighting it.

Having a private property system can be quite effective, especially once it's established as a Schnelling point. I believe that it was a Stossel video where he pointed out that Thanksgiving wasn't so much about being taught by the natives how to cultivate crops but actually more about their harnessing of private property arrangements to escape the famine they were on course to experience on account of their trying to manage their lands in common. But again, other systems can be quite effective if the proper social structures are in place. Private property just is a good solution for enabling economizing and commerce in the absence of such structures — with self-defense as the enforcement arm.

Obviously there's a lot more that could be said, but my suggestion for those interested in these kinds of ideas would be to check out David D. Friedman's works — especially The Machinery of Freedom.