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The whole notion of the "tragedy of the commons" needs to be put to rest. It's an armchair thought experiment that was disproven at the latest in the 90s by Eli

The whole notion of the "tragedy of the commons" needs to be put to rest. It's an armchair thought experiment that was disproven at the latest in the 90s by Elinor Ostrom with actual empirical evidence of commons. The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea.

b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
yeah, it's a post-hoc rationalization for the enclosure and privatization of said commons.
- TeMPOraL 9mo ago
  And here I thought the standard, obvious solution to tragedy of the commons is centralized governance.
  - dpark 9mo ago
    People invoke the tragedy of the commons in bad faith to argue for privatization because “the alternative is communism”. i.e. Either an individual or the government has to own the resource. This is of course a false dichotomy because governance can be done at any level.
    - AnthonyMouse 9mo ago
      It also seems to omit the possibility that the thing could be privately operated but not for profit. Let's Encrypt is a solid example of something you could reasonably model as "tragedy of the commons" (who is going to maintain all this certificate verification and issuance infrastructure?) but then it turns out the value of having it is a million times more than the cost of operating it, so it's quite sustainable given a modicum of donations. Free software licenses are another example in this category. Software frequently has a much higher value than development cost and incremental improvements decentralize well, so a license that lets you use it for free but requires you to contribute back improvements tends to work well because then people see something that would work for them except for this one thing, and it's cheaper to add that themselves or pay someone to than to pay someone who has to develop the whole thing from scratch.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
    That is, in fact, how medieval commons were able to exist successfully for hundreds of years.
Saline9515 9mo ago
Ostrom showed that it wasn't necessarily a tragedy, if tight groups involved decided to cooperate. This common in what we call "trust-based societies", which aren't universal. Nonetheless, the concept is still alive, and anthropic global warming is here to remind you about this.
wongarsu 9mo ago
A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms. The classic examples like people grazing sheep or cutting wood are bad examples that don't really work. But that doesn't mean the tragedy of the commons can't happen in other scenarios. If we define commons a bit more generously it does happen very frequently on the internet. It's also not difficult to find cases of it happening in larger cities, or in environments where cutthroat behavior has been normalized
- TeMPOraL 9mo ago
  > A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms. That works while the size of the community is ~100-200 people, when everyone knows everyone else personally. It breaks down rapidly after that. We compensate for that with hierarchies of governance, which give rise to written laws and bureaucracy. New tribes break off old tribes, form alliances, which form larger alliances, and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase. This is sociopolitical history of the world in a nutshell.
  - lukan 9mo ago
    "and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase." You say it like this is a law set in stone, because this is what happened im history, but I would argue it happened under different conditions. Mainly, the main advantage of an empire over small villages/tribes is not at all that they have more power than the villages combined, but that they can concentrate their power where it is needed. One village did not stand a chance against the empire - and the villages were not coordinated enough. But today we would have the internet for better communication and coordination, enabling the small entieties to coordinate a defense. Well, in theory of course. Because we do not really have autonomous small states, but are dominated by the big players. And the small states have mowtly the choice which block to align with, or get crushed. But the trend might go towards small again. (See also cheap drones destroying expensive tanks, battleships etc.)
gmfawcett 9mo ago
Ostrom's results didn't disprove ToC. She showed that common resources can be communally maintained, not that tragic outcomes could never happen.
- 8note 9mo ago
  i dont thjnk anything can disprove that ToC issues can happen under any situation. that seems like an unreasonable bar, and less useful than "does this system make ToC less frequent than that system"
dpark 9mo ago
She not “disprove” the existence of the tragedy of the commons. What she established was that controlling the commons can be done communally rather than through privatization or through government ownership. Communal management of a resource is still government, though. It just isn’t central government. The thesis of the tragedy of the commons is that an uncontrolled resource will be abused. The answer is governance at some level, whether individual, collective, or government ownership. > The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea. Right. And that’s what people are usually talking about when they say “tragedy of the commons”.

b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago

yeah, it's a post-hoc rationalization for the enclosure and privatization of said commons.

TeMPOraL 9mo ago
And here I thought the standard, obvious solution to tragedy of the commons is centralized governance.
- dpark 9mo ago
  People invoke the tragedy of the commons in bad faith to argue for privatization because “the alternative is communism”. i.e. Either an individual or the government has to own the resource. This is of course a false dichotomy because governance can be done at any level.
  - AnthonyMouse 9mo ago
    It also seems to omit the possibility that the thing could be privately operated but not for profit. Let's Encrypt is a solid example of something you could reasonably model as "tragedy of the commons" (who is going to maintain all this certificate verification and issuance infrastructure?) but then it turns out the value of having it is a million times more than the cost of operating it, so it's quite sustainable given a modicum of donations. Free software licenses are another example in this category. Software frequently has a much higher value than development cost and incremental improvements decentralize well, so a license that lets you use it for free but requires you to contribute back improvements tends to work well because then people see something that would work for them except for this one thing, and it's cheaper to add that themselves or pay someone to than to pay someone who has to develop the whole thing from scratch.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
  That is, in fact, how medieval commons were able to exist successfully for hundreds of years.

Saline9515 9mo ago

Ostrom showed that it wasn't necessarily a tragedy, if tight groups involved decided to cooperate. This common in what we call "trust-based societies", which aren't universal. Nonetheless, the concept is still alive, and anthropic global warming is here to remind you about this.

wongarsu 9mo ago

A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms. The classic examples like people grazing sheep or cutting wood are bad examples that don't really work. But that doesn't mean the tragedy of the commons can't happen in other scenarios. If we define commons a bit more generously it does happen very frequently on the internet. It's also not difficult to find cases of it happening in larger cities, or in environments where cutthroat behavior has been normalized

TeMPOraL 9mo ago
> A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms. That works while the size of the community is ~100-200 people, when everyone knows everyone else personally. It breaks down rapidly after that. We compensate for that with hierarchies of governance, which give rise to written laws and bureaucracy. New tribes break off old tribes, form alliances, which form larger alliances, and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase. This is sociopolitical history of the world in a nutshell.
- lukan 9mo ago
  "and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase." You say it like this is a law set in stone, because this is what happened im history, but I would argue it happened under different conditions. Mainly, the main advantage of an empire over small villages/tribes is not at all that they have more power than the villages combined, but that they can concentrate their power where it is needed. One village did not stand a chance against the empire - and the villages were not coordinated enough. But today we would have the internet for better communication and coordination, enabling the small entieties to coordinate a defense. Well, in theory of course. Because we do not really have autonomous small states, but are dominated by the big players. And the small states have mowtly the choice which block to align with, or get crushed. But the trend might go towards small again. (See also cheap drones destroying expensive tanks, battleships etc.)

gmfawcett 9mo ago

Ostrom's results didn't disprove ToC. She showed that common resources can be communally maintained, not that tragic outcomes could never happen.

8note 9mo ago
i dont thjnk anything can disprove that ToC issues can happen under any situation. that seems like an unreasonable bar, and less useful than "does this system make ToC less frequent than that system"

dpark 9mo ago

She not “disprove” the existence of the tragedy of the commons. What she established was that controlling the commons can be done communally rather than through privatization or through government ownership. Communal management of a resource is still government, though. It just isn’t central government. The thesis of the tragedy of the commons is that an uncontrolled resource will be abused. The answer is governance at some level, whether individual, collective, or government ownership. > The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea. Right. And that’s what people are usually talking about when they say “tragedy of the commons”.