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I disagree. Tragedy of the Commons is a situation that is about the management of wildlife and natural resources for the purposes of maximizing yield, with the

by wespiser_2018 8y ago

I disagree. Tragedy of the Commons is a situation that is about the management of wildlife and natural resources for the purposes of maximizing yield, with the lesson being regulated consumption results in maximal natural harvest. Pollution is just a negative economic externality, or consequence of an action that is unseen by the participants, where more pollution is always worse. Unfortunately, no one owns the oceans, and the normal ways for resolving externalities don't work without an aggrieved property owner.

EB66 8y ago
Your understanding of the tragedy of the commons is not accurate. Cases of pollution in public waters are typically prime examples of tragedies of the commons. Just because it's a "negative economic externality" does not mean that it is not a tragedy of the commons. Even the wiki page for tragedy of the commons lists "water pollution" as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Example... Maximizing yield via regulation is usually the ECON101 lesson that accompanies discussions about the tragedy of the commons.
- wespiser_2018 8y ago
  Still, I disagree, the mainstay of Tragedy of the Commons is about resource management through regulation, which does not apply well to oceans plastics. The "Water Pollution" example provided is about water management for the purposes of irrigation, and pollution of groundwater that needed for said irrigation. Ocean plastics could be different, if its just the systematic degradation of an ecosystem, orthogonal to resource management interests.
  - EB66 8y ago
    :smh:
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
blotter_paper 8y ago
>Unfortunately, no one owns the oceans, and the normal ways for resolving externalities don't work without an aggrieved property owner. Hmm, so if we want to reduce human pollution of the oceans... we just need to colonize the oceans!
matt4077 8y ago
„No one owns the oceans“ = commons
- wespiser_2018 8y ago
  Yes, I see. What I mean is that no single nation-state owns the oceans, so unlike most other examples of tragedy of the commons, where an organization has domain over the commons, the oceans are particularly difficult because there is no governing entity to resolve disagreements.
notacoward 8y ago
> Unfortunately, no one owns the oceans i.e. it's part of the commons. It has often been used as an example of such, because despoiling a resource still reduces supply just like direct depletion does. > the normal ways for resolving externalities don't work without an aggrieved property owner That is exactly what TotC is about. Even if one could split hairs about what's TotC vs. some other kind of externality, the fact remains that the dynamics are the same. In light of your own last sentence, do you disagree with GP's point that regulation is the necessary answer?
mikeash 8y ago
More pollution isn’t necessarily worse. The polluting activity can produce benefits that outweigh the harm of the pollution. Pollution is directly analogous to the standard Tragedy of the Commons scenario of a shared pasture, where the pasture equates to the environment, the cows are industry, and grazing the cows in the common pasture equates to industry producing pollution.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  the pasture equates to environment, the cows are industry [...] That's your problem right there. You're treating the cows as somehow separate from the environment. For this example, let's consider the pasture as an island so that you have nowhere else to go. The actual externality of cows eating grass is poop, which fertilizes the soil to some degree but can poison it in excess. Overgrazing is not an externality as such; it's depletion, and then all your cows die and so do you. Maybe you get to eat a few of the cows while you wait for more grass to grow but after they're gone you won't be able to live on the grass. The benefits of temporarily having more cows than you can sustainably graze is an illusion, because you can't eat them all as soon as the grass runs out. You too are part of the ecosystem. (Ok, in the real world you have other land available, trade, and so on. But that just distributes the problem over a large population and area, postponing the point where carrying capacity becomes an issue. And more often than not, profits are retained by one party while pollution is dumped on another whose suffering the profiteer has no desire to alleviate. In this example that particular cheat code is not operational.) There are two reasons this might happen: external forcing of the ecosystem (drought, being hit by a meteor etc.), or letting your herd expand faster than the pasture can grow new grass, which is essentially borrowing time from the future and dying when you've done so. The uncertain risk of external forcing inclines us to hedge against its possibility by accumulating excess, but since the known and increasing risk of feedback can't be directly compared with the uncertain external risk people tend to 'rationalize it' by making irrational appeals to possibility rather than probability. The most obvious example of this today is people who object to any and all environmental regulation by dismissing predictions of environmental problems as too vague while simultaneously insisting that mitigating them will definitely lead to economic catastrophe, even though weather and climate modeling is considerably more rigorous than economic modeling and the extremely harsh and obvious value and life destruction of environmental disasters. More pollution is necessarily worse. You can hedge it in the short term, but in the long term you mitigate it or you die - and while in the long run, we are all dead, dying faster than you need to is maladaptive. Running the system too fast increases entropy and that is a one-way ticket.

EB66 8y ago

Your understanding of the tragedy of the commons is not accurate. Cases of pollution in public waters are typically prime examples of tragedies of the commons. Just because it's a "negative economic externality" does not mean that it is not a tragedy of the commons. Even the wiki page for tragedy of the commons lists "water pollution" as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Example... Maximizing yield via regulation is usually the ECON101 lesson that accompanies discussions about the tragedy of the commons.

wespiser_2018 8y ago
Still, I disagree, the mainstay of Tragedy of the Commons is about resource management through regulation, which does not apply well to oceans plastics. The "Water Pollution" example provided is about water management for the purposes of irrigation, and pollution of groundwater that needed for said irrigation. Ocean plastics could be different, if its just the systematic degradation of an ecosystem, orthogonal to resource management interests.
- EB66 8y ago
  :smh:

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

blotter_paper 8y ago

>Unfortunately, no one owns the oceans, and the normal ways for resolving externalities don't work without an aggrieved property owner. Hmm, so if we want to reduce human pollution of the oceans... we just need to colonize the oceans!

matt4077 8y ago

„No one owns the oceans“ = commons

wespiser_2018 8y ago
Yes, I see. What I mean is that no single nation-state owns the oceans, so unlike most other examples of tragedy of the commons, where an organization has domain over the commons, the oceans are particularly difficult because there is no governing entity to resolve disagreements.

notacoward 8y ago

> Unfortunately, no one owns the oceans i.e. it's part of the commons. It has often been used as an example of such, because despoiling a resource still reduces supply just like direct depletion does. > the normal ways for resolving externalities don't work without an aggrieved property owner That is exactly what TotC is about. Even if one could split hairs about what's TotC vs. some other kind of externality, the fact remains that the dynamics are the same. In light of your own last sentence, do you disagree with GP's point that regulation is the necessary answer?

mikeash 8y ago

More pollution isn’t necessarily worse. The polluting activity can produce benefits that outweigh the harm of the pollution. Pollution is directly analogous to the standard Tragedy of the Commons scenario of a shared pasture, where the pasture equates to the environment, the cows are industry, and grazing the cows in the common pasture equates to industry producing pollution.

anigbrowl 8y ago
the pasture equates to environment, the cows are industry [...] That's your problem right there. You're treating the cows as somehow separate from the environment. For this example, let's consider the pasture as an island so that you have nowhere else to go. The actual externality of cows eating grass is poop, which fertilizes the soil to some degree but can poison it in excess. Overgrazing is not an externality as such; it's depletion, and then all your cows die and so do you. Maybe you get to eat a few of the cows while you wait for more grass to grow but after they're gone you won't be able to live on the grass. The benefits of temporarily having more cows than you can sustainably graze is an illusion, because you can't eat them all as soon as the grass runs out. You too are part of the ecosystem. (Ok, in the real world you have other land available, trade, and so on. But that just distributes the problem over a large population and area, postponing the point where carrying capacity becomes an issue. And more often than not, profits are retained by one party while pollution is dumped on another whose suffering the profiteer has no desire to alleviate. In this example that particular cheat code is not operational.) There are two reasons this might happen: external forcing of the ecosystem (drought, being hit by a meteor etc.), or letting your herd expand faster than the pasture can grow new grass, which is essentially borrowing time from the future and dying when you've done so. The uncertain risk of external forcing inclines us to hedge against its possibility by accumulating excess, but since the known and increasing risk of feedback can't be directly compared with the uncertain external risk people tend to 'rationalize it' by making irrational appeals to possibility rather than probability. The most obvious example of this today is people who object to any and all environmental regulation by dismissing predictions of environmental problems as too vague while simultaneously insisting that mitigating them will definitely lead to economic catastrophe, even though weather and climate modeling is considerably more rigorous than economic modeling and the extremely harsh and obvious value and life destruction of environmental disasters. More pollution is necessarily worse. You can hedge it in the short term, but in the long term you mitigate it or you die - and while in the long run, we are all dead, dying faster than you need to is maladaptive. Running the system too fast increases entropy and that is a one-way ticket.