> It's a good example of the Tragedy of the Commons. We mostly solved that problem on land, and even ended up with industrial farming by allowing people to own

> It's a good example of the Tragedy of the Commons. We mostly solved that problem on land, and even ended up with industrial farming by allowing people to own pieces of land to run their own farming operations. That's a myth. This "problem" wasn't much of a problem, historically, since real-world communities would spontaneously develop regulatory practices to prevent over-exploitation of the commons: > Political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded 2009's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on the issue, and others revisited Hardin's work in 1999.[45] They found the tragedy of the commons not as prevalent or as difficult to solve as Hardin maintained, since locals have often come up with solutions to the commons problem themselves.[46] For example, it was found that a commons in the Swiss Alps has been run by a collective of farmers there to their mutual and individual benefit since 1517, in spite of the farmers also having access to their own farmland. In general, it is in the interest of the users of a commons to keep them functioning and so complex social schemes are often invented by the users for maintaining them at optimum efficiency.[47][48] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Non-governmental_solution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Non-gov...) Privatization is one solution, but it seems to often be falsely portrayed as the only solution. The wiki article has a decent list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Solutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Solutio...