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That is one meaning of “commons”, but not all of them, and you might be mistaking which one the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ is using. “Commons can also be
by dahart 10mo ago
That is one meaning of “commons”, but not all of them, and you might be mistaking which one the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ is using.
“Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons
The actual mechanism by which ownership resolves tragedy of the commons scenarios is by making the resource non-free, by either charging, regulating, or limiting access. The effect still occurs when something is owned but free, and its name is still ‘tragedy of the commons’, even when the resource in question is owned by private interests.
- bawolff 10mo agoHow does that differ from what the person you are arguing against is saying?
- dahart 10mo agoOwnership, I guess. The 2 parent comments are claiming that “tragedy of the commons” doesn’t apply to privately owned things. I’m suggesting that it does. Edit: oh, I do see what you mean, and yes I misunderstood the quote I pulled from WP - it’s talking about non-ownership. I could pick a better example, but I think that’s distracting from the fact that ‘tragedy of the commons’ is a term that today doesn’t depend on the definition of the word ‘commons’. It’s my mistake to have gotten into any debate about what “commons” means, I’m only saying today’s usage and meaning of the phrase doesn’t depend on that definition, it’s a broader economic concept.
- nkmnz 10mo agoNo, it’s not.
- dahart 10mo agoWhat’s not what? Care to back up your argument with any links? I already pointed out that examples in the WP article for ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ use private property. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Digital_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Digital... Are you contradicting the Wikipedia article? Why, and on what basis?
- bawolff 10mo agoI'm not sure i agree that the Wikipedia article supports your position. Certainly private property is involved in tragedy of the commons. In the classic shared cattle ranching example, the individual cattle are private property, only the field is held in common. I generally think that tragedy of the commons requires the commons, to, well, be held in common. If someone owns the thing that is the commons, its not a commons but just a bad product. (With of course some nit picking about how things can be de jure private property while being defacto common property) In the microsoft example, windows becoming shitty software is not a tragedy of the commons, its just MS making a business decision because windows is not a commons. On the other hand, computing in general becoming shitty, because each individual app does attention grabbing dark patterns, as it helps the induvidual apps bottom line while hurting the ecosystem as a whole, would be a tragedy of the commons, as user attention is something all apps hold in common and none of them own.
- dahart 10mo agoOne of the examples of digital commons in the article is Wikipedia itself, which is privately owned, so now you can be sure the Wikipedia article does backup my claim at least a little. The Microsoft example in this subthread is GitHub, not Windows. Windows is not a digital commons, because it’s neither free nor finite. Github is (or was) both. That is the criteria that Wikipedia is using to apply the descriptor ‘commons’: something that is both freely available to the public, and comes in limited supply, e.g. bandwidth, storage, databases, compute, etc. Wikipedia’s article seems to be careful to not discuss ownership nor define the tragedy of the commons in terms of ownership, presumably because the phrase describes something that can still happen when privately owned things are made freely available. I skimmed Investopedia’s article on Tragedy as well, and it seems similarly to not explicitly discuss ownership, and even brings up the complicated issue of lack of international commons. That’s an interesting point: whatever we call commons locally may not be a commons globally. That suggests that even the original classic notion of tragedy of the commons often involves a type of private ownership, i.e. overfishing a “public” lake is a lake owned by a specific country, cattle overusing a “public” pasture is land owned by a specific country, and these resources might not be truly common when considered globally.