Garrett Hardin

Thinking in Systems: A Primer
by Meadows. Donella and Diana Wright
Published 3 Dec 2008

I express my admiration and gratitude to all its members. I also have drawn from thinkers in a variety of disciplines, who, as far as I know, never used a computer to simulate a system, but who are natural systems thinkers. They include Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Boulding, Herman Daly, Albert Einstein, Garrett Hardin, Václav Havel, Lewis Mumford, Gunnar Myrdal, E.F. Schumacher, a number of modern corporate executives, and many anonymous sources of ancient wisdom, from Native Americans to the Sufis of the Middle East. Strange bedfellows, but systems thinking transcends disciplines and cultures and, when it is done right, it overarches history as well.

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This phrase means roughly “effects which I hadn’t foreseen or don’t want to think about.”. . . Side-effects no more deserve the adjective “side” than does the “principal” effect. It is hard to think in terms of systems, and we eagerly warp our language to protect ourselves from the necessity of doing so. —Garrett Hardin,5 ecologist Remember the clouds in the structural diagrams of Chapters One and Two? Beware of clouds! They are prime sources of system surprises. Clouds stand for the beginnings and ends of flows. They are stocks—sources and sinks—that are being ignored at the moment for the purposes of simplifying the present discussion.

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The Tragedy of the Commons Leaders of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s coalition, led by the Christian Democratic Union, agreed last week with the opposition Social Democrats, after months of bickering, to turn back a flood of economic migrants by tightening conditions for claiming asylum. —International Herald Tribune, 19925 The trap called the tragedy of the commons comes about when there is escalation, or just simple growth, in a commonly shared, erodable environment. Ecologist Garrett Hardin described the commons system in a classic article in 1968. Hardin used as his opening example a common grazing land: Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. . . . Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?”.

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons
by Peter Barnes
Published 29 Sep 2006

Appendix Key Features of Corporate, State, and Commons Sectors CORPORATIONS STATE COMMONS Key functions Making things; seeking shortterm profit Defining, assigning, balancing rights Sharing gifts and preserving them for future generations Key institutions Corporations; labor unions Legislature Executive Judiciary Ecosystem trusts, permanent funds, open access commons, intergenerational pacts, community commons Key human actors Directors Politicians Trustees Accountable to Share owners Voters (donors) Future generations, living citizens equally, nonhuman species, communities Algorithms Maximize profit; distribute earnings to existing shareholders Win most votes (raise most money) Preserve asset; live off income, not principal; follow the precautionary principle; the more beneficiaries the better Time horizon Next quarter Next election Next generation Ownership regime One dollar, one share One person, one vote (one dollar, one vote) One person, one share Transferable ownership Yes Voting rights: No Property: Yes Beneficial rights: No Usage rights: Yes From each according to . . . Voluntary purchases Taxes Voluntary usage To each according to . . . Share ownership Political power Equal ownership Items in parentheses are de facto, not written in law. Notes Notes to Pages x–17 Preface 1x Biologist Garrett Hardin: Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, 1968, 162, 1243–1248. See www.sciencemag.org/sciext/sotp/commons.dtl. xii envisioned an economy: E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful (New York: HarperCollins, 1973). Chapter 1: Time to Upgrade 14 endangering human civilizations: Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin Books, 2005); Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004). 17 “The relational herdsman . . .”: Hardin, “Tragedy of the Commons,” p. 1244.

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(Working Assets offers telephone and credit card services which automatically I | ix | x | C A P I TA L I S M 3.0 donate to nonprofit groups working for a better world.) My initial ruminations focused on climate change caused by human emissions of heat-trapping gases. Some analysts saw this as a “tragedy of the commons,” a concept popularized forty years ago by biologist Garrett Hardin. According to Hardin, people will always overuse a commons because it’s in their self-interest to do so. I saw the problem instead as a pair of tragedies: first a tragedy of the market, which has no way of curbing its own excesses, and second a tragedy of government, which fails to protect the atmosphere because polluting corporations are powerful and future generations don’t vote.

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It’s small at the moment, but the point of this book is that we should enlarge it. Time to Upgrade | 7 The Tragedy of the Commons Isn’t What You Think If you heard about the commons before you picked up this book, your impressions were probably shaped by a 1968 article called “The Tragedy of the Commons.” In that article, biologist Garrett Hardin used the metaphor of an unmanaged pasture to suggest a root cause of many planetary problems. The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another. . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons.

Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs
by Juli Berwald
Published 4 Apr 2022

But as the swarm of voracious fish cleared, all I saw was happiness in her eyes. Part IV Sulawesi 16 The Tragedy of Scale According to one economic theory, today’s problems with our seas reach back beyond politics and policy to our very human nature. In 1968, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley named Garrett Hardin gave a talk to the American Association for the Advancement of Science with the catchy title “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Drawing from an essay published a century earlier, in 1866, Hardin described a grassy pasture on which herders could happily graze their cows. This mind experiment occurred before what we think of as modern times, so tribal wars and poaching, along with disease, kept the number of cattle in check.

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Not missing a beat, Lizzie hit the stop button, pulled out the smoking taco, plopped it in the sink, and said, “Also, there’s no protecting any region on a map from the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the warming of the seas from climate change.” * * * — After my conversation with Lizzie, I thought a lot about the implications of traditional marine tenure. If there were places that managed to skirt the Tragedy of the Commons through systems like sasi in Indonesia and no-take MPAs, what does that mean for the validity of Garrett Hardin’s idea? Is the Tragedy of the Commons a fundamental truth of humankind, or is it flawed? Flawed, was the answer articulated in the 1980s by Elinor Ostrom, the first—and until 2019 only—woman to have won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Known as Lin, Ostrom was rejected from the PhD program in economics at UCLA because she’d never taken trigonometry.

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He was studying the politics of the L.A. aquifer system and asked Lin to research the system called West Basin. The competing demands of farmers, builders, and residents were draining it dry. Observing the water wars and pumping races gave Lin critical insight into the Tragedy of the Commons. Remember the herders grazing in Garrett Hardin’s field? Lin recognized that for Hardin’s logic to work, he had to impose unnatural rules on the herders. The herders’ pro vs. con calculus depended on their never speaking to one another or having any preconceived notions of what the other herders might do. That’s not realistic, Lin argued.

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts
by Shane Parrish
Published 22 Nov 2019

If we don’t understand what the map does and doesn’t tell us, it can be useless or even dangerous. — Sidebar: The Tragedy of the Commons The Tragedy of the Commons The Tragedy of the Commons is a parable that illustrates why common resources get used more than is desirable from the standpoint of society as a whole. Garrett Hardin wrote extensively about this concept. “Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land.

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Margaret Atwood 2 In an example of second-order thinking deficiency, we have been feeding antibiotics to livestock for decades to make the meat safer and cheaper. Only in recent years have we begun to realize that in doing so we have helped create bacteria that we cannot defend against. In 1963, the UC Santa Barbara ecologist and economist Garrett Hardin proposed his First Law of Ecology: “You can never merely do one thing.”3 We operate in a world of multiple, overlapping connections, like a web, with many significant, yet obscure and unpredictable, relationships. He developed second-order thinking into a tool, showing that if you don’t consider “the effects of the effects,” you can’t really claim to be doing any thinking at all.

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A word of caution Second-order thinking, as valuable as it is, must be tempered in one important way: You can’t let it lead to the paralysis of the Slippery Slope Effect, the idea that if we start with action A, everything after is a slippery slope down to hell, with a chain of consequences B, C, D, E, and F. Garrett Hardin smartly addresses this in Filters Against Folly: Those who take the wedge (Slippery Slope) argument with the utmost seriousness act as though they think human beings are completely devoid of practical judgment. Countless examples from everyday life show the pessimists are wrong…If we took the wedge argument seriously, we would pass a law forbidding all vehicles to travel at any speed greater than zero.

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History
by Derek S. Hoff
Published 30 May 2012

Population Index 34 (October–December 1968): 467–74 (his presidential speech to the Population Association of America of April 19, 1968); and Thomas Frejka, “Reflections on the Demographic Conditions Needed to Establish a U.S. Stationary Population Growth,” Population Studies 22 (November 1968): 379–97. 65. Davis, “Zero Population Growth.” 66. Rienow and Rienow, Moment in the Sun, 211–12. 67. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (December 13, 1968): 1243–48. 68. Ibid., 1246. 69. Ibid., 1247. 70. Garrett Hardin, “Living on a Lifeboat,” BioScience 24 (October 1974): 561–68. 71. Hardin wrote that “those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more” (“Tragedy of the Commons,” 1247). Still, he rejected the notion that genetics should guide such transfers and never suggested that members of various ethnic groups have different innate abilities.

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The old frontier idea of producing armies of offspring to overcome infant mortality and push forward to conquer the continent is as discredited as bundling, witch-burning, and pond-dunking for shrews. Let all lovers of life plead for a new philosophy, a transformed social code, so that this nation and the world may survive.”66 A famous proponent of draconian population control was biologist Garrett Hardin, an enormously polarizing figure whose radicalism encouraged many to view the population movement as nothing more than the old wine of eugenics in new bottles. In “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which appeared in Science in 1968, Hardin called for a “new morality” to solve the population problem.67 He invoked a classic market failure: when land (in his example, a pasture) is owned in common, any one individual has every incentive to work this land as hard as possible because the grass is free.

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To be sure, historians of the feminist movement and of abortion politics have noted the general confluence between the family planning movement and the promotion of abortion liberalization.100 It is well known that in 1959, Planned Parenthood helped the American Law Institute draft a model law subsequently used by the few states that liberalized their abortion laws in the 1960s.101 In addition, scholars have recognized that Garrett Hardin and other population activists worked with leaders of the women’s movement to spur the creation of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), founded in 1969.102 Historian Suzanne Staggenborg notes in her study Pro-Choice Movement that the national ZPG organization—initially leery of engaging the abortion issue due to the group’s ecological emphasis and the recognition that the full legalization of abortion, though obviously consistent with the group’s mission, would only marginally affect aggregate population—officially endorsed the repeal of abortion restrictions in 1969.

The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move
by Sonia Shah

At one point, for example, he referred to the lemming migration as a “rather tragic procession of refugees, with all the obsessed behavior of an unwanted stranger in a populous land.” Elton’s ideas shed “considerable light18 on the way the human population should be regulated,” one well-heeled Elton fan sniffed. Principles such as Gause’s Law “ha[ve] applications in many academic fields of study,” added the University of California ecologist Garrett Hardin. Accepting its premises would bring about “a renaissance of understanding.” By the 1930s, the popularity of eugenics19 had started to diminish in the United States, even as it gained momentum in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Anxieties about newcomers subsided with the closing of the borders, and the Depression dulled enthusiasm for talk of superior races and their automatically superior lives.

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Soon local clubs and NGOs started inviting him to speak to their members. Ehrlich’s Stanford offices became a hub for scientific debate over the ecological crisis precipitated by population growth. At weekly seminars and conferences at Stanford, he gathered scientists such as the University of California ecologist Garrett Hardin, the social scientist Kingsley Davis, and others to share notes on the possibility of a human population explosion and its portents for the future. They saw signs of impending Kaibab-like collapse all around, including in California. By 1962, more people lived in California than the state of New York.

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In the 1980s and ’90s, elements on both sides of the political spectrum aligned both for and against immigration, with corporate interests and their partisan allies broadly aligned in favor of immigration and labor unions and their partisan allies arguing that immigrants drove down wages and had a negative impact on the environment. Garrett Hardin and Anne Ehrlich served on the board of Tanton’s Federation for American Immigration Reform. Like Ehrlich, who primed his readers and viewers to accept the necessity of authoritarian measures, Tanton gently helped his supporters disregard51 those who might call his antimigrant positions “racist.”

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762), Du Contrat Social (The Social Contract). John Rawls John Rawls (1971), A Theory of Justice, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. In Plato's Republic Plato (c. 427–347 BC), The Republic. Niccolò Machiavelli Niccolò Machiavelli (1517), Discourses Upon the First Ten Books of Titus Livy. Garrett Hardin Garrett Hardin (1994). “The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 9:199. voting is required Elliot Frankal (4 Jul 2005), “Compulsory Voting Around the World,” The Guardian. marriage rites were informal Stephanie Coontz (2005), Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, Viking.

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Her analysis leads to the decision to overfish. That makes sense, but—of course—if everyone acts according to the same analysis, they'll end up collapsing the fishing stocks and ruining the industry for everyone. This is called a Tragedy of the Commons, and was first described by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968.6 A Tragedy of the Commons occurs whenever a group shares a limited resource: not just fisheries, but grazing lands, water rights, time on a piece of shared exercise equipment at a gym, an unguarded plate of cookies in the kitchen. In a forest, you can cut everything down for maximum short-term profit, or selectively harvest for sustainability.

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The social pathologists make a distinction between codified and explicit norms established by the government and non-formal norms agreed upon by the group, but that leaves a large grey area for less-official groups. Still, codifying our reputational pressure into laws was a big step for the development of society, and it allowed larger and more complex social groupings—like cities. Garrett Hardin, who created the phrase “the Tragedy of the Commons,” later wished he'd called it “the tragedy of the unmanaged commons.” The point of his paper was not that defectors will inevitably ruin things for the group, but that unless things are managed properly, they will. He was stressing the need for institutional pressure.

Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

This contradiction arises out of the fact that language can exist only as a standard, or, in other words, in a commons. The same goes for networks. Commons in information are paramount to networks since a shared body of knowledge is a prerequisite for enabling communication between nodes. We can choose to read Garrett Hardin’s classic paper, Tragedy of the Commons in the light of this collision between language and private property.16 Referring to medieval commons, Garrett famously claims that free access to land leads to disaster, since the individual herdsman collects full gains from increasing his herd, but the reprisals for doing so, land depletion, is shared evenly by everyone.

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Security for the future was seen to, not by saving money, but by ensuring that the land would produce a harvest the next year too.18 The back-and-front argumentation of Hardin is not very convincing, and yet his influence is still being felt. The same argumentation underpins present-day beliefs in that the environment can be saved from capitalist exploitation with an intensified property regime and by enacting make-believe markets in carbon emissions and waste disposal. The merit of Garrett Hardin’s paper is not his case in favour of private property over commons. It is worthwhile to bring him up since he is the first mainstream economist to have touched upon the subject of externalities. In his argumentation he focuses on the classic example of an externality, land depletion. Pollution illustrates how some of the burden from the transaction between buyer and seller is carried by third parties.

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With knowledge of this fact, the restricted economy of capitalism shows up as a mirror world of anti-production where the principle of life has been inverted. If the first bird was a bourgeois, he would sue the second bird for piracy. At each and every instant, private property acts as a stoppage. It could rightly be described as a ‘Tragedy of the Anti-Commons’. The term was made up by Michael Heller in his criticism of Garrett Hardin’s essay.22 Heller argues from a conventional economist’s perspective, but he reaches an unorthodox conclusion: An overly strong private property regime can cause under-use of resources. Conflicting ownership claims might prevent two parties from developing a resource. Additionally, resources might go undeveloped because high prices hinder people from accessing and improving the resource in question.

Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
by Peter Singer
Published 3 Mar 2009

By 2050 Nigeria, now with 144 million people, is expected to grow to 282 million and be the world’s sixth most populous nation. By then the Democratic Republic of the Congo, now home to 63 million people, is predicted to have 187 million, and Ethiopia, 77 million today, is expected to have a population of 146 million.31 But to say, as ecologist Garrett Hardin did in the 1970s with countries like Bangladesh and India in mind, that we should not give aid to poor countries with rapidly growing populations ignores the well-established fact that reducing poverty also reduces fertility32 Where many children die and there is no Social Security, parents tend to have large families to ensure that some will survive to look after them in their old age, and, in the case of rural families, to work the land.

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“Millennium Villages: A New Approach to Fighting Poverty: FAQ,” www.unmillenniumproject.org/mv/mv_faq.htm; “The Magnificent Seven,” The Economist, April 26, 2006, p. 63. 24. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1st edition, 1798. 25. Paul Ehrlich, “Paying the Piper,” New Scientist 36:652-55, reprinted in Garrett Hardin, ed., Population, Evolution, and Birth Control, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1969), p. 127. See also Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968), p. 36. 26. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, World Agriculture: Towards 201512030, Rome, 2002, p. 1, ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/004/y3557e/y3557e01.pdf 27.

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Bertrand, “Multi-trait Prediction of Feed Conversion in Feedlot Cattle,” Proceedings of the 34th Annual Beef Improvement Federation Annual Meeting, Omaha, Nebraska, July 10—13, 2002, www.bifconference.com/bif2002/BIFsymposium_pdfs/Herring_02BIF.pdf, and “Pork Facts, 2001/2002,” National Pork Board, Des Moines, Iowa. 31. Population Reference Bureau, 2007 World Population Data Sheet, pp. 1, 7, www.prb.org/pdf07/07WPDS_Eng.pdf 32. Garrett Hardin, “Living on a Lifeboat,” Bioscience 24 (1974), pp. 561-68. 33. Population Reference Bureau, 2007 World Population Data Sheet, p. 4, www.prb.org/pdf07/07WPDS_Eng.pdf 34. See Amartya Sen, “Population: Delusion and Reality,” The New York Review of Books 41:15 (September 22, 1994). An updated (2002) version is available at www.asian-affairs.com/issuel7/sen.html. 35.

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside
by Xiaowei Wang
Published 12 Oct 2020

黄哲程, “探索区块链在食品安全领域的运用, 新京报,” Beijing News, November 4, 2019, http://web.archive.org/web/20200317213627/http://www.xinhuanet.com/food/2019-11/04/c_1125189022.htm.   4.  Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Michel Oksenberg, Policy Making in China: Leaders, Structures, and Processes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).   5.  “Garrett Hardin,” Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/garrett-hardin.   6.  Similar concepts, like “survival of the fittest,” based on Darwin’s ideas of natural selection, give scientific credence to economic systems like capitalism—with its aggressive emphasis on competition. Survival of the fittest has been similarly disproven.

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The idea that life is “nasty, brutish, and short” comes from the political and moral philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who argued that a strong, authoritarian government is needed to curb the selfish instinct that lives in all of us. A few hundred years later, the “tragedy of the commons” concept would solidify Hobbes’s thinking as scientific. Many crypto and blockchain enthusiasts will cite this concept often and candidly. The concept of the tragedy of the commons was popularized in 1968 by the ecologist Garrett Hardin, who also argued that the overpopulation of the earth would lead to disaster because of finite resources. Hardin’s tragedy of the commons was the condition where individual users, motivated by their own self-interest, ruin a shared resource system for everyone. Hardin gave the example of herders who, caring only about the survival of their own herds, destroyed pastures by overgrazing common land.

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet
by Roger Scruton
Published 30 Apr 2014

Such problems are not specific to environmental issues, and arise in connection with both radical and conservative policies. When considering the environment, however, one such problem is of particular importance, and that is the failure of collective rationality commented upon by Aristotle in the Politics and known, following an acclaimed article by Garrett Hardin, as ‘the tragedy of the commons’.151 Many of the earth’s resources are either unowned or owned in common by some particular community – the fish in a lake, the grazing on common land, the air that we breathe, and so on. If we all have access to such commons, and if they are easily depleted by our use of them, then the situation can easily arise in which it is in the interest of each person to take as much as he can before others deprive him of the chance.

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Such economies are often caught in a vicious circle of population growth, environmental degradation and natural resource depletion that ultimately can destabilize the social and political order.’ Arab Human Development Report 2009: Challenges to Human Security in the Arab Countries, UNDP Regional Bureau for Arab States, p. 118, www.arab-hdr.org/publications/other/ahdr/ahdr2009e.pdf. 16 On the theory of ‘rent seeking’, see Chapters 3 and 4. 17 Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, 162.1, 1968, pp. 243 –8. 18 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 1971, 2005. 19 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution, 1790; G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, 1820; Joseph de Maistre, Le Principe Générateur des Constitutions, 1809. 20 I return to them in Chapters 7 and 8. 21 And whose antics are thoroughly discredited by Adam Zamoyski in Holy Madness: Compatriots, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776–1871, London and New York, 2001. 22 George Monbiot, The Age of Consent, London, 2003. 23 For an eloquent assessment of the adverse effects of globalization on the identity, and therefore the environment, of the English nation, see Paul Kingsnorth, Real England, London, 2008. 24 See Roger Scruton, The Need for Nations, London, 2004. 25 Criticisms of these institutions from the left are assembled on the websites of the Global Justice Center and the Global Justice Ecology Center.

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Merton, ‘The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action’, American Sociological Review, 1.6, 1936, pp. 894–904. 148 Peltzman, op. cit. 149 Adams, op. cit.; Gerald J. S. Wilde, Target Risk, Toronto, 1994. The point is also sometimes referred to as the ‘Peltzman effect’, since Peltzman was the first to hit on the idea. 150 Adams, op. cit. 151 See 1261b in Aristotle, The Politics, Oxford, 1994; Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, 162, 13 December 1968, pp. 1243–8. Hardin’s original response to the tragedy was to call for government intervention to protect ‘public assets’; he later moved in the direction of favouring privatization. 152 The tragedy is described by Zac Goldsmith in The Constant Economy, London, 2009.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Published 2 Jan 2010

Brown: Landshare Explained,” Guardian (June 2009), www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gardeningblog/2009/jun/05/landshare-hugh-fearnley-whittingstall. 17. “Commons Sense,” Economist (July 31, 2008), www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/d.quercia/others/commons.pdf. 18. “The Tragedy of the Commons” is an influential article written by Garrett Hardin. First published in Science 162, no. 3859 (December 13, 1968): 1243–1248. 19. The idea of traffic congestion and “The Tragedy of the Commons” is documented in Garrett Hardin, Living Within Means (Oxford University Press, 1993). It is also well described in a blog post on Seed, www.seed.slb.com/subcontent.aspx?id=4110. 20. David Bollier, “Elinor Ostrom and the Digital Commons,” Forbes (October 13, 2009), www.forbes.com/2009/10/13/open-source-net-neutrality-elinor-ostrom-nobel-opinions-contributors-david-bollier.html. 21.

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The concept of private property and enclosures accelerated across Europe and America throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Privatization was justified by the rationale that shared resources were subject to overuse and misuse by individuals, who will always act in their own short-term self-interests, a scenario popularized by microbiologist Garrett Hardin centuries later in a 1968 Science article, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin drew on the parable of a field used for grazing cattle. “Picture a pasture open to all,” he wrote. “A herdsman grazing his animals on the land will have an incentive to “add another animal to his herd. And another; and another. . . .

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 14 Jul 2001

With a rivalrous resource, I must still worry that I will reap enough benefit to make it worth it to sow. But I must worry as well that others not deplete the resource that I've produced. If a rivalrous resource is open to all, there is a risk that it will be depleted by the consumption of all. This depletion of a rivalrous resource is the dynamic that biologist Garrett Hardin famously termed “the tragedy of the commons.”7 “Picture a pasture open to all,” Hardin writes, and consider the expected behavior of “herdsmen” who roam that pasture. Each herdsman must decide whether to add one more animal to his herd. In making a decision to do so, Hardin writes, the herdsman reaps a benefit, while everyone else suffers.

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When it benefits the ends to restrict access, when it benefits the ends to discriminate, then the ends will restrict and discriminate regardless of the effect on others. Here, then, we have the beginnings of a classic “tragedy of the commons.”46 For if keeping the network as a commons provides a benefit to all, yet closing individual links in the network provides a benefit to individuals, then by the logic that Garrett Hardin describes in chapter 2 above, we should expect the network “naturally” to slide from dot.commons to dot.control. We should expect these private incentives for control to displace the public benefit of neutrality.47 The closing of the network by the cable companies at the code layer is one example of this slide.

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Not all liability rule cases will eliminate this core of discretion. But the system is structured to avoid it. 6 Virgil, Virgil in English Rhythm, 2nd ed., Robert Corbet Singleton, trans. (London: Bell and Daldy [imprint], 1871), iii-iv (“There is a common of language to which both poetry and prose have the freest access.”). 7 Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243. The idea of congestion externalities of course predates Hardin. See Posner, “Economic Analysis of Law,” 32-34, citing Frank H. Knight, “Some Fallacies in the Interpretation of Social Cost,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 38 (1924): 582. 8 Hardin, 1244 (emphasis added). 9 Ostrom, ch. 3; Robert C.

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance
by Julia Angwin
Published 25 Feb 2014

even a few freshwater mussels: Michael Scott, “Freshwater Mussels Found in Cuyahoga River, Indicating Improved Water Quality,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 22, 2009, http://www.cleveland.com/science/index.ssf/2009/08/freshwater_mussels_found_in_cu.html. To understand the links: Dennis Hirsch, in discussion with author, July 26, 2011. as portrayed in Garrett Hardin’s: Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (December 13, 1968): 1423–48, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full. “The risk here is that eventually”: Dennis Hirsch, in discussion with author, July 26, 2011. This is the argument put forth: David Brin, The Transparent Society (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

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To understand the links between privacy and pollution, I called Dennis Hirsch, a professor of environmental law at the Capital University Law School in Ohio, who has been studying privacy and environmental law for a decade. Hirsch compared institutions that mine individuals’ personal data to ranchers who overgraze their cattle on commonly owned grasslands, as portrayed in Garrett Hardin’s seminal 1968 essay in Science magazine, “Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin described how each rancher seeks to increase profits by adding cattle to his herd, even though too many cattle will overgraze and ruin the pasture for all. “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all,” Hardin wrote. Hirsch described excessive data mining as a similar tragedy of the commons.

Bulletproof Problem Solving
by Charles Conn and Robert McLean
Published 6 Mar 2019

But this work shows a large number of promising avenues to fight obesity that have a strong evidence base, and reasonable costs relative to the economic burdens this epidemic imposes on society. Overfishing: The Quintessential Wicked Problem Environmental degradation is one of the most pervasive wicked problems. The famous article by Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” written in 1968,10 influenced many to reach the view that so‐called common‐pool resources, such as public land, water, or fisheries, required either government intervention or private ownership to avoid overuse. Elinor Ostrom, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, showed that there are solutions available to the problems of the commons, some of which are long‐standing arrangements among resource users that have elements of community management via norms, and elements that mimic private ownership via certain kinds of harvest rights.11 Let's look at an example of fisheries reform that employed clever problem solving to achieve much better outcomes.

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Tie, et al., “Risk of Childhood Overweight or Obesity Associated with Excessive Weight Gain During Pregnancy: A Meta‐Analysis,” Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics 289, no. 2 (2014): 247–257. 7  US data source provided by Professor Desiree Silva, the ORIGINS project at Joondalup Health Campus, Western Australia. 8  Submission 10 to Senate Select Enquiry into the Obesity Epidemic in Australia, July 2018. 9  Walk Economy, The Place Report (2016), 7. 10  Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science (December 13, 1968). 11  Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 1990). 12  Oral communications, Chuck Cook and Charles Conn, August–October, 2017. 13  Mark Tercek and Jonathan Adams, Nature's Fortune (Island Press, 2015). 14  Morro Bay Commercial Fisheries. 2015 Economic Impact Report Working Waterfront Edition. 15  Morro Bay Commercial Fisheries. 2015 Economic Impact Report Working Waterfront Edition.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

The household supplies labour and capital to the market, but there’s no need to lift the roof and ask what goes on within its four walls: wives and daughters kindly take care of domestic affairs and they belong in the home, as does this matter. THE COMMONS, which are tragic – so sell them off. In the 1960s, Garrett Hardin described ‘the tragedy of the commons’ in which shared resources – such as grazing land and fish stocks – tend to be over-exploited by individual users and so are depleted for all.12 Managing such resources sustainably therefore calls for government regulation or, better still, private ownership.

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Natural commons have traditionally emerged in communities seeking to steward Earth’s ‘common pool’ resources, such as grazing land, fisheries, watersheds and forests. Cultural commons serve to keep alive a community’s language, heritage and rituals, myths and music, traditional knowledge and practice. And the fast-growing digital commons are stewarded collaboratively online, co-creating open-source software, social networks, information and knowledge. Garrett Hardin’s description of the commons as ‘tragic’ – which fitted so neatly into the neoliberal script – arose from his belief that, if left as open access to all, then pastures, forests and fishing grounds would inevitably be overused and depleted. He was most probably right about that, but ‘open access’ is far from how successful commons are actually governed.

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In case after case, investors’ promises to create new jobs, enrich community infrastructure and skill-up local farmers have come to nothing: instead many communities have found themselves dispossessed, dispersed and impoverished.41 Adam Smith’s celebration of the self-organising market underpinned the justification given for turning land into private property, a justification that was later reinforced by Garrett Hardin’s claim that the commons are inherently tragic. But, as we saw in Chapter 2, Elinor Ostrom challenged that belief when she started drawing attention to the equally powerful alternative of self-organising in the commons, and proved Hardin wrong. Gathering a rich array of case studies of ‘common-pool’ resource users, from Southern India to Southern California, she and her colleagues analysed how diverse communities had, sometimes for generations, successfully collaborated in harvesting, stewarding, and sustaining forests, fishing grounds and waterways.42 Many of those communities, in fact, managed their land and its common-pool resources better than markets did, and better than comparable state-run schemes.

Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman
Published 1 Jun 2020

But for advertising you’re allowed to deface public space and economists will call it ‘growth’. The concept of the commons gained currency with a piece published in the journal Science by American biologist Garrett Hardin. This was 1968, a time of revolution. Millions of demonstrators around the world took to the streets in protest, rallying to the cry: ‘Be realistic. Demand the impossible.’ But not the conservative Garrett Hardin. His six-page paper made short work of hippie idealism. Title? ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. ‘Picture a pasture open to all,’ Hardin wrote. ‘It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons.’

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Since common property was tragically doomed to fail, we needed either the visible hand of the state to do its salutary work, or the invisible hand of the market to save us. It seemed these two flavours – the Kremlin or Wall Street – were the only options available. Then, after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, only one remained. Capitalism had won, and we became Homo economicus. 4 To be fair, at least one person was never swayed by Garrett Hardin’s arguments. Elinor Ostrom was an ambitious political economist and researcher at a time when universities didn’t exactly welcome women. And, unlike Hardin, Ostrom had little interest in theoretical models. She wanted to see how real people behave in the real world. It didn’t take her long to realise there was one crucial detail Hardin’s paper had overlooked.

Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All
by Paul A. Offit M.D.
Published 28 Dec 2010

So why are more and more parents choosing not to vaccinate their children? The answer can be found in part in the writings of a professor of biology at the University of California at Santa Barbara who has explained why, under certain circumstances, a choice not to get a vaccine is far more rational than a choice to get one. In 1968, Garrett Hardin published an essay in the journal Science called “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin was interested in the problem of population control, but his observations can easily be applied to the problem of vaccine refusal. “Picture a pasture open to all,” he wrote. “It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons.

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Magid, et al., “Parental Refusal of Pertussis Vaccination Is Associated with an Increased Risk of Pertussis Infection in Children,” Pediatrics 123 (2009): 1446-1451. 144 International impact of anti-vaccine activism: E. J. Gangarosa, A. M. Galazka, C. R. Wolfe, et al., “Impact of Anti-Vaccine Movements on Pertussis Control: The Untold Story,” The Lancet 351 (1998): 356- 361. 144 Garrett Hardin essay: G. Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243-1248. All Hardin quotes are from this essay. 146 Stephanie Tatel: S. Tatel, “A Pox on You,” http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2232977. All Tatel quotes are from this essay. 147 Hardin’s second essay: G.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Mar 2014

Licensed Spectrum: Evidence from Market Adoption,” Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 26(1) (2012), http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publica tions/2012/unlicensed_wireless_v_licensed_spectrum (accessed October 23, 2013). 51. “Auctions,” U.S. Federal Communications Commission, http://www.fcc.gov/topic/auctions (accessed June 4, 2013). Chapter 10 1. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162(3859) (December 13, 1968): 1244. 2. Ibid., 1243–48. 3. Garrett Hardin, “Political Requirements for Preserving Our Common Heritage,” in Wildlife and America, ed. Howard P. Brokaw (Washington, DC: Council on Environmental Quality, 1978), 310–17. 4. Carol Rose, “The Comedy of the Commons,” University of Chicago Law Review 53(3) (1986): 720. 5.

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Unfortunately, in modern times, its reputation has been tarnished, first by Enlightenment philosophers and, more recently, by conventional economists committed to replacing it with a ubiquitous private property regime and market exchange model. Likely the most well-known contemporary depiction of the Commons—albeit a thoroughly negative one—is Garrett Hardin’s essay entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which appeared in the journal Science in 1968. A professor of ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Hardin posed the hypothetical situation of a pasture “open to all.” Each herder benefits from grazing as many cows on the pasture as he can.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Published 28 Feb 2008

In historical terms, a potluck dinner or a barn raising is collaborative production (the members work together to create something), while a union or a government engages in collective action, action that is undertaken in the name of the members meant to change something out in the world, often in opposition to other groups committed to different outcomes. The commonest collective action problem is described as the “Tragedy of the Commons,” biologist Garrett Hardin’s phrase for situations wherein individuals have an incentive to damage the collective good. The Tragedy of the Commons is a simple pattern to explain, and once you understand it, you come to see it everywhere. The standard illustration of the problem uses sheep. Imagine you are one of a group of shepherds who graze their sheep on a commonly owned pasture.

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Howard Rheingold, whose The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Basic Books (1993) was a critical early work on online community, is working on a multiyear study of cooperation in collaboration (www.cooperationcommons.com) with the Institute for the Future. Page 51: “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (3859), December 13, 1968, pp. 682-83. Garrett Hardin was a biologist, and the tragedy of the commons formulation often appears in discussions about natural resources. (There’s an online version at www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html ). A more mathematically rigorous view of the same problem appears in Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Harvard University Press (1965).

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley
Published 17 May 2010

When President Lyndon Johnson’s adviser Joseph Califano suggested that an increase in famine relief should be announced before a visit by Indira Gandhi to the United States, Johnson supposedly replied that he was not going to ‘piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems’. Garrett Hardin, in his famous essay ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ (remembered these days as being about collective action, but actually a long argument for coerced population control), found ‘freedom to breed intolerable’, coercion ‘a necessity’ and that ‘the only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon.’

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Human beings are a species that stops its own population expansions once the division of labour reaches the point at which individuals are all trading goods and services with each other, rather than trying to be self-sufficient. The more interdependent and well-off we all become, the more population will stabilise well within the resources of the planet. As Ron Bailey puts it, in complete contradiction of Garrett Hardin: ‘There is no need to impose coercive population control measures; economic freedom actually generates a benign invisible hand of population control.’ Most economists are now more worried about the effects of imploding populations than they are about exploding ones. Countries with very low birth rates have rapidly ageing workforces.

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p. 200 ‘On average a merchant in Britain who left £1,000 in his will had four surviving children, while a labourer who left £10 had only two’. Clark, G. 2007. A Farewell to Alms. Princeton University Press. p. 203 ‘Johnson supposedly replied’. Epstein, H. 2008. The strange history of birth control. New York Review of Books, 18 August 2008. p. 203 ‘Garrett Hardin, in his famous essay’. Hardin, G. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162:1243–8. p. 203 ‘Hardin’s view was nearly universal’. An exception was Barry Commoner, who argued at the UN conference on population in Stockholm in 1972 that the demographic transition would solve population growth without coercion.

Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies
by Charles de Ganahl Koch
Published 14 Sep 2015

Even if an upstanding renter (ahem) wanted to dispose of his garbage properly, there was no way to walk through that alley, because of the trash pileup. None of us owned this alley or had the power to stop others from trashing it. So none of us took care of it. This is an example of what is called the “tragedy of the commons.” Ecologist Garrett Hardin coined that phrase to describe what happens when herdsmen graze animals on shared grazing land, referred to as the commons.2 A rational herdsman will add as many animals as he can graze, because he receives all the proceeds when the additional animals are fed, and later sold, but he bears almost none of the cost of grazing—until the commons is depleted.

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Michael Porter, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (New York: The Free Press, 1998), p. xiv. 6. Peter Drucker, “What Executives Should Remember,” Harvard Business Review 84, no. 2 (February 2006). 7. Thorpe, How to Think Like Einstein, p. 35. Chapter 9: DECISION RIGHTS 1. Aristotle’s Politics, 1261b. 2. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (December 1968), pp. 1243–48. 3. http://blog.chron.com​/newswatchenergy​/2010/04/​bp-ceo-on-gulf-rig-disaster-how-the-hell-could-this-happen. (The date of the CEO’s remarks is April 28, 2010.) 4. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (Chicago: Regnery Co., 1963), p. 311.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

In the Friedmanite world view, the state is usually an incompetent, bloated actor. Even on the left, though, the basic logic of the market/state binary is accepted – progressives just have a more optimistic view of government. The trouble is, this dichotomy is flawed. It conceals other, often more productive, ways of organising our lives. One contemporary of Friedman’s, Garrett Hardin, became famous for a 1968 essay called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, which mournfully argues that any resource that is freely available will be overused.41 The commons are the things that are shared communally – the fish in international waters, or a forest that is shared between a community.

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i=1000510469428> [accessed 5 April 2021]. 39 will.i.am, ‘We Need to Own Our Data as a Human Right—and Be Compensated for It’, The Economist, 21 January 2019 <https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/01/21/we-need-to-own-our-data-as-a-human-right-and-be-compensated-for-it> [accessed 18 October 2020]. 40 Martin Tisné, ‘It’s Time for a Bill of Data Rights’, MIT Technology Review, 14 December 2018 <https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/14/138615/its-time-for-a-bill-of-data-rights/> [accessed 8 October 2020]. 41 Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, 162(3859), 1968, pp. 1243–1248 <https://doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243>. 42 For a good discussion of Hardin and Ostrom’s relative contributions to this debate, see Brett Frischmann, Alain Marciano and Giovanni Battista Ramello, ‘Retrospectives: Tragedy of the Commons after 50 Years’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 33(4), 2019, pp. 211–228 <https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.33.4.211>. 43 Carol Rose, ‘The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property’, The University of Chicago Law Review, 53(3), 1986.

Who Rules the World?
by Noam Chomsky

Environmental constraints threaten to deprive the company of future profits, a crime that can be punished under the rules of the investor-rights regime mislabeled as “free trade.”8 And this is only a tiny sample of struggles underway over much of the world, some involving extreme violence, as in the eastern Congo, where millions have been killed in recent years to ensure an ample supply of minerals for cell phones and other uses, and, of course, ample profits.9 The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also how they are conceived of. The prevailing view today is captured by Garrett Hardin’s influential argument that “freedom in a commons brings ruin to us all,” the famous “tragedy of the commons”: what is not owned will be destroyed by individual avarice.10 An international counterpart was the concept of terra nullius, employed to justify the expulsion of indigenous populations in the settler-colonial societies of the Anglosphere, or their “extermination,” as the founding fathers of the American republic described what they were doing, sometimes with remorse, after the fact.

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Emily Achtenberg, “From Water Wars to Water Scarcity: Bolivia’s Cautionary Tale,” NACLA Report on the Americas, 6 June 2013, https://nacla.org/blog/2013/6/5/water-wars-water-scarcity-bolivia%E2%80%99s-cautionary-tale.   8. Randal C. Archibold, “El Salvador: Canadian Lawsuit over Mine Allowed to Proceed,” New York Times, 5 June 2012.   9. Erin Banco, “Is Your Cell Phone Fueling Civil War in Congo?,” Atlantic, July 11, 2011. 10. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 13 December 1968, 1243–48. 11. See Paul Corcoran, “John Locke on the Possession of Land: Native Title vs. the ‘Principle’ of Vacuum domicilium.” Paper presented at the Australian Political Studies Association Annual Conference, September 2007, https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/44958/1/hdl_44958.pdf. 12.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Feb 2018

It encapsulates the idea that we can embed into these “programmable” forms of money a way to steer communities toward desired common outcomes. Tokens might help us solve the Tragedy of the Commons. In other words, they could be a big deal. The Tragedy of the Commons concept stems from a 1968 essay by the ecologist Garrett Hardin. Hardin tells the story of nineteenth-century farmers over-grazing the public land they shared because none of them could trust their counterparts not to let their livestock eat more than their fair share. It has long been used as a cautionary tale about the need for government to regulate access to a public resource—in the farmers’ case, land.

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Perhaps inevitably, consumers are turning to ad-blocking software: “Basic Asset Token (BAT): Blockchain Based Digital Advertising,” May 29, 2017, p. 9, https://basicattentiontoken.org/BasicAttentionTokenWhitePaper-4.pdf. The idea is to create price signals: ibid. The Tragedy of the Commons concept stems from a 1968 essay: Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, December 13, 1968, 162 (3859): pp. 1243–1248. The Economist described as a twenty-first-century resource: “The World’s Most Valuable Resource Is No Longer Oil, But Data,” The Economist, May 6, 2017, https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21721656-data-economy-demands-new-approach-antitrust-rules-worlds-most-valuable-resource.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by Eric Posner and E. Weyl
Published 14 May 2018

At the time, investment inefficiency for land was not considered a problem, because people thought that land did not need maintenance and the only value that could be added to land was through above-ground structures like houses. But these assumptions ignored environmental damage. As ecologist Garrett Hardin observed many years later, land without a single owner often becomes overgrazed, eroded, and polluted in what he labeled the “tragedy of the commons.”19 George’s scheme ran into even greater problems with natural resources that can be depleted, like metal from mines or oil from wells. If all the value of land is taxed away, the possessor of such a resource will remove the oil or ore as quickly as possible, leading to waste.

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We will see more about Lange’s ideas below. 14. Walras, Studies in Social Economics, 234. 15. George, Progress and Poverty, 223. 16. George, Progress and Poverty, 244. 17. http://landlordsgame.info/. 18. George R. Geiger, The Philosophy of Henry George. Introduction by John Dewey xxii (MacMillan Co., 1933). 19. Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons, 162 Science 1243 (1968). 20. Harold Schiffrin, Sun Yat-sen’s Early Land Policy: The Origin and Meaning of “Equalization of Land Rights,” 16 Journal of Asian Studies 549, 555 (1957). 21. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Harper & Brothers, 1942). 22.

A Man for All Markets
by Edward O. Thorp
Published 15 Nov 2016

The notion is of limited use, because most markets are not as Smith assumed. Take computer chips: 99.8 percent of them, worldwide, are made by just two US companies, and the smaller one is fighting to survive. An opposite concept to the magic of the invisible hand is “the tragedy of the commons,” as explained in 1968 by Garrett Hardin. Imagine a natural resource that anyone can freely use, such as—once upon a time—catching fish in the ocean. In the eighteenth century, schools of cod were so vast that Benjamin Franklin was amazed when his ship plowed through them for days at a time. Now, after two centuries of overfishing, this population has collapsed.

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Wall Street Journal (as reprinted in The Orange County Register, May 11, 2014, Business, page 3) says a study by the Economic Policy Institute found that for the 350 companies with the largest sales, CEOs received 18 times the pay of their workers in 1965 but were compensated 201 times as much, on average, in 2012. as Moshe Adler Adler, Moshe, “Overthrowing the Overpaid,” Los Angeles Times Opinion, page A15, January 4, 2010. CHAPTER 30 Garrett Hardin Hardin, Garrett, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, Vol. 162, No. 3859 December 13, 1968, pp. 1243–48. protects my neighbors Vaccination is a positive externality as it protects others from contracting a disease from the recipient. collection of insights Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T.

The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century
by Alex Prud'Homme
Published 6 Jun 2011

See also Campana, “The Human Right to Water.” 357 240,000 water pipes burst every year: “Aging Water Infrastructure,” US Environmental Protection Agency: http://www.epa.gov/nrmrl/pubs /600f07015/600f07015.pdf. 357 650 water mains break every day: “ITT’s Value of Water Survey Reveals That Americans Are Ready to Fix Our Nation’s Crumbling Water Infrastructure,” October 27, 2010. 357 made of wood: Michael Cooper, “Aging of Water Mains Is Becoming Hard to Ignore,” New York Times, April 17, 2009. 357 “dawn of the replacement era”: “Water infrastructure at a turning point,” American Water Works Association, 2010. 357 America’s water systems cost $1 trillion a year: “FAQ,” American Water.com. 357 will require a $334 billion investment: Mae Wu, “More money to improve drinking water,” Natural Resources Defense Council, May 12, 2010. 357 the US Conference of Mayors: Bob Herbert, “The Corrosion of America,” New York Times, October 26, 2010. 358 Garrett Hardin: Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, December 13, 1968. 358 Bob Hirsch: http://water.usgs.gov/dispatch/2008/podcast/wolman-lecture-transcript.html. 358 Stephen Ambrose’s writings: Stephen Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 359 “The Nation’s Rivers”: M.

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THE AGE OF RESTORATION The greatest threat to freshwater supplies is human indifference. It has allowed disease, poverty, conflict, and environmental destruction to proliferate. Some fear that humans have already passed the world’s hydrologic tipping point. In an influential 1968 article in Science, titled “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin, a leading American ecologist, wrote of “the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment” and described the pattern by which people acting in their own self-interest destroy shared resources. The hypothetical example he used focused on medieval farmers who shared a field, “the commons,” and allowed their cattle to graze indiscriminately.

Peer-to-Peer
by Andy Oram
Published 26 Feb 2001

I’d like to suggest that one can predict the success of a particular system for building a shared database by how much the database is aided through normal, selfish use. The commons We’ve heard plenty about the tragedy of the commons—in fact, it pops up in several other chapters of this book. In the 1968 essay that popularized the concept, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin wrote: Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

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ISPs measure the bandwidth their clients are using—such as the traffic generated from a hosted web site—and charge some monetary fee proportional to this amount. Without these controls, each user has an incentive to squeeze all the value out of the resource in order to maximize personal gain. If one user has this incentive, so do all the users. Biologist Garrett Hardin labeled this economic plight the "tragedy of the commons.”[44] The “commons” (originally a grazing area in the middle of a village) is any resource shared by a group of people: it includes the air we breathe, the water we drink, land for farming and grazing, and fish from the sea. The tragedy of the commons is that a commonly owned resource will be overused until it is degraded, as all agents pursue self-interest first.

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We would also like to thank a number of others for reviews and comments: Robert Zeithammer for economic discussion of micropayments, Jean-François Raymond and Stefan Brands for micropayments, Nick Mathewson and Blake Meike for the reputations section, and Daniel Freedman, Marc Waldman, Susan Born, and Theo Hong for overall edits and comments. * * * [44] Garrett Hardin (1968), “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, pp. 1243-1248. [45] Mancur Olson (1982), “The Logic of Collective Action.” In Brian Barry and Russell Hardin, eds., Rational Man and Irrational Society. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, p. 44. [46] A pseudonymous identity allows other participants to link together some or all the activities a person does on the system, without being able to determine who the person is in real life.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman
Published 14 Feb 2012

Many problems that challenge us today can be traced back to a profound tension between what is good and desirable for society as a whole and what is good and desirable for an individual. That conflict can be found in global problems such as climate change, pollution, resource depletion, poverty, hunger, and overpopulation. As once argued by the American ecologist Garrett Hardin, the biggest issues of all—saving the planet and maximizing the collective lifetime of the species Homo sapiens—cannot be solved by technology alone. If we are to win the struggle for existence and avoid a precipitous fall, there’s no choice but to harness this extraordinary creative force. It is down to all of us to refine and extend our ability to cooperate.

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A good rule of thumb, then, when confronting the apparent magic of the world of life and mind is: Look for the cycles that are doing all the hard work. Keystone Consumers Jennifer Jacquet Postdoctoral researcher in environmental economics, University of British Columbia When it comes to common resources, a failure to cooperate is a failure to control consumption. In Garrett Hardin’s classic tragedy, everyone overconsumes and equally contributes to the detriment of the commons. But a relative few can also ruin a resource for the rest of us. Biologists are familiar with the term “keystone species,” coined in 1969 after Robert Paine’s intertidal exclusion experiments. Paine found that by removing the few five-limbed carnivores—the purple sea star, Pisaster ochraceus—from the seashore, he could cause an overabundance of its prey, mussels, and a sharp decline in diversity.

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century
by Ronald Bailey
Published 20 Jul 2015

A swelling population is blotting up the earth’s food.” They confidently added, “Our technology will be unable to increase food production in time to avert the deaths of tens of millions people by starvation.” In his famous 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” published in the journal Science, ecologist Garrett Hardin flatly declared, “The freedom to breed is intolerable.” To illustrate the harms of the freedom to breed, he conjures up the arresting example of a pasture open to all people in a village. Each herdsman, seeking to maximize his individual gain, puts as many cattle on the pasture as possible, leading eventually to its destruction from overgrazing.

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During that time, female literacy rose to 90 percent; 50 percent of the workforce is now female; and fertility fell from 6 children per woman in the 1960s to 1.5 today. Although Thailand is classified as only moderately free on the economic freedom index, its gross domestic product (GDP) grew in terms of purchasing power parity from just over $1,000 per capita in 1960 to over $8,500 per capita in 2012. Back in 1968, Garrett Hardin declared, “There is no prosperous population in the world today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero.” That’s no longer true. Japan is now experiencing a fall in its population due largely to reduced fertility, as are Germany, Russia, Italy, Poland, and some 20 other countries and territories.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold
Published 24 Dec 2011

The land can support a limited number of grazing animals. The temptation to graze more than one’s share is a rational strategy for an individual herder. But if everyone succumbs to the same temptation, the grass ceases to grow, and the value of the pasture disappears.” I recognized this as the situation Garrett Hardin named in a much-debated article titled “The Tragedy of the Commons,” in which Hardin concluded: “Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

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Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993). 3. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959).Cooperation 4. Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of (London: Penguin, 1996). 5. Ibid. 6. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (13 December 1968): 12431248. 7. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 8. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952). 9. Mancur Olson Jr., The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Group (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965). 10.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
by Stuart Russell
Published 7 Oct 2019

It’s just one of many approaches that game theorists have tried in their efforts to obtain less depressing solutions to the prisoner’s dilemma.27 Another famous example of an undesirable equilibrium is the tragedy of the commons, first analyzed in 1833 by the English economist William Lloyd28 but named, and brought to global attention, by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968.29 The tragedy arises when several people can consume a shared resource—such as common grazing land or fish stocks—that replenishes itself slowly. Absent any social or legal constraints, the only Nash equilibrium among selfish (non-altruistic) agents is for each to consume as much as possible, leading to rapid collapse of the resource.

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For an interesting trust-based solution to the prisoner’s dilemma and other games, see Joshua Letchford, Vincent Conitzer, and Kamal Jain, “An ‘ethical’ game-theoretic solution concept for two-player perfect-information games,” in Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Web and Internet Economics, ed. Christos Papadimitriou and Shuzhong Zhang (Springer, 2008). 28. Origin of the tragedy of the commons: William Forster Lloyd, Two Lectures on the Checks to Population (Oxford University, 1833). 29. Modern revival of the topic in the context of global ecology: Garrett Hardin, “The tragedy of the commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–48. 30. It’s quite possible that even if we had tried to build intelligent machines from chemical reactions or biological cells, those assemblages would have turned out to be implementations of Turing machines in nontraditional materials.

Because We Say So
by Noam Chomsky

This is only one example of struggles under way over much of the world, some with extreme violence, as in resource-rich eastern Congo, where millions have been killed in recent years to ensure an ample supply of minerals for cellphones and other uses, and of course ample profits. The dismantling of the Charter of the Forest brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are conceived, captured by Garrett Hardin’s influential thesis in 1968 that “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to us all,” the famous “tragedy of the commons”: What is not privately owned will be destroyed by individual avarice. The doctrine is not without challenge. Elinor Olstrom won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009 for her work showing the superiority of user-managed commons.

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind
Published 24 Aug 2015

The first is the most basic—why on earth would people or institutions give up ownership or control of their valuable practical expertise and willingly share it with others in the commons? For the reasons just discussed, would they not want to maintain exclusivity? Would this not be to forgo an opportunity for profit? The second misgiving is that the practical expertise, if held in a commons, might be overused. Garrett Hardin, an ecologist, called this phenomenon the ‘tragedy of the commons’. In a widely cited article in Science in 1968, Hardin invited readers to imagine a group of shepherds who share a pasture, where each shepherd must decide how many sheep to put out to graze. If shepherds act out of self-interest alone, the result would be a ‘tragedy’—each shepherd would enjoy the full benefit of putting each extra sheep out to graze (plumper and healthier sheep), but only suffer part of the cost of doing so (more arid and slightly less verdant pasture, the full cost of which would be borne by all the shepherds, and not just by one).

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An updated version of their thinking is found in ‘Dancing with Robots’ (2013), at <http://content.thirdway.org/publications/714/Dancing-With-Robots.pdf> (accessed 25 March 2015). 36 What we say here is consistent with the observation by Frey and Osborne, in a much-discussed paper, that ‘Computer capital can now equally substitute for a wide range of tasks commonly defined as non-routine.’ See Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation’, 17 Sept. 2013 <http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf> (accessed 23 March 2015). 37 Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, 162: 3859 (1968), 1243–8. 38 Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014). 39 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006), 153. 40 Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 221–2. 41 Carol Rose, ‘The Comedy of the Commons: Commerce, Custom, and Inherently Public Property’, University of Chicago Law Review, 53: 3 (1986), 711–81.

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth
by Fred Pearce
Published 28 May 2012

Pastoralism’s PR is dreadful. Stories of overgrazing and “desertification” spread around the world, often told by farmers who want the pastoralists’ land. Pastoralists are seen as the big villains in the environmentalists’ narrative of the “tragedy of the commons,” in which the American ecologist Garrett Hardin posited that sharing the environment doesn’t work. According to Hardin, when there are common pastures, those with the most animals will make the most profit, while everyone, however many or few animals they have, will share in the suffering as the pasture is overgrazed. The only rational response is therefore to graze as many animals as you can till the pasture turns to dust.

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Zwarts’s hydrology is discussed in more detail in “The Niger, a Lifeline,” http://www.altwym.nl (2005), and “Will the Inner Niger Delta Shrivel Up Due to Climate Change and Water Use Downstream?” http://www.wetlands.org (2009). Chapter 26: Badia, Jordan I visited the Jordanian Badia in 1995 and wrote about the journey in “Shepherds Wise Men,” http://www.newscientist.com. Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons,” is at http://www.sciencemag.org (1968). IUCN reports are discussed in “Global Review of the Economics of Pastoralism,” cmsdata.iucn.org (2006). Further details about Oromia are provided in “Putting Pastoralists on the Policy Agenda: Land Alienation in Southern Ethiopia,” http://pubs.iied.org (2010); “Pastoralists in Southern Ethiopia,” http://www.drylands-group.org (2008); and “Indian Company Given Oromia Land Twice the Size of Singapore,” http://www.jimmatimes.com (2011).

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders
by Jason L. Riley
Published 14 May 2008

Tanton is a retired ophthalmologist who lives in the tiny northern Michigan town of Petoskey (population 6,000), which is about as far from the front lines of the immigration brouhaha as you can get. A longtime environmentalist and member of the Sierra Club and Audubon Society, he turned his attention to population control in the 1960s after becoming familiar with the works of antinatal zealots like Paul Ehrlich and the late ecologist Garrett Hardin. If you think zealot is too strong a word, know that Ehrlich has said all U.S. aid to developing nations should be conditioned on the sterilization of Third World fathers with more than two children. And Hardin once asserted that “the freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.” Hardin also believed that “either there must be a relatively painless weeding out before birth or a more painful and wasteful elimination of individuals after birth.”

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
by Jeffrey Sachs
Published 1 Jan 2008

The rate of harvesting (fishing, logging, or grazing) can dramatically exceed the natural regrowth rate of the natural population of fish, trees, or grasses. In this case, the commons will be depleted. This recognition that an open-access resource will give rise to rapid depletion was famously termed the “tragedy of the commons” by Garrett Hardin in 1968. Just as with pollution control, there are many mechanisms to limit the rate of harvesting to a sustainable level. One method is to introduce tradable permits for harvesting, akin to the tradable permits for pollution emissions. The most efficient fishing fleets, which stand to make the highest profits on fishing, will buy more permits.

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Holdren, “One-Dimensional Ecology,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 1972, pp. 16–27. 34 innovations systems: My colleague Richard Nelson has been the world’s leading scholar on mapping the structure and performance of these innovation systems in many parts of the world. For further reading see: Richard Nelson, ed., National Innovation Systems: A Comparative Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 38 “tragedy of the commons”: Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–48. 38 variety of quota systems: J. R. Beddington et al., “Current Problems in the Management of Fisheries,” Science 316 (June 22, 2007): 1713–16. 39 Community-based management: See Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Economics of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Partha Dasgupta, “Common Property Resources: Economic Analytics,” in N.

Energy: A Human History
by Richard Rhodes
Published 28 May 2018

Since the mill owner didn’t own the underground water except as it filled his well, the court awarded him no relief when his well went dry.32 As with water, so with petroleum. The surface of the earth belonged to those who held title, but the oil under the surface belonged to no one until it was found and taken, and whoever took it first made it his property. This common-law principle, called the rule of capture, establishes a condition that the biologist Garrett Hardin, in a historic 1968 paper in the journal Science, called “The Tragedy of the Commons.”33 The tragedy of the commons—of any resource held in common by a community—is that each user is motivated to use as much of the resource as possible without regard for its depletion or despoiling. With petroleum, the tragedy of the commons meant that each well owner was motivated to pump as much oil as possible as quickly as possible, before other wells drained away the common supply.

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Quoted in Joseph W. Dellapenna, “A Primer on Groundwater Law,” Idaho Law Review 49 (2012): 272, from Westmoreland Cambria Nat. Gas Co. v. Dewitt, 18 A. 724, 725 (Pa. 1889). 32. Acton v. Blundell, (1843) 152 Eng. Re1223 (Exch. Chamber). The English Reports: Exchequer, ed. W. Green, 1915, 1233. 33. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (December 13, 1968): 1243–48. 34. Ibid., 1244. 35. Ida M. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work: An Autobiography (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985; first published 1939 by Macmillan), 9. 36. Oil production in 1870: Giddens, Birth of the Oil Industry, 192–93.

Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town
by Lamorna Ash
Published 1 Apr 2020

The seas were mapped out and politicised, leading to terms of ownership like ‘Our Waters’ (as in ‘Get Our Waters Back’ the much-touted slogan of the Brexit Vote Leave campaign); and yet, though the sea is a site of damage, loss and corruption, it is also synonymous with life, generation and the flow of ideas between diverse places. It is all these things at once, every contradiction and inconsistency. In 1968 the biologist and ecologist Garrett Hardin published a paper called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, in which he argued that individuals are motivated by their own self-interest to overuse common property. If the seas are left unchecked as a communal resource, Hardin explains, each man will ensure he spends as much time and effort at sea as to be certain no one else can take his share.

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When the sea-faring peoples of Oceania consider their world, he writes, they do not think only of the islands, but ‘the surrounding ocean as far as they could traverse and exploit it, the underworld with its fire-controlling and earth-shaking denizens and the heavens above with their hierarchies of powerful gods and named stars and constellations that people could count on to guide their way across the seas’ – a sea of islands. Though Cornwall is a county in the UK and not a continent, I found Hau’Ofa’s image of a land that does not end with the land but extends out into the waters a powerful tool with which to consider Newlyn and Cornwall more generally. For Garrett Hardin, see ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, in Science, Vol. 162, no. 2859 (1968). For Elizabeth Bishop, see ‘The Fish’, in The Complete Poems. For Joseph Conrad, see The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. CAREWORN For Dylan Thomas, see ‘Quite Early One Morning’, in Collected Stories (New York: New Directions, 1945, 1967, and London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014).

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities
by John Cassidy
Published 10 Nov 2009

With just two people playing the game, it is difficult to sustain a cooperative outcome. When there are ten, or twenty, or a hundred players, it is virtually impossible—a fact highly germane to the overexploitation of natural resources, such as tropical rain forests, the fish in the sea, and the sub-Saharan plains. In 1968, Garrett Hardin, a Texan ecologist who died in 2003, tackled this problem in a famous article, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” The example Hardin used was that of a pasture shared by local herders. The pasture is limited in size, and all the herders know that overgrazing will render it useless for everybody. At the same time, though, the herders’ incomes are determined by the size of their herds, which gives them an incentive to add more animals to the pasture.

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THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA AND RATIONAL IRRATIONALITY 143 Flood’s babysitting experiment: See William Poundstone, The Prisoner’s Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 103. 143 Non-cooperative pair experiment: Ibid., 106–107. 145 “Both Flood and Dresher . . .”: Ibid., 122. 147 90 percent of the players choose: Ken Binmore, Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21. 149 “Adding together the component . . .”: Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1244. 150 “Game theorists get . . .”: Binmore, Game Theory, 67. 12. HIDDEN INFORMATION AND THE MARKET FOR LEMONS 151 “I belonged to . . .”: From George Akerlof’s Nobel autobiography, available at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2001/akerlof-autobio.html. 152 “a major reason as to why . . .”: George Akerlof, “Writing ‘The Market for Lemons’: A Personal and Interpretive Essay,” available at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/articles/akerlof/index.html. 153 “[M]ost cars traded . . .”: George Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84 (1970): 489. 154 “was potentially an issue . . .”: Akerlof, “Writing ‘The Market for Lemons.’ ” 155 “marginally attached”: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Issues in Labor Statistics, Summary 90–04 (April 2009): 1. 156 “it is quite possible . . .”: Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons,’ ” 494. 157 2006 health care spending: “National Health Spending in 2006: A Year of Change for Prescription Drugs,” Health Affairs 27, no. 1 (2008): 14. 158 “The most obvious . . .”: Kenneth J.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 28 Jun 2020

After all, Johnson had suggested economic growth was still possible “in a world where the Malthusian specter, more terrible than Malthus ever conceived, is so near to being a reality,” editorialized the Times.70 That same year, the journal Science published an article, “Tragedy of the Commons,” by University of California at Santa Barbara biologist Garrett Hardin, which argued that environmental collapse was inevitable because of uncontrolled breeding, and that the only way to avoid the tragedy was “mutual coercion,” in which everybody agreed to similar sacrifices.71 Many conservation leaders embraced Malthusianism. In 1968, Sierra Club executive director David Brower conceived and edited a book, The Population Bomb, by Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, which claimed the world was on the brink of mass starvation.

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Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1969), xi. 73. Ibid., 15–16. 74. Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, “The Population Bomb Revisited,” The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1, no. 3 (2009), https://www.populationmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Population-Bomb-Revisited-Paul-Ehrlich-20096.pdf. 75. Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” Psychology Today, September 1974. 76. Peter Passell, Marc Roberts, and Leonard Ross, “The Limits to Growth,” [review] New York Times, April 2, 1972, https://www.nytimes.com. 77. Barry Commoner, Crossroads: Environmental Priorities for the Future (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1988), 146. 78.

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
by Brett Christophers
Published 6 Nov 2018

I could have made this observation at more or less any point in this section, but this seems as good a place as any: our use of the land for enjoyment, as well as economic production, has ecological implications. Landownership always intermediates these effects. That it does so is, in fact, the central claim of one of the most famous interventions in the literature on environmental management, Garrett Hardin’s famous ‘tragedy of the commons’ thesis.3 Hardin claimed that holding land communally tends to have tragic ecological consequences because individuals lack incentives to use the land sustainably. I will say no more here about that thesis, or counter-arguments to it. It resurfaces in Chapter 3.

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‘We believe’, said the enquiry team that in 1983 accused NHS property managers of a ‘casual’ attitude towards their assets, ‘that this attitude derives largely from the fact that property in the NHS is a “free good”’.2 A free good is a good that is, by definition, not scarce, the consumption or use of which therefore incurs no opportunity cost; thus there is, in essence, no incentive to ration one’s usage or not to use the good ‘casually’. Why, after all, would one be parsimonious in using land if no cost is incurred through not doing so? This argument can be thought of as a version of Garrett Hardin’s famous ‘tragedy of the commons’ thesis.3 Hardin argued that communally owned environmental resources are used inefficiently, and are ultimately degraded, because in such a context individuals lack the incentives necessary to encourage sustainable use. Critics of public landownership make much the same case: it is the nature of the system of ownership, and the attendant misalignment of incentives, that engenders inefficiency.

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back
by Guy Shrubsole
Published 1 May 2019

Appallingly, some commons have fallen into the hands of banks, chemical manufacturers and mining companies: one common in Surrey, for instance, is part-owned by the Worms Heath Gravel Company, and the site ‘appears to have been used partially as landfill’. The pillage of the commons by private owners and corporations gives the lie to the modern myth about the ‘tragedy of the commons’. This slander, that common land was a free-for-all where self-interested commoners depleted a shared resource, was propagated by the right-wing ecologist Garrett Hardin as a reason for extending private property rights. It couldn’t be further from the truth. Commons were closely regulated by local communities – a fact that can still be glimpsed in the modern registers of ownership, where occasional references to archaic commons officials open windows onto a forgotten world.

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Three of the largest For a discussion of some of the complexities around common land registration and the New Forest, see the website of the New Forest Verderers (commoners), http://www.verderers.org­.uk/rights.html­ A fascinating survey https://data.gov­.uk/dataset/05c61ecc­-efa9­-4b7f­-8fe6­-9911afb44e1a/database-of-registered-common-land-in-england – see spreadsheet labelled ‘Commons register England, 2000’, from which I have drawn the examples cited, including that of Worms Heath common at Tandridge in Surrey, part-owned by the Worms Heath Gravel Company. appears to have been Aitchison et al., ‘The Common Lands of England’. This slander Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science 162: 3859 (13 December 1968), pp. 1243–8. One of the many critiques of Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’ is Simon Fairlie, ‘A Short History of Enclosure in Britain’, The Land 7 (Summer 2009), http://www.thelandmagazine.org­.uk/articles/short­-history­-enclosure­-britain­ Piecemaster of Atherstone The commons officials listed here all appear in the ownership column in the Common Register of England (2000), https://data.gov­.uk/dataset/05c61ecc­-efa9­-4b7f­-8fe6­-9911afb44e1a/database-of-registered-common-land-in-england.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
by James E. Lovelock
Published 1 Jan 2009

As in war there could be the rapid application of new technology to climate and survival problems. I hope that it will work, but I do not think humans as a species are yet clever enough to handle the coming environmental crisis and I fear they will spend their efforts trying to combat global heating instead of trying to adapt and survive in the new hot world. So let us prove Garrett Hardin wrong when gloomily he said in 1968 that our condition is truly tragic; for in tragedy there is no escape. We can prove him wrong by surviving. Because I am old I often think of Gaia as if she were an old lady of about my age. I can already hear Pecksniffian colleagues complaining, ‘You are doing it again – anthropomorphizing the Earth, talking of it as alive.’

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them
by Donovan Hohn
Published 1 Jan 2010

“One picture is worth a thousand words,” said an ancient Chinese; but it may take 10,000 words to validate it. It is as tempting to ecologists as it is to reformers in general to try to persuade others by way of the photographic shortcut. But the essence of an argument cannot be photographed: it must be presented rationally—in words. —Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick SOUTH POINT The southernmost edge of Hawaii is also the southernmost edge of the United States of America and feels like the southernmost edge of the world.

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In theory, every region in the country could follow suit, but already cash-strapped governments in Southern California are complaining that these “zero-trash TMDLs” are too costly and ambitious to implement. Moore, meanwhile, has collected data showing that even full-capture systems would allow tens of thousands of plastic particles to escape the Los Angeles River every day. Forty years ago, Science published an essay called “The Tragedy of the Commons” in which the ecologist Garrett Hardin challenged what might be called the American Comedy of Progress—the cherished notion that with time, technology, entrepreneurialism, and, if need be, activism, all problems can be solved. In America, even prophets of environmental doom subscribe to the Comedy of Progress. Thus, at the end of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore follows his alarming forecast with an uplifting recipe for salvation.

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
by Quinn Slobodian
Published 16 Mar 2018

He describes his own proj­ect frankly as one of “constitutional design” in the first pages of his 1970s trilogy.114 Though the top layer of rules may be thin, Hayek viewed it as the only place where h ­ umans can actually intervene: “Our main interest w ­ ill then be t­ hose rules which, ­because we can deliberately alter them, become the chief instrument whereby we can affect the resulting order, namely the rules of law.”115 It is helpful h ­ ere to return to a distinction between planning and design offered by the phi­los­o­pher Garrett Hardin in a 1969 article cited by Hayek in his Hong Kong paper. Hardin defined planning as “the making of rather detailed, rather rigid plans.” By designing, he meant “much looser, less detailed, specification of a cybernetic system which includes negative feedbacks, self-­correcting controls.” He added that “the classical market economy is such a design.”116 W ­ hether or not Hayek was inspired by Hardin directly on this point, the distinction helps clarify his writings.

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Streit, “Economic Order, Private Law and Public Policy: The Freiburg School of Law and Economics in Perspective,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE) / Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 148, no. 4 (1992): 680. 114. Hayek, Rules and Order, 4. 115. Ibid., 45; emphasis added. 116. Garrett Hardin, “The Cybernetics of Competition: A Biologist’s View of Society,” in The Subversive Science: Essays t­ oward an Ecol­ogy of Man, ed. Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 295. 117. Hayek, Rules and Order, 46. 118. Hayek, The Po­liti­cal Order of a ­Free ­People, 149; emphasis in the original. 119.

Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
by Steve Krug
Published 2 Jan 2000

It’s a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons.9 The premise is simple: Any shared resource (a “commons”) will inevitably be destroyed by overuse. 9 The concept, originated by nineteenth-century amateur mathematician William Forster Lloyd, was popularized in a classic essay on overpopulation by biologist Garrett Hardin (“The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, December 1968). Take a town pasture, for example. For each animal a herdsman adds to the common pasture, he receives all proceeds from the sale of the animal—a positive benefit of +1. But the negative impact of adding an animal—its contribution to overgrazing—is shared by all, so the impact on the individual herdsman is less than –1.

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
by Peter Singer and Jim Mason
Published 1 May 2006

In U.S. fisheries, the bycatch is 22 percent, or 1.1 million tons, which according to Dalhousie University Professor Ransom Myers is enough to fill every bathtub in a city of 1.5 million people.2 The problem with commercial fishing, from an environmental perspective, is that each fishery in international waters is a commons, and in a world of self-interested independent agents, as Garrett Hardin argued in a celebrated article published in 1968, the tragic economic logic of the commons rules. I Imagine a village that owns some common land on which, traditionally, every family in the village has the right to graze their cows. In the olden days, every family in the village had just one cow, because one cow would provide the family with plenty of milk, butter, and cheese.

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The 17 billion estimate is from www.fishinghurts.com/fishingl01.asp, calculated by dividing the total weight of seafood consumed by an estimated average weight per creature. 2 "Challenge to Fishing: Keep Unwanted Species Out of Its Huge Nets," Otto Pohl, The New York Times, July 29, 2003 www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/science/29BYCA.html. 3 Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science, 162 (1968) pp. 1243-48. 4 "A Run on the Banks: How 'Factory Fishing' Decimated Newfoundland Cod," Colin Woodward, E Magazine, March/April, 2001. www.emagazine.com/view/?507. 5 Information from Tim Fitzgerald, Environmental Defense Trust, Oceans Program, 257 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10010, and James lanelli, Alaska Fish.

Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
by Elinor Ostrom
Published 29 Nov 1990

Chapel Hill: University of North 260 261 References References Carolina Press. Ostrom, E. 1965. Public Enterpreneurship: A Case Study in Ground Water Man­ agement. Ph.D. dis!iertation, University of California at Los Angeles. Ostrom, E. 1985a. Are Successful Efforts to Manage Common-Pool Problems a Challenge to the Theories of Garrett Hardin and Mancur Olson? Working paper, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University. Ostrom, E. 1985b. The Rudiments of a Revised Theory of the Origins, Survival, and Performance of Institutions for Collective Action. Working paper, Work­ shop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University.

Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
by Steve Krug
Published 1 Jan 2000

The section that’s being promoted gets a huge gain in traffic, while the overall loss in effectiveness of the Home page as it gets more cluttered is shared by all sections. It’s a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons.4 The premise is simple: 4 The concept, originated by nineteenth-century amateur mathematician William Forster Lloyd, was popularized in a classic essay on overpopulation by biologist Garrett Hardin (“The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, December 1968). Any shared resource (a “commons”) will inevitably be destroyed by overuse. Take a town pasture, for example. For each animal a herdsman adds to the common pasture, he receives all proceeds from the sale of the animal—a positive benefit of +1.

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2012

Keith Bradsher, "High-Speed Rail Poised to Alter China, but Costs and Fares Draw Criticism;' New York Times, June 23, 20 1 1 . 52. Peter Martin and David Cohen, "Socialism 3.0 in China:' the-diplomat. com; Anderlini, "Fate of Real Estate is Global Concern:' C H A PT E R T H R E E : TH E C R EAT I O N O F T H E U R BAN CO M M O N S I . Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy o f the Commons:' Science 1 62 ( 1 968): I ,243- 8; B. McCay and J. Acheson, eds, The Question of the Co mmons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1 987. 2. It is astonishing how many left analysts get Hardin totally wrong on this point.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
by Charles Leadbeater
Published 9 Dec 2010

Available from http:// www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12015774/site/newsweek 16 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press, 2006) 17 Patrice Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) 18 Charles Leadbeater, ‘The DIY State’, Prospect 130, January 2007 19 Fred Turner, op. cit. 20 John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Penguin, 2006) 21 Patrice Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) 22 Jonathan Lethem, ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’, Harper’s Magazine, February 2007 23 Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science 162 (1968), pp. 1243–48 24 Elenor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 1990) 25 Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1999) and Free Culture (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2004) 26 Melvyn Bragg, The Routes of English (BBC Factual and Learning, 2000); Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English (Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 2003) 27 Jonathan Lethem, ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’, Harper’s Magazine, February 2007 28 Cory Doctorow et al., ‘On “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism” By Jaron Lanier’, Edge (2006). http://www.edge.org/discourse/digital_ maoism.html 29 Paul A.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson
Published 8 Dec 2016

Since many ecological resources (including the climate) can be classed as ‘common pool resources’, her work is of particular interest to the aims of this book.9 Working as a political scientist in the US, Ostrom had for some years been studying how small communities managed local resources when she happened to attend a lecture by the ecologist Garrett Hardin. It was 1968 – the same year in which Hardin published his landmark ‘Tragedy of the commons’. Hardin’s primary interest was in the problem of unchecked population growth. Like Malthus before him, he became convinced that the earth could not continue to provide resources at the same rate that the population was growing.10 Somewhere along the way, Hardin came across a couple of lectures first published in 1833 by the Victorian economist William Forster Lloyd.

The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches
by Marshall Brain
Published 6 Apr 2015

If there is any economic advantage to be gained by killing and/or harvesting another species, humans will as a general rule kill it or harvest it without any remorse, all the way to extinction if given the chance. As a species we will often do this even if it is not in our own best interest as a group, a fact succinctly captured in the essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” [1] by Garrett Hardin in 1968, and first explored by William Forster Lloyd in 1833. The natural system on earth can be appalling, and human beings as a product of this process can be shockingly appalling – the fact that we are sentient often makes us more appalling rather than less. This fact is made obvious if we imagine the arrival of a hypothetical extraterrestrial species to planet earth.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder
Published 1 Sep 2008

Wade.47 Charlie Munger took up this case with a passion; the firm had chosen it out of concern over the way young women were being maimed and killed through illegal abortions. Buffett and Munger sponsored a “church” called the Ecumenical Fellowship, which became part of the country’s abortion underground railroad.48 Buffett had been especially moved by the logic of Garrett Hardin, whose 1968 article “The Tragedy of the Commons” laid out the way that people who have no ownership stake in common goods—the air, the seas—overuse and destroy them.49 While Buffett adopted many principles conceived by Hardin, a leader of the “population control” movement, he rejected solutions favored by Hardin, who espoused authoritarian ideas and took a eugenicist approach.

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“I wouldn’t in any way limit a woman’s right to bear children even if the world were extremely overpopulated, and I wouldn’t ban the right to choose even if there were only two people on the planet and fertility was critical. I think the world should be limited to wanted people first. I don’t think that the numbers should determine how many people are wanted. Even if everybody had seven children, I wouldn’t do as Garrett Hardin said and link the right to the numbers.” So the Buffett Foundation supported reproductive rights. Increasingly, the complexities and nuances of reproductive rights, civil rights, and population control had all gotten lost in the controversy over abortion. Buffett’s giving ultimately was based on what he called the Ovarian Lottery.56 He had passed the idea along to a group called Responsible Wealth.

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Buffett says he has never seen Munger “so fired up,” the most unconventional thing he has ever seen Munger do. 48. Buffett said Munger tempted him into running a church by offering him the job of sexton, until he found out the job description was not what he thought. “We held mock debates over who got to be the preacher.” 49. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, Vol. 162, No. 3859, December 13, 1968. Hardin’s theory was essentially a restatement of the “prisoner’s dilemma,” which also addresses cooperation and “cheating” as covered in references on that subject. In the 1970s it was assumed that economic progress would accelerate population growth, that population growth would prevent economic growth.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 11 Apr 2011

Grazing fields in traditional English villages were collectively owned by the village’s inhabitants; since no one could be excluded from access to these fields, whose resources were depletable, they were overused and made worthless. The solution to the risk of depletion was to turn the commons into private property, whose owners would then have a strong incentive to invest in its upkeep and exploit its resources on a long-term, sustainable basis. In an influential article, Garrett Hardin argued that the tragedy of the commons exists with respect to many global resources, such as clean air, fisheries, and the like, and that in the absence of private ownership or strong regulation they would be overexploited and made useless.3 In many contemporary ahistorical discussions of property rights, one often gets the impression that in the absence of modern individual property rights, human beings always faced some version of the tragedy of the commons in which communal ownership undermined incentives to use property efficiently.4 The emergence of modern property rights was then postulated to be a matter of economic rationality, in which individuals bargained among themselves to divide up the communal property, much like Hobbes’s account of the emergence of the Leviathan out of the state of nature.

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See David Sloan Wilson and Elliott Sober, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and David Sloan Wilson, “The Group Selection Controversy: History and Current Status,” Annual Review of Ecological Systems 14 (1983): 159–87. 4: TRIBAL SOCIETIES: PROPERTY, JUSTICE, WAR 1 “The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.” Madison, Federalist No. 10. 2 Douglass C. North and Robert P. Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 1–2. 3 Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–48. See also Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 89. 4 See, for example, Yoram Barzel, Economic Analysis of Property Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 5 Such rights were said to have spontaneously emerged during the California gold rush of 1849–1850, when miners peacefully negotiated among themselves an allocation of the claims they had staked out.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

So common lands will supposedly get overgrazed, and common fisheries will run out of fish. Never mind that there’s no evidence of either happening in the maintained commons of England. The supposed tragedy became an accepted truth taught in basic economics courses, and as easy to prove as the condition of most public restrooms in the United States. As recently as 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin convinced the remaining holdouts of the tragedy of the commons by arguing that Darwinian selection favors privatization by the strong, and that if the world’s land is not privatized, the results would be “horrifying.” In his words, “injustice is preferable to total ruin.”77 The false assumption is that people are incapable of recognizing the value of their shared resources and then organizing to protect them—and in doing so, create great value for everyone involved.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

As Jesse Ausubel points out, “Fish biomass in intensively exploited fisheries appears to be about one-tenth the level of the fish in those seas a few decades… ago.” Ocean overfishing is a classic example of the “tragedy of the commons,” an unhappy phenomenon named in a 1968 Science article by the ecologist Garrett Hardin. Hardin defined a commons as a shared resource, such as a pasture or a body of water, that is available to many but owned by none. That open access sounds great but has a big problem: everyone has ample incentive to exploit the commons (by grazing cows on the pasture or taking fish from the water), but because no one owns it, no one has the incentive to protect or sustain it.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

Counterintuitively, the Reagan administration’s Palo Alto brain trust argued, privatizing public knowledge ensured its best, fullest use for the public. This line of thought was in accordance with a fable that capitalists adopted from the Stanford eco-racist anti-population milieu: the “tragedy of the commons.” In six pages published in the journal Science in December of 1968, the Stanford-trained ecologist Garrett Hardin asserted that the public “commons” was by its nature subject to abuse by maximizing actors. A bigot and cofounder of the anti-immigrant group FAIR, Hardin was worried about population specifically. “In a welfare state,” he begs the question, “how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement?”

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Privatized life didn’t mean individualism in terms of effort but rather a resurrection of classed IQ logic and the recentralization of inheritance. Increasing the cost of being a college student not only kept the commie bums out, it also turned higher education back into a family investment. Instead of treating human capital as a national resource the way David Starr Jordan and company first planned it, America’s new leaders applied Garrett Hardin’s tragic-commons logic: If they were giving it away, people would go to school and, say, invent radical new theatrical art practices instead of building bombs like they were supposed to. With education enclosed, on the other hand, the market could properly value it and ensure its best use. Students began to think of themselves in the same terms, as a walking, talking set of investments; in a bifurcated world, they couldn’t afford not to.

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George Skelton, “‘Make My Day’: Reagan Assails Congress, Vows Tax Hike Veto,” Los Angeles Times, March 14, 1985. 16. Herbert G. Ruffin, Uninvited Neighbors: African Americans in Silicon Valley, 1769–1990 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 216. 17. Joint Economic Committee Staff, U.S. Senate, “President Reagan’s Economic Legacy: The Great Expansion,” October 2000, 22. 18. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (1968): 1246. 19. Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980). 20. Doogab Yi, The Recombinant University: Genetic Engineering and the Emergence of Stanford Biotechnology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 207. 21. Ibid., 171. 22.

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest
by Yochai Benkler
Published 8 Aug 2011

Particularly pressing for politicians, lawmakers, and social scientists is the question of how much intervention is needed to successfully regulate common property or resources—shared public spaces, municipal stores of water, and so on. The question at the heart of this debate is one that we’ve seen in some form or another many times before: Can humans be trusted, in the absence of strict rules and limits, to share a common resource in a way that is fair to everyone? In 1968 biologist turned ecologist Garrett Hardin published his famous parable, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” the story of a village that had in its center a piece of land that was shared by all the village farmers. The problem was, there was a finite amount of grass on that commons and no laws or limits on how many cattle each farmer could allow on the land to graze.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Published 5 Mar 2019

In response to any mention of durable human cooperation that is not mediated by markets, in particular by the undisguised incentives provided by the labor market—at their most basic, work or starve—defenders of the market system often bring up the notion of the “tragedy of the commons.” The phrase, coined by ecologist Garrett Hardin in a 1968 article in the journal Science, refers to a shared resource inevitably depleted through overuse by individuals acting in their self-interest. The prototypical commons employed to illustrate this tragedy is a plot of open, shared pastureland in a village. If farmers only look out for the cows that are theirs, rather than the entire pasture, each will allow their cows to overgraze, and the land shared in common will quickly turn to dust.

Having and Being Had
by Eula Biss
Published 15 Jan 2020

Parkwood, Sony, Roc Nation, 2018. The Raft of the Medusa, Théodore Géricault. 1818–1819. The Massacre at Chios, Eugène Delacroix. 1824. Venus de Milo, Alexandros of Antioch. 101 BC. “Art and Property Now,” John Berger. Landscapes: John Berger on Art. Verso, 2016. BLOOD “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin. Science, December 13, 1968. BICYCLE MANIFESTO “Interview with Cauleen Smith and Brandon Breaux,” Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Cauleen Smith, Brandon Breaux. Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Alison Cuddy. Terra Foundation for American Art, 2019. “What Driving Can Teach Us about Living,” Rachel Cusk.

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)
by Tom Vanderbilt
Published 28 Jul 2008

Studies in Leeds, England, for example, found that economically disadvantaged areas had higher levels of nitrogen dioxide. See G. Parkhurst, G. Dudley, G. Lyons, E. Avineri, K. Chatterjee, and D. Holley, “Understanding the Distributional Impacts of Road Pricing,” Department of Transport, United Kingdom, 2006. by Garrett Hardin: See Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science, December 13, 1968. oft-invoked “tragedy”: Shi-Ling Hsu, “What Is a Tragedy of the Commons? Overfishing and the Campaign Spending Problem,” February 21, 2005, bepress Legal Series, Working Paper 463; http://law.bepress.com/expresso/eps/463. any traffic engineer: Gary Toth, a planner with the New Jersey Department of Transportation, told me in a conversation in early 2007: “We ran a calculation this week for the twenty congestion-related projects that I have in my division.

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
by Mark Lynas
Published 1 Apr 2008

Even environmentalists can be tempted by displacement: the vilification of George Bush-indefensible though his stance might be-is easier for most of us than having to face more tricky challenges closer to home. Climate change is a classic ‘tragedy of the commons’ problem, where behaviour which makes sense at an individual level ultimately proves disastrous to society when repeated by everyone. The concept's originator, Garrett Hardin, gives the example of cattle herders using a shared pasture to illustrate the problem. Each herder stands to gain individually by adding another cow to the common-he gets more milk and beef. But if all herders act the same way, the result is overgrazing and the destruction of the shared resource.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

All are threatened by erosion, enclosure and conversion into sources of rental income. And all are more important for the precariat than for those above them in the class spectrum. For that reason, as suggested later, the precariat has the most interest in recovering the commons from rent seekers. Ironically, the neo-liberal era has brought about the realisation of Garrett Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’. In a famous article in 1968, Hardin claimed that the commons was doomed to depletion because every user had an incentive to maximise what they could take out of it. Although the argument had been made before, it was seized upon by neo-liberal economists to justify privatisation.

The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us
by Robert H. Frank, Philip J. Cook
Published 2 May 2011

Thus we have ($1 ,000,000 - M)/99 > $ 10,000, which implies M < $ 10,000. So if contestants enter up to the point where their expected income equals the potter's wage, entry \vill pro­ ceed past the income-maximizing point. For a more general demonstra­ tion of this result, see Frank and Cook, 1993. 17. The paper in which the phrase was coined is by Garrett Hardin, 1 968. 18. In ordinary markets as well, the entry of a new supplier may cause harm to existing suppliers by driving the price of the product down. But every dollar suppliers lose because of a price reduction is a dollar gained by those who buy the product. There is no similar compensation, however, for the loss suffered by contestants in a winner-take-all market when a new person enters. 19.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
by Chris Smaje
Published 14 Aug 2020

They involve different and often incompatible social logics around issues like the deployment of capital and labour, the concentration of state power, and more philosophical questions like humanity’s place in the universe, of a kind that puts horse-powered agriculture and nuclear power on diverging conceptual tracks. But given our exceptional capabilities in the modern world it’s worth pondering why climate change seems to pose such an unsolvable problem. In an influential though widely criticised paper, the controversial ecologist Garrett Hardin discussed what he called the ‘tragedy of the commons,’ in which a resource open to all, like a common pasture, might be depleted if its users each pursued their own self-interest without regard to the wider common interest.28 His critics correctly pointed out that this isn’t how a commons actually works, although private property or state control have generally been favoured over common resource management in modern times anyway.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
Published 4 Apr 2016

A high price of anarchy, on the other hand, means that things have the potential to turn out fine if they’re carefully coordinated—but that without some form of intervention, we are courting disaster. The prisoner’s dilemma is clearly of this latter type. Unfortunately, so are many of the most critical games the world must play. The Tragedy of the Commons In 1968, the ecologist Garrett Hardin took the two-player prisoner’s dilemma and imagined scaling it up to involve all the members of a farming village. Hardin invited his readers to picture a “commons” of public lawn—available to be grazed by everyone’s livestock, but with finite capacity. In theory, all the villagers should graze only as many animals as would leave some grass for everyone.

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists
by Linda McQuaig
Published 30 Aug 2019

Nikiforuk has succinctly described Alberta’s situation today: “The low fruit has been picked and nobody saved anything for the future.”27 Surely, in any fair-minded contest between the merits of Alberta’s free-market model of oil development and Norway’s public ownership approach, Norway wins. It’s not even close. Eight The Triumph of the Commons In 1968 U.S. ecologist Garrett Hardin penned what became a highly influential academic article entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons.” He argued that, since humans are self-interested, they will inevitably take more than their share when resources are communally available. A similar argument had been expounded in an 1833 pamphlet by an English economist who speculated about the danger of cows overgrazing in the commonly shared fields.

Complexity: A Guided Tour
by Melanie Mitchell
Published 31 Mar 2009

This is the paradox of the Prisoner’s Dilemma—in the words of political scientist Robert Axelrod, “The pursuit of self-interest by each leads to a poor outcome for all.” This paradox also applies to the all too familiar case of a group of individuals who, by selfishly pursuing their own interests, collectively bring harm to all members of the group (global warming is a quintessential example). The economist Garrett Hardin has famously called such scenarios “the tragedy of the commons.” The Prisoner’s Dilemma and variants of it have long been studied as idea models that embody the essence of the cooperation problem, and results from those studies have influenced how scholars, businesspeople, and governments think about real-world policies ranging from weapons control and responses to terrorism to corporate management and regulation.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex
by Rupert Darwall
Published 2 Oct 2017

In a lecture in 1979, shortly before his death, Marcuse argued that in advanced industrial society, material satisfaction is always tied to destruction. The domination of nature is tied to the violation of nature. The search for new sources of energy is tied to the poisoning of the life environment.41 American biologist Garrett Hardin attacked capitalism from a different angle. In 1968, Hardin gave a lecture to the American Association for the Advancement of Science that became one of ecology’s canonical texts (Science lists over 26,000 citations). “The Tragedy of the Commons” takes a (hypothetical) example of open pasture leading to overgrazing.

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians
by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman
Published 21 Mar 2017

So you set an island-wide quota, and you set up size limits, and you set aside a reserve area, and it’s all ignored. You open up the lagoon, and it’s just mayhem. People will go and plunder as much as they can. It’s a natural human reaction to the common property resource. As soon as you put a dollar value on a shared resource, all of a sudden all hell breaks loose, and Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” comes charging to the fore.” He asks if we’ve read the classic 1968 essay by the famous ecologist elucidating the economic reasons why people care for their private property but ravage public property. “Everybody should read it!” he says. For those who don’t get the economic principle, Neil tells a story that, in retrospect, represents for him his breaking point.

The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier
by Ian Urbina
Published 19 Aug 2019

Lloyd’s lecture inspired the phrase “tragedy of the commons,” which was popularized by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968 and came to refer to the notion that when everyone owns something, no one does, resulting in misuse and neglect. International law identifies four global commons: the High Seas; the Atmosphere; Antarctica; and Outer Space. Historically, access to the resources found within the global commons has been difficult. The advancement of science and technology in recent decades, however, has changed that. See Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, Dec. 13, 1968. But in practice, flags: There are thirty-five countries that the International Transport Workers’ Federation deems “flags of convenience.”

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means
by John Lanchester
Published 5 Oct 2014

The divisions and mutual incomprehension between the different tribes and their different activities is one of the things that make the big banks resemble, in the words of the Manchester anthropologist Karel Williams, “loose federations of money-making franchises.” 76 “The Tragedy of the Commons” A highly influential 1968 essay by the economist Garrett Hardin, on the subject of how to share common land, when it’s in everybody’s interest to maximize his or her own use of the land at the expense of everybody else. His central insight was that when a resouce is communally shared, individuals have no reason to protect other people’s interests in the resource, and every reason to maximize their own use of it.

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

That model of tragedy is based on the long-term futility of rational self-interest in certain poorly designed circumstances, and so bears a similarity to the problem of Siren Servers. The Sirenic Age is more a tragedy of the commotion, more mania than myopia. Information technology can cause things to move so fast that there’s a rush, a thrill that distracts. Garrett Hardin’s classic 1968 paper “The Tragedy of the Commons” explained how cows were allowed to overgraze on common property, while private property was well maintained. The cows that overgrazed at least grazed. In our present idea about an information economy, cows get no free grass, but a token few might get famous.

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America
by Shawn Lawrence Otto
Published 10 Oct 2011

At the center of many of the arguments over proposed solutions to environmental problems associated with increasing population and industrial development are differing views of how individuals and freedom relate to regulation and the commons—the common property of humankind. These questions are central to the relationship between science and democracy itself. THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS In December of 1968, a little-known University of California Santa Barbara biologist named Garrett Hardin published a paper in Science that would change the way we look at economics. The core dilemma it identified, which came to be called “the tragedy of the commons” after the paper’s title, lies at the heart of the unresolved environmental challenges of the twentieth century, among them climate change, ocean acidification, overfishing, biodiversity loss, habitat fragmentation, overdevelopment, pollution, exploding population, and unsustainable energy use, to name a few.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
by Oliver Morton
Published 26 Sep 2015

‘The crew of spacecraft Earth’ was ‘in virtual mutiny to the order of the universe’, Edgar Mitchell, the lunar module pilot of Apollo 14, wrote in the 1970s. Mutiny has penalties, and the Earth would enact them – unless its deputized authorities in the officer class got there first. The influential environmentalist Garrett Hardin used talk of a troubled Spaceship Earth as a way to advocate the suspension of humanistic moral values in favour of ‘lifeboat ethics’ derived from the harsher parts of naval law and practice. Ultimately, the weakness and unpleasantness of the Spaceship Earth metaphor stems from the same problem as that which I see encouraged by the use of Apollo images as environmental icons: it leads people to divorce the physical planet from the human world.

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World
by Simon Winchester
Published 19 Jan 2021

So far as justification is concerned, the official reasons can be inferred from the long title of the enabling act that Parliament passed in 1773, that “inclosure” was a process designed “for the better Cultivation, Improvement, and Regulation of the Common Arable Fields, Waste and Commons of Pasture in this Kingdom.” The unstated reason, however, was suggested by an infamous paper published in Science magazine very much later, in 1968, which had a title that has since become a catchphrase: “The Tragedy of the Commons.” The essay’s author, an American ecologist named Garrett Hardin who was a devout anti-immigrationist and eugenicist and a believer in the dangers of overpopulation, declared that commonly used land would inevitably be badly used land, because people were greedy or careless, wouldn’t cooperate or take care of their land, would push as many of their own cattle to graze on fields that were already overgrazed, would take more than their fair share, and so on—would, in other words, ruin the bounty that God and Nature had so generously offered to them.

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Published 6 Nov 2023

We’ve argued earlier that space will just be another place where humans will be humans, and you may have interpreted that to mean “humans are demonic ogre-creatures and we will inflict our ogreness on space.” But we really do share from time to time. We have commons and they work reasonably well. In our experience, a lot of people think commons don’t work due to an economic concept called “the tragedy of the commons.” The language goes back to Garrett Hardin’s 1968 paper on the economics of commons, but the logic is at least as old as Aristotle, who wrote, “For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.” Here’s the idea: suppose a Martian greenhouse has a nice field set aside for food crickets. Everyone is allowed to use them, including you.

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
by Robert H. Frank
Published 3 Sep 2011

Alberto Alesina and Dani Rodrik, “Distributive Politics and Economic Growth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 109(2), May 1994: 465–490. 4. http://www.princeton.edu/odoc/faculty/grading/faq/#comp000047219e98000 0000b7278c0. 5. See, for example, Michael Lewis, Liar’s Poker, New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. 6. For references to studies that document these and other forms of overconfidence, see Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So, New York: Free Press, 1991, pp. 77–78. 7. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, 1968: 1243–1247. 8. For a more detailed discussion of the incentive problems that lead to superfluous entry into winner-take-all markets, see Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society, New York: Free Press, 1995, chapter 6. 9. Jenny Anderson and Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Bill Is Offered to Increase Tax on Private Equity,” New York Times, June 23, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/23/ business/23tax.html. 10.

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies
by Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer
Published 14 Apr 2013

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). 10. This quote is generally attributed to Einstein, but we could not verify a specific source. 11. Mental models is a term that Peter Senge et al. introduced in The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of a Learning Organization (New York: Doubleday, 1990). 12. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (1968): 1243–48. 13. Wolfgang Münchau, “Peer Steinbrück’s grösste Fehleinschätzung,” column, Der Spiegel, October 3, 2011, www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/wolf gang-muenchau-peer-steinbrueck-und-seine-groesste-fehleinschaetzung-a-859295.html (accessed December 8, 2012). 14.

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload
by Cal Newport
Published 2 Mar 2021

Drucker, “Knowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge,” California Management Review 41, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 79–94. Italics in the original. 36. Lloyd didn’t use the phrase “tragedy of the commons.” This label was introduced later in a now famous article that rigorously analyzes the scenario: Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (December 1968): 1243–48. Chapter 4: The Attention Capital Principle 1. Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 124. 2. The details of the development of the assembly line, including the specific numbers cited in this discussion, come from two excellent secondary sources: Freeman, Behemoth, 119–26; and Simon Winchester, The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World (New York: Harper, 2018), 159–66. 3.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
by Daniel C. Dennett
Published 15 Jan 1995

Spencer (1870, p. 396) had offered the following definition: "Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." The memeology of James' marvelous parody is worth recording. I got the quotation from Garrett Hardin, who informs me that he got it from Sills and Merton (1991, p. 104). They in turn cite James' Lecture Notes 1880-1897 as their source, but Hardin has tracked down some further details. P. G. Tait (1880, p. 80) gives credit to a mathematician named Kirkman for his "exquisite translation" of Spencer, of which James' version — presumably borrowed from Tait — is a mutation.

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The latter competes, for instance, with the advice the Pirate King gives to Frederick, the self-styled "slave of duty" in Pirates of Penzance: "Aye me lad, always do your duty — and chance the consequences!" Neither slogan is quite vacuous. 6. A Kantian who presses the charge of practical imponderability against utilitarianism with particular vigor and clarity is Onora O'Neill (1980). She shows how two utilitarians, Garrett Hardin and Peter Singer, armed with the same information, arrive at opposite counsels on the pressing moral dilemma of famine relief: we should take drastic steps to prevent shortsighted efforts to feed famine victims (Hardin), or we should take drastic steps to provide food for today's famine victims (Singer).

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
by Donella H. Meadows , Jørgen Randers and Dennis L. Meadows
Published 15 Apr 2004

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, "The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2002," wwwfao.org/docrep/005/y7300e/y7300e00.htm. 9. Lester Brown, Eco-Economy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 51-55. 10. Fact sheets of the World Wide Fund for Nature Endangered Seas Campaign, 2003, www.panda.org/campaigns/marine/sturgeon. 11. The classic analysis of this phenomenon is Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science, 162(1968):1243-1248. 12. Audubon (September-October 1991), 34. 13. Dagens Naeringsliv (Norwegain business journal), Oslo (December 9, 2002), 10. 14. Japanese journalist to Paul Ehrlich, in Animal Extinctions: What Everyone Should Know, edited by R. J.

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives
by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman
Published 2 Mar 2021

“It is revolting”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Path of the Law,” Harvard Law Review 10 (1897): 469 “protect private property”: Eskenazi, “Great Sucking Sound.” “We’re dealing with”: Ibid. Notice Pate’s strategy here: See, for example, Eugene Volokh, “Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope,” Harvard Law Review 116 (2003): 1026–137. tragedy of the commons: Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (December 1968): 1243–48. “To save our valley”: Boxall, “Overpumping of Central Valley.” When oil was first: Bruce Kramer and Owen Anderson, “The Rule of Capture—an Oil and Gas Perspective,” Environmental Law 35 (2005): 899–954. unitization: Many tools exist to fragment ownership (like subdivision rules for land), but relatively few for re-aggregating them.

Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming
by Mckenzie Funk
Published 22 Jan 2014

Stephen Gardiner, a philosophy professor who organized the lecture series, is also the author of A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). His writings helped me understand that contrary to conventional wisdom, global warming is not a classic “tragedy of the commons” as first described by the ecologist Garrett Hardin—or at least that if it is, some of the metaphorical herdsmen among us have bigger cows. When I traveled a second time to Alaska’s Chukchi Sea and stayed in the village of Point Hope, I carried with me The Firecracker Boys by Dan O’Neill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), the story of how we nearly detonated six hydrogen bombs to create a new Arctic harbor—a brilliant history I wish I had read long ago.

Not the End of the World
by Hannah Ritchie
Published 9 Jan 2024

There are some species where this functional value is obvious. For others, it’s less clear-cut. Ecosystems are complex: the needs and dependencies between species are intricate. We are notoriously bad at understanding them. There are countless tales throughout history of us meddling with ecosystems and making a mess. As the ecologist and economist Garrett Hardin coined in the First Law of Ecology: ‘You can never merely do one thing.’ If you don’t consider second-order effects (the effects of the effects) then you’re asking for trouble. So, for many of the species where the functional value is not obvious, the value might instead be hidden via an intricate web of prey, predator and ecological connections.

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve
by Steve Stewart-Williams
Published 12 Sep 2018

The tragedy is that both players would do better if they both cooperated: They’d get three points each instead of the one point they end up with when they both defect. Ironically, then, in a one-shot game, the rational pursuit of self-interest makes both parties worse off. This is a hypothetical example of a real-world phenomenon – a phenomenon the ecologist Garrett Hardin called the tragedy of the commons.43 But what if the virtual animals get to encounter each other again and again, like real animals often do? In that case, the best course of action is no longer quite so obvious. And that’s why we need the computer simulations. Back to the main story. After issuing his invitation for programs to compete in his tournament, Axelrod soon had a diverse collection of contestants, each reflecting its creator’s best guess about which strategy would rack up the most points.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together
by Thomas W. Malone
Published 14 May 2018

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin Books, 1985); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, translated by Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). 4. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3,859 (1968): 1,243–48; Robert L. Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971): 35–57, doi:10.1086/406755; Christopher Stephens, “Modelling Reciprocal Altruism,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47, no. 4 (1996): 533–51, doi:10.1093/bjps/47.4.533. 5.

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
by Robert Wright
Published 1 Jan 1994

The Northwest Coast Indians’ rudimentary “government” wasn’t only a stand-in for the market. It did things that governments do even in capitalist societies. For example, if fishermen were allowed to compete without restraint, they could deplete the salmon stock, hurting everyone. This is an instance of what the biologist Garrett Hardin famously called the “tragedy of the commons”—a textbook non-zero-sum problem, in which overgrazing of public land by privately owned herds would be ruinous, so all herd owners can benefit by mutual restraint. The Northwest Coast Indians solved the problem by deciding when fishing would begin and end, much as governments today enforce a hunting season so that deer and ducks will live to die another day.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
by Robert Wright
Published 28 Dec 2010

The Northwest Coast Indians’ rudimentary “government” wasn’t only a stand-in for the market. It did things that governments do even in capitalist societies. For example, if fishermen were allowed to compete without restraint, they could deplete the salmon stock, hurting everyone. This is an instance of what the biologist Garrett Hardin famously called the “tragedy of the commons”—a textbook non-zero-sum problem, in which overgrazing of public land by privately owned herds would be ruinous, so all herd owners can benefit by mutual restraint. The Northwest Coast Indians solved the problem by deciding when fishing would begin and end, much as governments today enforce a hunting season so that deer and ducks will live to die another day.

The Selfish Gene
by Richard Dawkins
Published 1 Jan 1976

We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. The Selfish Gene 12. Nice guys finish first. Nice guys finish last. The phrase seems to have originated in the world of baseball, although some authorities claim priority for an alternative connotation. The American biologist Garrett Hardin used it to summarize the message of what may be called 'Sociobiology' or 'selfish genery'. It is easy to see its aptness. If we translate the colloquial meaning of 'nice guy' into its Darwinian equivalent, a nice guy is an individual that assists other members of its species, at its own expense, to pass their genes on to the next generation.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits
by Richard Davies
Published 4 Sep 2019

The conversion of rainforest to farmland and the policies adopted to prevent deforestation are discussed and evaluated in Nelson et al. (2001); maps of the forest cover over time and the impact of logging are provided in Gutierrez (1989); the problem of deforestation and the rise of cattle-ranching are discussed in Arcia (2017) and Belisle (2018). The ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ Ecologist Garrett Hardin coined the term ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ in the 1960s in a discussion of overpopulation and the environment – Hardin (1968). Failures of free markets The example of common ground that is damaged by overuse is set out in the first of William Forster Lloyd’s ‘Two Lectures on the Checks to Population’ delivered in Oxford in 1832.

Making Globalization Work
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 16 Sep 2006

Somewhat earlier, an independent review of World Bank lending in extractive industries had argued against the Bank lending in countries like Chad, where it was unlikely that the money would help in poverty alleviation. The Bank sent away the review’s recommendations for further study—a polite rejection. Chapter Six 1.The term was popularized by Garrett Hardin in his classic article of that title in Science, vol. 162 (December 13, 1968), pp. 1243–48. There is a fundamental difference between the knowledge commons and the commons being discussed here. In the former, the use of the commons by one does not detract from what is available to others; the enclosure represents an inefficient restriction on usage.

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants
by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi
Published 14 May 2020

Overall, cooperation was greater in subsequent rounds of the Cooperation Game, contrary to the predictions of people who knew the players very well. 44.Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter, “Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments,” American Economic Review 90, no. 4 (September 2000): 980–94, http://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.90.4.980. 45.Devesh Rustagi, Stefanie Engel, and Michael Kosfeld, “Conditional Cooperation and Costly Monitoring Explain Success in Forest Commons Management,” Science 330, no. 6006 (November 12, 2010): 961, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6006/961.full. 46.Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (December 13, 1968): 1243–48, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full. 47.Forest user groups with a higher percentage of conditional cooperators had more potential crop trees per hectare. A 10 percent increase in the share of free-riders led to an average drop in the forest management outcome by almost seven potential crop trees per hectare. 48.See Michael E.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World
by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg
Published 15 Nov 2010

As we noted in the smoking example this is not plausible when many individuals are involved in the negotiation. Similarly, in the case of pollution, establishing marketable pollution rights is more likely to minimize transaction costs and lead to socially optimal outcomes. 24.2 The Tragedy of the Commons In a 1968 article in Science, entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons” [204], Garrett Hardin offered a compelling story about the inevitable “tragedy” of commonly shared resources. In his story there is a village commons on which any herdsman can freely graze his cattle.3 Hardin noted that inevitably the commons will be overused to the detriment of all the villagers. He then argued that establishing property rights would solve the problem.

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AIDS, 3:807–817, 1989. 814 BIBLIOGRAPHY [202] Werner Güth, Rolf Schmittberger, and Bernd Schwarze. An experimental analysis of ultimatum bargaining. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 3:367–388, 1982. [203] Frank Harary. On the notion of balance of a signed graph. Michigan Math. Journal, 2(2):143–146, 1953. [204] Garrett Hardin. The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859):1243–1248, 1968. [205] Larry Harris. Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners. Oxford University Press, 2002. [206] John C. Harsanyi. Game with incomplete information played by “Bayesian” players, I–III. Part I: The basic model.

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell
by Phil Lapsley
Published 5 Feb 2013

A version of this problem also appears in code breaking (if you break your enemy’s codes and then do something with the information you obtain, your enemy is likely to figure out that you’ve broken his codes and will change them, denying you further intelligence) and is explored in Neal Stephenson’s book Cryptonomicon (2002). See Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, December 1968, p. 1243, at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full.pdf. 246 One such phreak in New York: Author interview with a New York–area phone phreak who prefers to remain anonymous, 2012. Two of the books in question were the Distance Dialing Reference Guide and the Traffic Routing Guide, both of which described AT&T’s network routing in excruciating detail.

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City
by Peter D. Norton
Published 15 Jan 2008

In urban transportation history, Los Angeles is the least representative city in America. Nevertheless, Bottles uses transportation in Los Angeles to represent urban transportation in America, as his book’s subtitle and the boldly stated conclusions in his epilogue show. 26. The street, in other words, is an instance of a “commons.” See Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (Dec. 13, 1968), 1243–1248. In medieval England a commons was a place of exceptional economic laws, unlike those that obtain in private property. Like a commons, roads and streets are a shared good; individual users cannot be charged for each use. This sense of the metaphor is clearer in its original formulation; see William Forster Lloyd, “Two Lectures on the Checks to Population,” in Lectures on Population Value, Poor-Laws and Rent (1837; reprint: Augustus M.

Cadillac Desert
by Marc Reisner
Published 1 Jan 1986

As a state legislator he had made a name as an environmentalist, and a rather bold one—he was the leader of the successful effort to keep the lucrative Winter Olympics out of Denver. In 1978, the Almanac of American Politics described him as “far-out.” He flew periodically to Chicago or New York to hobnob with people like Garrett Hardin, the ecologist, and Hazel Henderson, the “futurist,” who served with him on the national board of the Council on Population and Environment. He staffed his administration with left-leaning people in their twenties and thirties—people like Harris Sherman, his resources secretary, who had served as counsel to the Environmental Defense Fund.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
by Nicholas A. Christakis
Published 26 Mar 2019

How do people collaborate to protect shared meadows where their livestock roam? Classical models that assume all people are purely self-interested predict that lands will be overgrazed, seas overfished, and air polluted because individual incentives are contrary to what is best for the group. Ecologist Garrett Hardin famously called this the “tragedy of the commons.”76 Individuals act selfishly because the benefits of the acts accrue to them but the costs are divided across the whole group. These types of group-wide interactions and collective efforts cannot easily be addressed with the notions of reciprocity and cooperation we have been considering so far.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent
Published 22 May 2017

(Carbon Tracker Initiative, 2012), http://www.carbontracker.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Unburnable-Carbon-Full-rev2-1.pdf (accessed February 5, 2017); McKibben, “Global Warming's Terrifying New Math.” 66. Boyd, “Economic Growth”; Peter Victor, “Questioning Economic Growth,” Nature 468 (2010): 370–71. 67. See Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–48; Ponting, New Green History, 132–33; Boyd, “Economic Growth”; Royal Society, People and the Planet, 73; Boulding's quote cited in Mark Bittman, “A Banker Bets on Organic Farming,” New York Times, August 28, 2012. 68. McNeill, Something New, locs. 4910–19.

Collapse
by Jared Diamond
Published 25 Apr 2011

Janis's case studies are of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the American army's crossing of the 38th parallel in Korea in 1950, American's non-preparation for Japan's 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, America's escalation of the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1967, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and America's adoption of the Marshall Plan in 1947. Garrett Hardin's classic and often-cited article "The tragedy of the commons" appeared in Science 162:1243-1248 (1968). Mancur Olson applies the metaphor of stationary bandits and roving bandits to Chinese warlords and other extractive agents in "Dictatorship, democracy, and development" {American Political Science Review 87:567-576 (1993)).

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
Published 2 Jan 2008

Janis’s case studies are of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the American army’s crossing of the 38th parallel in Korea in 1950, American’s non-preparation for Japan’s 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, America’s escalation of the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1967, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and America’s adoption of the Marshall Plan in 1947. Garrett Hardin’s classic and often-cited article “The tragedy of the commons” appeared in Science 162:1243-1248 (1968). Mancur Olson applies the metaphor of stationary bandits and roving bandits to Chinese warlords and other extractive agents in “Dictatorship, democracy, and development” (American Political Science Review 87:567-576 (1993)).

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, The State of Food and Agriculture 1947, cited in Norberg 2016. 8. A definition by the economist Cormac Ó Gráda, cited in Hasell & Roser 2017. 9. Devereux 2000, p. 3. 10. W. Greene, “Triage: Who Shall Be Fed? Who Shall Starve?” New York Times Magazine, Jan. 5, 1975. The term lifeboat ethics had been introduced a year earlier by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in an article in Psychology Today (Sept. 1974) called “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.” 11. “Service Groups in Dispute on World Food Problems,” New York Times, July 15, 1976; G. Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics,” Psychology Today, Sept. 1974. 12. McNamara, health care, contraception: N.

The Irrational Bundle
by Dan Ariely
Published 3 Apr 2013

William Forster Lloyd, “Two Lectures on the Checks to Population, Delivered Before the University of Oxford, in Michaelmas Term,” Oxford Press (1833). Günter Hitsch, Ali Hortaçsu, and Dan Ariely, “Matching and Sorting in Online Dating,” American Economic Review (2010). Günter Hitsch, Ali Hortaçsu, and Dan Ariely, “What Makes You Click?—Mate Preferences in Online Dating,” Working Paper, University of Chicago (2010). RELATED READINGS Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science (1968). Peter Darke and Robin Ritchie, “The Defensive Consumer: Advertising Deception, Defensive Processing, and Distrust,” Journal of Marketing Research (2007). Richard Emerson, “Social Exchange Theory,” Annual Review of Sociology (1976). Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter, “Fairness and Retaliation: The Economics of Reciprocity,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (2000).

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
Published 14 Jul 2019

The 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics went to Hurwicz, Maskin, and Myerson “for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory” (Hurwicz, 1973). The tragedy of the commons, a motivating problem for the field, was analyzed by William Lloyd (1833) but named and brought to public attention by Garrett Hardin (1968). Ronald Coase presented a theorem that if resources are subject to private ownership and if transaction costs are low enough, then the resources will be managed efficiently (Coase, 1960). He points out that, in practice, transaction costs are high, so this theorem does not apply, and we should look to other solutions beyond privatization and the marketplace.

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Utility functions can go wrong due to externalities, the word used by economists for factors that are outside of what is measured and paid for. The world suffers when greenhouse gases are considered as externalities—companies and countries are not penalized for producing them, and as a result everyone suffers. Ecologist Garrett Hardin (1968) called the exploitation of shared resources the tragedy of the commons. We can mitigate the tragedy by internalizing the externalities—making them part of the utility function, for example with a carbon tax—or by using the design principles that economist Elinor Ostrom identified as being used by local people throughout the world for centuries (work that won her the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009): •Clearly define the shared resource and who has access.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

The best outcome for the group is for everyone to contribute the maximum amount. But the best outcome for an individual is to stint on his own contribution and be a free rider on the profits from everyone else’s. The tragedy is that contributions will dwindle to zero and everyone ends up worse off. (The biologist Garrett Hardin proposed an identical scenario called the Tragedy of the Commons. Each farmer cannot resist grazing his own cow on the town commons, stripping it bare to everyone’s loss. Pollution, overfishing, and carbon emissions are equivalent real-life examples.)190 But if players have the opportunity to punish free riders, as if in revenge for their exploitation of the group, then the players have an incentive to contribute, and everyone profits.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

The political scientists Elinor and Vincent Ostrom at Indiana University showed repeatedly that a situation that would in Samuelsonian economics always be assumed to be a hopeless case of free riding and the tragedy of the commons, such as the overexploitation of the Los Angeles aquifer, can often be solved by sustained talk among serious-minded, ethically disciplined people.22 It was true as well in medieval English villages, which in 1968 the ecologist Garrett Hardin supposed were instances of the hopeless case. Ethics undergirds water rights, grazing rights, civil and criminal laws, marriages, friendships, children’s games, adults’ games, clubs, traffic, science, business deals, constitutions—a point that political theorists from Machiavelli and Hobbes through James Buchanan and Martha Nussbaum, in their eagerness to devise a theory mainly out of prudence only, have tended to overlook.23 The working of the U.S. constitution, for example, has always rested on such ethical grounding.

Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
by Wolfgang Streeck
Published 1 Jan 2013

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking
by Richard E. Nisbett
Published 17 Aug 2015

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 6 Mar 2018

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess
by Robert H. Frank
Published 15 Jan 1999

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin
Published 1 Jan 1998

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey
by Michael Huemer
Published 29 Oct 2012

Meat: A Benign Extravagance
by Simon Fairlie
Published 14 Jun 2010

Coming of Age in the Milky Way
by Timothy Ferris
Published 30 Jun 1988

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?
by Alan Weisman
Published 23 Sep 2013

The World's First Railway System: Enterprise, Competition, and Regulation on the Railway Network in Victorian Britain
by Mark Casson
Published 14 Jul 2009