Comments on: Fallacy of the Commons

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Sat, 08 May 2004 02:35:13 +0000

Robbo, I’m certainly not advocating naive reliance on markets (though they have their place). In fact, one of the reasons I reacted against Hardin was that, at least for part of his career, he was an advocate of free-market environmentalism, symbolised by enclosure as a solution to the putative tragedy of the commons.

By: robbo

robbo — Sat, 08 May 2004 00:29:23 +0000

John, now that we’re down toward the level of specifics, I’ll happily agree that TOTC does not apply to every case of protecting commonly held resources. Maybe there are plenty of exceptions. I’m pretty familiar with land use issues in southern California, specifically Orange County. It’s clear to me that the major land-protection actions of the past 30 years were based on (1) the federal Endangered Species Act, still one of the few environmental protection laws with enough teeth to scare a major developer, and/or (2) strong and organized public pressure—i.e. pressure from outside the group of people who stood to gain financially from destroying the resource—to preserve places like Upper Newport Bay, which was very nearly turned into a yacht harbor in the 1970s. And as one who remembers the literally choking smog of the 1970s and 1980s, I’m very pleased that we have a jack-booted Air Quality Management District that has done such a great job of letting me breathe. I’m also glad that the State cracked down on smoking in bars and restaurants. Again, these highly beneficial protections of public resources were simply not happening on their own, as the result of market forces or far-sighted self-regulation by those who stood to profit more from abusing the commons. And allowing that certain fisheries that are well-managed, the overall state of the world’s fisheries is widely believed to be poor: http://tinyurl.com/34p94 http://tinyurl.com/233s9 http://www.fishingnj.org/njnet14.htm Sorry, count me among the tiny minority of Americans who proudly stand up for strong government regulation of commonly held resources. Markets just don’t cut it!

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Fri, 07 May 2004 21:41:49 +0000

Robbo, there are plenty of examples of successfully-managed common-property fisheries (read Ostrom). And there are important examples of common-property environmental regulation in the contemporary US, most notably homeowners associations. These sometimes work well and sometimes not. Hardin’s discussion implies that the appropriate solution is always either privatisation (enclosure) or external regulation and this is not correct.

By: robbo

robbo — Fri, 07 May 2004 16:54:52 +0000

I don’t have Lloyd’s 1833 paper, and doubt that I’d be interested enough to read it. But Hardin did not cite an “actual open field system.” He wrote, “Picture a pasture open to all.” And if the hypothetical illustration has no real-world counterpart, doesn’t this suggest that the analogy is likely to miss out on key features of the problem? I was taught the TOTC analogy to mean the following: Without effective outside regulation, timber companies can be counted on to destroy the forests; fishing fleets will inevitably deplete important fish stocks; mining companies will destroy rivers and leave gaping scars on the landscape; large industry and car drivers will ruin the air we breathe; etc. In America, I see no indication that these common-property resources would not be totally destroyed in the absence of outside regulation. The fact that shepherds on actual commons work out ways among themselves to keep their flocks alive has not detracted from the potency of the analogy in the cases cited above. I’ll grant that actually using the TOTC as the literal basis for attempting to regulate grazing in developing countries is a stupid idea. But those particulars don’t turn the analogy, as applied to commonly held resources—like air, water, fish, and forests—into a load of tripe, in my estimation.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Fri, 07 May 2004 01:33:07 +0000

I suggest readers go back to the piece by Lloyd, cited by Hardin, which certainly does claim to be a description of the actual open field system and not some hypothetical case. And if the hypothetical illustration has no real-world counterpart, doesn’t this suggest that the analogy is likely to miss out on key features of the problem? The extensive work of Ostrom and others has shown that if you want to understand common property and open access resources, you should examine actual institutions rather than spurious accounts of hypothetical cases. Conflation of common property with open access, as in Hardin, has repeatedly let to mistaken policy prescriptions in developing countries where actual common property institutions have been abolished (sometimes nationalised, sometimes privatised) on the basis of the assumption that they must lead to resource degradation. In quite a few instances, the new institutions have produced rapid resource degradation.

By: robbo

robbo — Fri, 07 May 2004 00:05:29 +0000

Right ASG, Steve, Glen, et al. Quiggin’s claim to have participated in discrediting Hardin is, quite simply, pathetic. Since the pasture is hypothetical Hardin can’t have portrayed it inaccurately in a historical sense. Sure, those in the know about how pastures are typically regulated can chuckle at the notion of Hardin’s unregulated pasture, but as a strict metaphor the pasture nicely illustrates the basic problems encountered in dividing and exploiting any common-property resource.

By: Another Damned Medievalist agrees in part with EAR Brown

Another Damned Medievalist agrees in part with EAR Brown — Thu, 06 May 2004 20:26:05 +0000

what in the name of all that’s holy has the commons to do with the so-called feudal system? Manorial, maybe. Feudal, no. System—a pox on the tyranny of a construct.

By: Glen

Glen — Thu, 06 May 2004 19:50:57 +0000

I don’t get it. Reading over the essay, I see two things: 1. Yes, there’s a lot of tripe related to overpopulation. Hardin was quite the Malthusian. Too bad he never made a bet with Julian Simon. 2. But on the other hand, his analysis of the commons problems makes perfect sense. He does not claim (at least nowhere that I could find in the essay) that his theory described the actual institutional structure of common pastures in England. Rather, he describes a hypothetical situation in which a pasture is “open to all.” If the common pastures of England were not in fact “open to all,” but instead were heavily regulated, then the conditions for his theory don’t apply. When Hardin needs empirical examples, he does not rely on English pastures; he relies on excellent modern-day examples like air pollution and over-fishing of the oceans.

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Thu, 06 May 2004 18:54:20 +0000

There are some more readings on this, all tending to utterly discredit Hardin’s ‘thesis’, in Matt Ridley’s ‘The Origins of Virtue’. Horrifies me to think that I was taught ‘the tragedy of the commons’ more or less uncritically in my first year at Oxford. Ridley’s book is worth reading for its own sake, btw, although the last couple of chapters are some of the dumbest sub-Hayek tripe imaginable.

By: asg

asg — Thu, 06 May 2004 15:35:15 +0000

Will W.—I was curious about that too, but I was able to find it pretty easily by googling “gramsci beaver”. I confess its relevance to the topic at hand was not clear to me, though.

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 06 May 2004 15:27:47 +0000

Riume, Where would one locate Gramsci’s “parable of the beaver”?

By: DJW

DJW — Thu, 06 May 2004 15:18:53 +0000

Olstrom, too, of course. I’d forgotten about that. Best part of that book, IMO.

By: DJW

DJW — Thu, 06 May 2004 15:16:45 +0000

A similar point is made by Susan Buck in her 1985 Environmental Ethics article, “No Tragedy of the Commons”. Reprinted in the popular Global Environmental Politics anthology, Green Planet Blues. Suffice it to say that for people paying attention, it’s clear that Hardin screws up his his history. I think ASG is correct though, this metaphor does have some value in some contemporary contexts. It never really captures the essence of any system of common property, but it certainly tells an important part of the story.

By: Henry

Henry — Thu, 06 May 2004 15:08:19 +0000

Lin Ostrom has a really lovely book, Governing the Commons that makes the same point on the basis of comparative study of thousands of common property systems across the world. She shows that they work quite well in governing resource use across a wide variety of settings (although she maybe underplays a bit the extent to which they may instantiate unequal power relations).

By: David Sucher

David Sucher — Thu, 06 May 2004 15:03:51 +0000

Of course I should have written “stinting” though “stinging” has a punnish quality.