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The whole tragedy of the commons was literally made up by a very reactionary dude to justify fucking people over and justify enclosure and privatisation. Histor

by pvdoom 3y ago

The whole tragedy of the commons was literally made up by a very reactionary dude to justify fucking people over and justify enclosure and privatisation. Historically people have actually had rather complicated and at the same time very effective ways of sustainably managing the commons. It also happens that privatisation is the thing that makes the tragedy of the commons happen.

concordDance 3y ago
> Historically people have actually had rather complicated and at the same time very effective ways of sustainably managing the commons. Ones that scale to more than a million people?
- pvdoom 3y ago
  Yup.
RandomLensman 3y ago
Historically, quite a few people ruined themselves.
inglor_cz 3y ago
Historically, people also cut down most of the forests in the Mediterranean for firewood and shipbuilding without even attempting to balance the process, causing major problems for their descendants. Most of this activity predated modern capitalism by millennia. Historically and currently, people polluted common waters and air with all sorts of agricultural and industrial runoff. Heck, someone around me has been feeding their home fireplace with plastic right now and fifty other families have to smell the acrid smoke. Historically and currently, people overfished oceanic stocks to total depletion in certain seas. Historically and currently, people dumped their refuse somewhere behind their village or city, creating rotting heaps of trash. I don't see anything made up about the tragedy of the commons.
- pvdoom 3y ago
  And a lot of those things you list are not tragedy of the commons as stated, but a consequences of the very thing that Hardin was defending - the enclosure of the commons and privatisation. Because privatisation and capitalism both encourage competition, and unsustainable behaviour towards common resources. This is why we see agricultural and industrial runoffs, oceanic stock depletion etc. Historical communities tend to have tools and practices that prevent all of that stuff from happening, practices that have been put aside with colonialism, enclosure and markets ...
nvm0n2 3y ago
That seems to be ahistorical revisionism. The common land in mediaeval England was literally called "waste" as in a "wasteland". It seems that some ideological academics are now trying to rewrite this history. Wikipedia has been edited into a state of internal inconsistency where it says [2]: > Millions of acres were "common land", but this did not mean public land open to everybody, a popular fallacy ... Certainly their rights were strong, because the lord was not entitled to build on his own land, or fence off any part of it So this land wasn't fenced off in any way and the putative "owner" couldn't build anything on it, yet this article argues it also wasn't "open to everybody", despite literally being called "common land" that is the root of the word "commoners". It also says: > the commoners' right to graze the lord's land with their animals was restricted by law - precisely in order to prevent overgrazing ... but the citation for this is very curious. It's a book [1] with an abstract that says: The report of the Royal Commission on Common Lands (of which both authors were members) revealed not only the chaotic state of the laws relating to the commons but also the lack of information regarding their nature, distribution and extent. Some commons being shamefully misused, while some very large tracts are lying idle and serving no useful purpose either economically or for public enjoyment. ... which sounds exactly like the well known tragedy of the commons that supposedly doesn't exist. Checking the history of the Wikipedia talk page (which is nearly empty) reveals what you might expect: someone engaged in a massive edit war to totally rewrite this page along ideological lines, claiming the classic understanding taught to British schoolchildren was "neomalthusian rubbish", whatever that means. They appear to have simply ground down their opposition, then the whole discussion was deleted by a bot. Nice. Wikipedia has become such a dumpster fire in recent years, it's so sad. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Common-England-Collins-Naturalist-Library/dp/0007342225 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Common-England-Collins-Naturalist-L... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- Fluorescence 3y ago
  I can't understand what issue you are having. Common land was managed in different ways in different places (chaotic) with local laws granting rights that often restricted scale of access to prevent over-use. I'm not sure what your point is about waste is because The Lord's Waste was a specific legal designation separate from the more emotive devastated/unusable/excess we might be familiar with. The assumption that Common Land was unmanaged and owned by all is false but that doesn't mean it was always well managed. Be in no doubt that Enclosure was a horrifying theft of rights from the citizenry and in no way a solution to a Tragedy of the Commons.
panick21_ 3y ago
Both broad generalizations are wrong. Yes historically many societies have put in place various solutions to the tragity of the commons. But its also wrong that this was always the case and that all these solutions were great. > It also happens that privatisation is the thing that makes the tragedy of the commons happen. That is just fundamentally false. Privatization is one potential solution for a Tragedy of the commons. And of course privatization can be done in a fair or an unfair way. Just like every other potential solution. I would suggest Elinor Ostrom work on the topic.
- pvdoom 3y ago
  > I would suggest Elinor Ostrom work on the topic. Isn't her fundamental restatement of the tragedy of the commons that if the people decide to cooperate, then it doesn't happen? Which is a pretty thorough refutation to the original tragedy of the commons, as we see it in the Econ 101 meme. Problem is that privatisation (together with markets, cause the two always go hand in hand) introduces incentives to compete and to exploit, which achieves ... well a tragedy of the commons. And the second problem is that historically, privatisation has pretty much always been done in an unfair way.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    Here work shows of course that the simplistic Econ101 Trategy of the Commons is wrong. And that of course was known long before. Just as in any other field just reading 101 isn't sufficient. This is an old problem in economics and much has been written about. What her work actually shows is that the determining factor isn't so much if something is private or government or something else but rather about various other factor, like communication, monitoring and enforcement. > Problem is that privatisation (together with markets, cause the two always go hand in hand) introduces incentives to compete and to exploit There are tons of resources under private management and private operates are very well capable of understanding that if they simply use up the resource they will hurt their future earnings potential. In the old school case of common land being zoned off, those lands became private. Those private operators used that land far more efficiently and the result a massive increase in the British population. And guess what, 100s of years later and that land is very often still farmed to this day. They understand that the land has capacity that needs to be restored in various way. Now one can make the argument if the privatization happened in a fair way. Meaning did all the people who had access to common land get an fair share. That however is a different question. With farm land this works because based on Ostroms work its pretty easy to monitor, and enforce. Secretly going to another farmers land and planting or harvesting isn't all that viable. In case of fishery rights this get much more complex. Before the invention of barbed wire such simply mechanism didn't work for cattle for example and thus other mechanism were used. However once barbed wire was invented cattle farmers moved to full privatization. See 'The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier' if you are interest in various stories like that. We can take various other examples. Common forest could suffer tragedy of the commons. But private logging operations have long understood that they need to split up land to have forest at different stages so that they can continually harvest wood for a long time. Privatization (as in splitting up the resources into various parts) can align the intensives correctly, the damage the resource takes impact your own utility and thus aligns intensives correctly. So it totally correct to say that splitting up a resource and managing it independent is a potential solution. But I think Ostrom work indicates that we need to look deeper and beyond a one size fits all solution to resource management.

by pvdoom 3y ago

concordDance 3y ago

> Historically people have actually had rather complicated and at the same time very effective ways of sustainably managing the commons. Ones that scale to more than a million people?

pvdoom 3y ago
Yup.

RandomLensman 3y ago

Historically, quite a few people ruined themselves.

inglor_cz 3y ago

Historically, people also cut down most of the forests in the Mediterranean for firewood and shipbuilding without even attempting to balance the process, causing major problems for their descendants. Most of this activity predated modern capitalism by millennia. Historically and currently, people polluted common waters and air with all sorts of agricultural and industrial runoff. Heck, someone around me has been feeding their home fireplace with plastic right now and fifty other families have to smell the acrid smoke. Historically and currently, people overfished oceanic stocks to total depletion in certain seas. Historically and currently, people dumped their refuse somewhere behind their village or city, creating rotting heaps of trash. I don't see anything made up about the tragedy of the commons.

pvdoom 3y ago
And a lot of those things you list are not tragedy of the commons as stated, but a consequences of the very thing that Hardin was defending - the enclosure of the commons and privatisation. Because privatisation and capitalism both encourage competition, and unsustainable behaviour towards common resources. This is why we see agricultural and industrial runoffs, oceanic stock depletion etc. Historical communities tend to have tools and practices that prevent all of that stuff from happening, practices that have been put aside with colonialism, enclosure and markets ...

nvm0n2 3y ago

That seems to be ahistorical revisionism. The common land in mediaeval England was literally called "waste" as in a "wasteland". It seems that some ideological academics are now trying to rewrite this history. Wikipedia has been edited into a state of internal inconsistency where it says [2]: > Millions of acres were "common land", but this did not mean public land open to everybody, a popular fallacy ... Certainly their rights were strong, because the lord was not entitled to build on his own land, or fence off any part of it So this land wasn't fenced off in any way and the putative "owner" couldn't build anything on it, yet this article argues it also wasn't "open to everybody", despite literally being called "common land" that is the root of the word "commoners". It also says: > the commoners' right to graze the lord's land with their animals was restricted by law - precisely in order to prevent overgrazing ... but the citation for this is very curious. It's a book [1] with an abstract that says: The report of the Royal Commission on Common Lands (of which both authors were members) revealed not only the chaotic state of the laws relating to the commons but also the lack of information regarding their nature, distribution and extent. Some commons being shamefully misused, while some very large tracts are lying idle and serving no useful purpose either economically or for public enjoyment. ... which sounds exactly like the well known tragedy of the commons that supposedly doesn't exist. Checking the history of the Wikipedia talk page (which is nearly empty) reveals what you might expect: someone engaged in a massive edit war to totally rewrite this page along ideological lines, claiming the classic understanding taught to British schoolchildren was "neomalthusian rubbish", whatever that means. They appear to have simply ground down their opposition, then the whole discussion was deleted by a bot. Nice. Wikipedia has become such a dumpster fire in recent years, it's so sad. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Common-England-Collins-Naturalist-Library/dp/0007342225 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Common-England-Collins-Naturalist-L... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Fluorescence 3y ago
I can't understand what issue you are having. Common land was managed in different ways in different places (chaotic) with local laws granting rights that often restricted scale of access to prevent over-use. I'm not sure what your point is about waste is because The Lord's Waste was a specific legal designation separate from the more emotive devastated/unusable/excess we might be familiar with. The assumption that Common Land was unmanaged and owned by all is false but that doesn't mean it was always well managed. Be in no doubt that Enclosure was a horrifying theft of rights from the citizenry and in no way a solution to a Tragedy of the Commons.

panick21_ 3y ago

Both broad generalizations are wrong. Yes historically many societies have put in place various solutions to the tragity of the commons. But its also wrong that this was always the case and that all these solutions were great. > It also happens that privatisation is the thing that makes the tragedy of the commons happen. That is just fundamentally false. Privatization is one potential solution for a Tragedy of the commons. And of course privatization can be done in a fair or an unfair way. Just like every other potential solution. I would suggest Elinor Ostrom work on the topic.

pvdoom 3y ago
> I would suggest Elinor Ostrom work on the topic. Isn't her fundamental restatement of the tragedy of the commons that if the people decide to cooperate, then it doesn't happen? Which is a pretty thorough refutation to the original tragedy of the commons, as we see it in the Econ 101 meme. Problem is that privatisation (together with markets, cause the two always go hand in hand) introduces incentives to compete and to exploit, which achieves ... well a tragedy of the commons. And the second problem is that historically, privatisation has pretty much always been done in an unfair way.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Here work shows of course that the simplistic Econ101 Trategy of the Commons is wrong. And that of course was known long before. Just as in any other field just reading 101 isn't sufficient. This is an old problem in economics and much has been written about. What her work actually shows is that the determining factor isn't so much if something is private or government or something else but rather about various other factor, like communication, monitoring and enforcement. > Problem is that privatisation (together with markets, cause the two always go hand in hand) introduces incentives to compete and to exploit There are tons of resources under private management and private operates are very well capable of understanding that if they simply use up the resource they will hurt their future earnings potential. In the old school case of common land being zoned off, those lands became private. Those private operators used that land far more efficiently and the result a massive increase in the British population. And guess what, 100s of years later and that land is very often still farmed to this day. They understand that the land has capacity that needs to be restored in various way. Now one can make the argument if the privatization happened in a fair way. Meaning did all the people who had access to common land get an fair share. That however is a different question. With farm land this works because based on Ostroms work its pretty easy to monitor, and enforce. Secretly going to another farmers land and planting or harvesting isn't all that viable. In case of fishery rights this get much more complex. Before the invention of barbed wire such simply mechanism didn't work for cattle for example and thus other mechanism were used. However once barbed wire was invented cattle farmers moved to full privatization. See 'The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier' if you are interest in various stories like that. We can take various other examples. Common forest could suffer tragedy of the commons. But private logging operations have long understood that they need to split up land to have forest at different stages so that they can continually harvest wood for a long time. Privatization (as in splitting up the resources into various parts) can align the intensives correctly, the damage the resource takes impact your own utility and thus aligns intensives correctly. So it totally correct to say that splitting up a resource and managing it independent is a potential solution. But I think Ostrom work indicates that we need to look deeper and beyond a one size fits all solution to resource management.