[iDC] The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons

[James Grimmelmann]

Here's what I wrote on MetaFilter (http://www.metafilter.com/74505/The-Myth-of-the-Tragedy-of-the-Commons#2237580 
) about this essay:

----

Aaaagh!

The point of Hardin's article was that "mutual coercion, mutually  
agreed upon" was necessary to prevent overuse of a common resource. He  
thought that the restrictions could come either from privatization OR  
from state regulation. This article simply ignores the "or regulation"  
half of Hardin's argument, thereby creating a nicely puffed-up straw  
man for ideological purposes.

Now, Hardin was indeed wrong in one of his critical assumptions. He  
thought that the restrictions on use could come only from private  
property or from the state. That assumption has been exploded through  
a lot of good field work; some communities do successfully self- 
regulate, and a lot of very good economic work has been done trying to  
figure out which ones succeed and which ones fail. The linked article  
is half-right in pointing out that sometimes communities get it right,  
but pretty much everything depends on situation-specific factors.

Elinor Ostrom's work is the go-to reference here: she started a now  
decades-old conversation on exactly which factors matter and how much.  
For example, it's not small farmers vs. large corporations -- there  
are plenty of farming communities that have blown the task of commons  
management in irrigation, and some large corporations who've done well  
at commons management in pumping water out of the ground. Instead, it  
matters a great deal whether others can tell that you're grazing your  
metaphorical sheep on the metaphorical pasture, and it matters whether  
there's a good forum for everyone to come together and talk about what  
to do, and it's easier when the pasture is smaller and used by fewer  
people, and so on.

I've learned that it's not worth taking seriously any piece that acts  
as though this follow-on literature didn't exist. The authors of such  
trash -- whether pro-regulation, pro-property, or pro-community -- are  
not engaged in the serious work of trying to actually solve common- 
pool resource problems. They're just trying to score cheap ideological  
points.

----

Please pardon the invective.

James

On Sep 17, 2008, at 6:50 PM, Paul Miller wrote:

> Are we helpless prisoners of biology and the market forces of a  
> hyper accelerated and, like, totally turbulent world?
> I just thought I'd pass this on, especially with the turbulence in  
> todays markets.
>
> Food for thought: The tragedy/comedy thing is pretty amusing, but to  
> actually look at the world stage of economics as a kind of theater  
> is kind of cool, but then again, perception of prices can influence  
> things like oil futures, and "speculation"  in economics is always a  
> kind of perception. As the essay says:
>
> We may well call it "the tragedy of the commons," using the word  
> "tragedy" as the philosopher Whitehead used it [7]: "The essence of  
> dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of  
> the remorseless working of things." He then goes on to say, "This  
> inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human  
> life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only  
> by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the  
> drama."  I wonder how Enron employees felt when they woke up one  
> morning and everything was gone...
>
> Paul
>
>
>> The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons
>>
>> Ian Angus
>>
>> Will shared resources always be misused and overused?
>> Is community ownership of land, forests and fisheries a
>> guaranteed road to ecological disaster? Is
>> privatization the only way to protect the environment
>> and end Third World poverty? Most economists and
>> development planners will answer "yes" -- and for proof
>> they will point to the most influential article ever
>> written on those important questions.
>>
>> Since its publication in Science in December 1968, "The
>> Tragedy of the Commons" has been anthologized in at
>> least 111 books, making it one of the most-reprinted
>> articles ever to appear in any scientific journal. It
>> is also one of the most-quoted: a recent Google search
>> found "about 302,000" results for the phrase "tragedy
>> of the commons."
>>
>> For 40 years it has been, in the words of a World Bank
>> Discussion Paper, "the dominant paradigm within which
>> social scientists assess natural resource issues."
>> (Bromley and Cernea 1989: 6) It has been used time and
>> again to justify stealing indigenous peoples' lands,
>> privatizing health care and other social services,
>> giving corporations 'tradable permits' to pollute the
>> air and water, and much more.
>>
>> Noted anthropologist Dr. G.N. Appell (1995) writes that
>> the article "has been embraced as a sacred text by
>> scholars and professionals in the practice of designing
>> futures for others and imposing their own economic and
>> environmental rationality on other social systems of
>> which they have incomplete understanding and
>> knowledge."
>>
>> Like most sacred texts, "The Tragedy of the Commons" is
>> more often cited than read. As we will see, although
>> its title sounds authoritative and scientific, it fell
>> far short of science.
>>
>> ** Garrett Hardin hatches a myth **
>>
>> The author of "The Tragedy of the Commons" was Garrett
>> Hardin, a University of California professor who until
>> then was best-known as the author of a biology textbook
>> that argued for "control of breeding" of "genetically
>> defective" people. (Hardin 1966: 707) In his 1968 essay
>> he argued that communities that share resources
>> inevitably pave the way for their own destruction;
>> instead of wealth for all, there is wealth for none.
>>
>> He based his argument on a story about the commons in
>> rural England.
>>
>> (The term "commons" was used in England to refer to the
>> shared pastures, fields, forests, irrigation systems
>> and other resources that were found in many rural areas
>> until well into the 1800s. Similar communal farming
>> arrangements existed in most of Europe, and they still
>> exist today in various forms around the world,
>> particularly in indigenous communities.)
>>
>> "Picture a pasture open to all," Hardin wrote. A
>> herdsmen who wants to expand his personal herd will
>> calculate that the cost of additional grazing (reduced
>> food for all animals, rapid soil depletion) will be
>> divided among all, but he alone will get the benefit of
>> having more cattle to sell.
>>
>> Inevitably, "the rational herdsman concludes that the
>> only sensible course for him to pursue is to add
>> another animal to his herd." But every "rational
>> herdsman" will do the same thing, so the commons is
>> soon overstocked and overgrazed to the point where it
>> supports no animals at all.
>>
>> Hardin used the word "tragedy" as Aristotle did, to
>> refer to a dramatic outcome that is the inevitable but
>> unplanned result of a character's actions. He called
>> the destruction of the commons through overuse a
>> tragedy not because it is sad, but because it is the
>> inevitable result of shared use of the pasture.
>> "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."
>>
>> ** Where's the evidence? **
>>
>> Given the subsequent influence of Hardin's essay, it's
>> shocking to realize that he provided no evidence at all
>> to support his sweeping conclusions. He claimed that
>> the "tragedy" was inevitable -- but he didn't show that
>> it had happened even once.
>>
>> Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real
>> commons: self-regulation by the communities involved.
>> One such process was described years earlier in
>> Friedrich Engels' account of the "mark," the form taken
>> by commons-based communities in parts of pre-capitalist
>> Germany:
>>
>> "The use of arable and meadowlands was under the
>> supervision and direction of the community ...
>>
>> "Just as the share of each member in so much of the
>> mark as was distributed was of equal size, so was his
>> share also in the use of the 'common mark.' The nature
>> of this use was determined by the members of the
>> community as a whole. ...
>>
>> "At fixed times and, if necessary, more frequently,
>> they met in the open air to discuss the affairs of the
>> mark and to sit in judgment upon breaches of
>> regulations and disputes concerning the mark." (Engels
>> 1892)
>>
>> Historians and other scholars have broadly confirmed
>> Engels' description of communal management of shared
>> resources. A summary of recent research concludes:
>>
>> "What existed in fact was not a 'tragedy of the
>> commons' but rather a triumph: that for hundreds of
>> years -- and perhaps thousands, although written
>> records do not exist to prove the longer era -- land
>> was managed successfully by communities." (Cox 1985:
>> 60)
>>
>> Part of that self-regulation process was known in
>> England as "stinting" -- establishing limits for the
>> number of cows, pigs, sheep and other livestock that
>> each commoner could graze on the common pasture. Such
>> "stints" protected the land from overuse (a concept
>> that experienced farmers understood long before Hardin
>> arrived) and allowed the community to allocate
>> resources according to its own concepts of fairness.
>>
>> The only significant cases of overstocking found by the
>> leading modern expert on the English commons involved
>> wealthy landowners who deliberately put too many
>> animals onto the pasture in order to weaken their much
>> poorer neighbours' position in disputes over the
>> enclosure (privatization) of common lands. (Neeson
>> 1993: 156)
>>
>> Hardin assumed that peasant farmers are unable to
>> change their behaviour in the face of certain disaster.
>> But in the real world, small farmers, fishers and
>> others have created their own institutions and rules
>> for preserving resources and ensuring that the commons
>> community survived through good years and bad.
>>
>> ** Why does the herder want more? **
>>
>> Hardin's argument started with the unproven assertion
>> that herdsmen always want to expand their herds: "It is
>> to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as
>> many cattle as possible on the commons. ... As a
>> rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his
>> gain."
>>
>> In short, Hardin's conclusion was predetermined by his
>> assumptions. "It is to be expected" that each herdsman
>> will try to maximize the size of his herd -- and each
>> one does exactly that. It's a circular argument that
>> proves nothing.
>>
>> Hardin assumed that human nature is selfish and
>> unchanging, and that society is just an assemblage of
>> self-interested individuals who don't care about the
>> impact of their actions on the community. The same
>> idea, explicitly or implicitly, is a fundamental
>> component of mainstream (i.e., pro-capitalist) economic
>> theory.
>>
>> All the evidence (not to mention common sense) shows
>> that this is absurd: people are social beings, and
>> society is much more than the arithmetic sum of its
>> members. Even capitalist society, which rewards the
>> most anti-social behaviour, has not crushed human
>> cooperation and solidarity. The very fact that for
>> centuries "rational herdsmen" did not overgraze the
>> commons disproves Hardin's most fundamental assumptions
>> -- but that hasn't stopped him or his disciples from
>> erecting policy castles on foundations of sand.
>>
>> Even if the herdsman wanted to behave as Hardin
>> described, he couldn't do so unless certain conditions
>> existed.
>>
>> There would have to be a market for the cattle, and he
>> would have to be focused on producing for that market,
>> not for local consumption. He would have to have enough
>> capital to buy the additional cattle and the fodder
>> they would need in winter. He would have to be able to
>> hire workers to care for the larger herd, build bigger
>> barns, etc. And his desire for profit would have to
>> outweigh his interest in the long-term survival of his
>> community.
>>
>> In short, Hardin didn't describe the behaviour of
>> herdsmen in pre-capitalist farming communities -- he
>> described the behaviour of capitalists operating in a
>> capitalist economy. The universal human nature that he
>> claimed would always destroy common resources is
>> actually the profit-driven "grow or die" behaviour of
>> corporations.
>>
>> ** Will private ownership do better? **
>>
>> That leads us to another fatal flaw in Hardin's
>> argument: in addition to providing no evidence that
>> maintaining the commons will inevitably destroy the
>> environment, he offered no justification for his
>> opinion that privatization would save it. Once again he
>> simply presented his own prejudices as fact:
>>
>> "We must admit that our legal system of private
>> property plus inheritance is unjust -- but we put up
>> with it because we are not convinced, at the moment,
>> that anyone has invented a better system. The
>> alternative of the commons is too horrifying to
>> contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin."
>>
>> The implication is that private owners will do a better
>> job of caring for the environment because they want to
>> preserve the value of their assets. In reality,
>> scholars and activists have documented scores of cases
>> in which the division and privatization of communally
>> managed lands had disastrous results. Privatizing the
>> commons has repeatedly led to deforestation, soil
>> erosion and depletion, overuse of fertilizers and
>> pesticides, and the ruin of ecosystems.
>>
>> As Karl Marx wrote, nature requires long cycles of
>> birth, development and regeneration, but capitalism
>> requires short-term returns.
>>
>> "The entire spirit of capitalist production, which is
>> oriented towards the most immediate monetary profits,
>> stands in contradiction to agriculture, which has to
>> concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent
>> conditions of life required by the chain of human
>> generations. A striking illustration of this is
>> furnished by the forests, which are only rarely managed
>> in a way more or less corresponding to the interests of
>> society as a whole..." (Marx 1998: 611n)
>>
>> Contrary to Hardin's claims, a community that shares
>> fields and forests has a strong incentive to protect
>> them to the best of its ability, even if that means not
>> maximizing current production, because those resources
>> will be essential to the community's survival for
>> centuries to come. Capitalist owners have the opposite
>> incentive, because they will not survive in business if
>> they don't maximize short-term profit. If ethanol
>> promises bigger and faster profits than centuries-old
>> rain forests, the trees will fall.
>>
>> This focus on short-term gain has reached a point of
>> appalling absurdity in recent best-selling books by
>> Bjorn Lomborg, William Nordhaus and others, who argue
>> that it is irrational to spend money to stop greenhouse
>> gas emissions today, because the payoff is too far in
>> the future. Other investments, they say, will produce
>> much better returns, more quickly.
>>
>> Community management isn't an infallible way of
>> protecting shared resources: some communities have
>> mismanaged common resources, and some commons may have
>> been overused to extinction. But no commons-based
>> community has capitalism's built-in drive to put
>> current profits ahead of the well-being of future
>> generations.
>>
>> ** A politically useful myth **
>>
>> The truly appalling thing about "The Tragedy of the
>> Commons" is not its lack of evidence or logic -- badly
>> researched and argued articles are not unknown in
>> academic journals. What's shocking is the fact that
>> this piece of reactionary nonsense has been hailed as a
>> brilliant analysis of the causes of human suffering and
>> environmental destruction, and adopted as a basis for
>> social policy by supposed experts ranging from
>> economists and environmentalists to governments and
>> United Nations agencies.
>>
>> Despite being refuted again and again, it is still used
>> today to support private ownership and uncontrolled
>> markets as sure-fire roads to economic growth.
>>
>> The success of Hardin's argument reflects its
>> usefulness as a pseudo-scientific explanation of global
>> poverty and inequality, an explanation that doesn't
>> question the dominant social and political order. It
>> confirms the prejudices of those in power: logical and
>> factual errors are nothing compared to the very
>> attractive (to the rich) claim that the poor are
>> responsible for their own poverty. The fact that
>> Hardin's argument also blames the poor for ecological
>> destruction is a bonus.
>>
>> Hardin's essay has been widely used as an ideological
>> response to anti-imperialist movements in the Third
>> World and discontent among indigenous and other
>> oppressed peoples everywhere in the world.
>>
>> "Hardin's fable was taken up by the gathering forces of
>> neo-liberal reaction in the 1970s, and his essay became
>> the 'scientific' foundation of World Bank and IMF
>> policies, viz. enclosure of commons and privatization
>> of public property. ... The message is clear: we must
>> never treat the earth as a 'common treasury.' We must
>> be ruthless and greedy or else we will perish." (Boal
>> 2007)
>>
>> In Canada, conservative lobbyists use arguments derived
>> from Hardin's political tract to explain away poverty
>> on First Nations' reserves, and to argue for further
>> dismantling of indigenous communities. A study
>> published by the influential Fraser Institute urges
>> privatization of reserve land:
>>
>> "These large amounts of land, with their attendant
>> natural resources, will never yield their maximum
>> benefit to Canada's native people as long as they are
>> held as collective property subject to political
>> management. ... collective property is the path of
>> poverty, and private property is the path of
>> prosperity." (Fraser 2002: 16-17)
>>
>> This isn't just right-wing posturing. Canada's federal
>> government, which has refused to sign the United
>> Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
>> Peoples, announced in 2007 that it will "develop
>> approaches to support the development of individual
>> property ownership on reserves," and created a $300
>> million fund to do just that.
>>
>> In Hardin's world, poverty has nothing to do with
>> centuries of racism, colonialism and exploitation:
>> poverty is inevitable and natural in all times and
>> places, the product of immutable human nature. The poor
>> bring it on themselves by having too many babies and
>> clinging to self-destructive collectivism.
>>
>> The tragedy of the commons is a useful political myth
>> -- a scientific-sounding way of saying that there is no
>> alternative to the dominant world order.
>>
>> Stripped of excess verbiage, Hardin's essay asserted,
>> without proof, that human beings are helpless prisoners
>> of biology and the market. Unless restrained, we will
>> inevitably destroy our communities and environment for
>> a few extra pennies of profit. There is nothing we can
>> do to make the world better or more just.
>>
>> In 1844 Friedrich Engels described a similar argument
>> as a "repulsive blasphemy against man and nature."
>> Those words apply with full force to the myth of the
>> tragedy of the commons.
>>
>> Ian Angus is editor of Climate and Capitalism
>> <http://www.climateandcapitalism.com> and an associate
>> editor of Socialist Voice <http://www.socialistvoice.ca>
>> (((( T h e B u l l e t )))) A Socialist Project e-bulletin
>> .... No. 133 .... August 25, 2008
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