Tragedy of the Commons

[[Garrett Hardin]].

Hardin’s “tragedy” thesis ought to be renamed “The Tragedy of Unmanaged, Laissez-Faire, Commons-Pool Resources with Easy Access for Non-Communicating, Self-Interested Individuals.”

– [[Free, Fair and Alive]]

Even Hardin (1994) eventually acknowledged that the tragedy of the commons only applies to “unmanaged commons”, by which he meant simple open access resources with no use constraints. Of course, such resources are not commons, because it is the shared management that makes a resource a commons.

– [[dulongderosnay2020: Digital commons]]

tragedy of the commons

[[Fat-tailed sheep]] in Afghanistan. The “tragedy of the commons” is one way of accounting for [[overexploitation]] - [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fat_tailed_sheep,_Afghanistan,_1976.jpg wikimedia]

The tragedy of the commons describes a situation in economic science when individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their [[selfishness]] and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist [[William Forster Lloyd]], who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on [[common land]] (also known as a "common") in [[Great Britain]] and [[Ireland]]. The concept became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" over a century later after an article written by [[Garrett Hardin]] in 1968 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons wikipedia]

Although open-access resource systems may collapse due to overuse (such as in [[over-fishing]]), many examples have existed and still do exist where members of a community with regulated access to a common resource co-operate to exploit those resources prudently without collapse or even creating [[Perfect Order]]. [[Elinor Ostrom]] was awarded the 2009 [[Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences]] for demonstrating exactly this concept in her book ”Governing the Commons”, which included examples of how local communities were able to do this without top-down regulations or [[privatization]].

In a modern economic context, "[[commons]]" is taken to mean any open-access and unregulated resource such as the [[Carbon dioxide#In the Earth’s atmosphere]], [[Great Pacific garbage patch]], [[river]]s, ocean [[fish stocks]], or even an office refrigerator. In a legal context, it is a type of property that is neither private nor public, but rather held jointly by the members of a community, who govern access and use through social structures, traditions, or formal rules.

The term is used also in [[environmental science]]. The "tragedy of the commons" is often cited in connection with [[sustainable development]], meshing economic growth and environmental protection, as well as in the [[Global warming controversy]]. It has also been used in analyzing behavior in the fields of [[economics]], [[evolutionary psychology]], [[anthropology]], [[game theory]], [[politics]], [[taxation]], and [[sociology]].

Sections

See also

• [[Bounded rationality]]
• [[Dutch disease]]
• [[Externality]]
• [[Credentialism and educational inflation]]
• [[International Association for the Study of the Commons]]
• [[Nash equilibrium]]
• [[Race to the bottom]]
• [[Panic buying]]
• [[Parasitism (social offense)]]
• [[Prisoner’s dilemma]]
• [[Social reputation in fiction]]
• [[Social trap]]
• [[Somebody else’s problem]]
• [[Stone Soup]]
• [[Tragedy of the anticommons]]
• [[Tyranny of small decisions]]
• [[Unscrupulous diner’s dilemma]]
• [[The Evolution of Cooperation]]
• [[Unintended consequences]]
• [[Volunteer’s dilemma]]
• [[Overfishing]]
• [[Shark finning]]
• [[Pacific bluefin tuna]]

• [[2022-12-04 17:19:17+00:00]] @[[flancian]]: https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1599453298435784713 pull

• [[2022-12-04 17:19:17+00:00]] @[[flancian]]: https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1599453298435784713 pull

RT @flancian@social.coop smallcircles ocdtrekkie jonny hmiron alcinnz an [[agora]] tries to give communities the tools to solve the so called [[tragedy of the commons]] — should a tool/device like this be proposed to a standards body? https://t.co/RIYBCdX8g5