And since the 1833 lecture is available online for free, anyone can read it and see that Wikipedia is in fact correct about the origin of the concept.
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Hardin quotes that didn’t make it into his seminal paper: “Diversity is the opposite of unity, and unity is a prime requirement for national survival”
More linguistic misuse. The antonyms of unity are asymmetry, discordance, disproportion, disunity, imbalance, incoherence, and violence…the last of which I think is most fitting for the violence against the many by the privileged few.
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Usually what I see is things that are supposed to be communally maintained (parks, the fridge at work, etc.) wind up trashed because people seem to believe that “someone (else)” has ownership and responsibility for maintenance. We’ve become so used to everything being privatized that we’re no longer socially equipped for true communal property. People don’t just organically take care of public parks as they use them, someone is paid by local government to do so. The office fridge inevitably becomes a disaster unless it’s specifically part of someone’s job duties to manage it.
There’s probably also a component of social contempt for cleaning/maintenance work and people feeling they’re too good/important to contribute to it personally.
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Interesting 15 min talk on BBC about this here too…
This reminds me of how “Survival of the Fittest” started as a business term, that was then lifted by Darwin, and then business types lifted it back to give their worst goals and behaviors an illusion of scientific respectability.
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That was the spurious argument, that people would not take care of things owned by the community, but would only take care of things owned by themselves.
Ok this makes more sense to me. I was taught ToC only in the context of the modern environmental movement, not as a process for private versus public ownership of property.
Side note: If you try to have a serious conversation about something with historical nuance maybe find a better way than a tweetstorm?
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People behave differently if they have “skin in the game” or a sense of ownership (similar but not identical concepts, bear with me)
I feel like public parks etc are not viewed as something that I own, as the public, but something that the government (city or otherwise) owns. Therefore, not my problem. It’s a distancing thing. My neighborhood park is paid for by my property taxes, but if I’m so distanced from the idea of belonging to a city or even neighborhood I probably don’t care what happens to it.
TL;DR I agree, we’ve moved away from being able to conceive of communal property.
As long as we are all swapping anecdotals, here’s my take.
People take care of things if they are invested. There are assholes, but most people are good hearted.
Before a career switch I worked for over twenty years either in the field or in a lab with either a partner or up to a hundred coworkers.
Many jobs were on location for days or months; often in shared living/working quarters. People would be in charge of garbage, sweeping, dishes, latrines. A system would always find a place and things would go smoothly until the asshole appeared; and 9 times out of 10 it would be a meat eating Christian. IMHO get rid of cows and christians and communal living is great.
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I didn’t finish my Economics degree due to differences in the core curriculum between it and my Computer Science degree, but I completed most of the classes that are required in Economics for an undergraduate degree.
When real economists are discussing the Tragedy of the Commons paper, this ain’t it. This is completely 180* opposite of the actual economic theory. While this may be used as a justification to transfer public property to private hands for the economic benefit of a nefarious few, it is not the accepted and traditional economic reaction.
As others have posted, the real Tragedy of the Commons is that people will use public resources to maximize their private utility gains while minimizing the community’s utility of the property until and unless regulations upon the use of the public common is enforced to ensure that the maximum public utility is gained. From parking to parks to the atmosphere and the rivers, unless usage is regulated and enforced good will from the community is not enough to prevent someone from taking advantage of the resource, because eventually someone will have no freaking shame at all.
Such as the authors of this paper…
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No, he did not invent it. He co-opted it. Being aware of the history of professional shitheel Garrett Hardin is a good thing. Pretending he invented either the term or the idea (which is several thousand years older) is not. Hardin’s use is not what most people mean by the term today; it is in fact nearly the diametric opposite.
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Eh, while I’m swinging at windmills and all…
The Austerity movements, taking public assets and turning them private, and most of the other things that we have seen the EU and IMF doing (and have been attempted in the United States) don’t have economic theories supporting them - they have people who are trying to sound like they are using economic theories to justify their actions which they are doing because it profits them and/or the people who they are lackeys to.
Frankly, what the EU did to Greece should be considered war crimes.
Taking a public good and making it private is virtually never in the public’s interest.
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This thread, tho…
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I don’t care about the inventor’s personal politics - Lots of geniuses believed odd things - I’m much more interested in the assertion that it’s based on a false history and is “toxic bullshit”. Less ad-hominem and more argument destruction, please. Evidence he may have had a biased POV is fine, but IMHO the main thrust of any refutation should be documentation that disproves the thesis, not documentation that proves that the thesis-originator is a Bad Person.
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heaven forbid we see this for what it is - its not an explanation for why the commons are untenable, but a demonstration of why unregulated commons destroys them.
But we’ve seen this line of thinking from this type before. Witness “we want smaller government” so we fail to govern or govern poorly as an excuse for why governing does not work.
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the environmental movement elevates Hardin to sainthood, whitewashing his racism and celebrating “The Tragedy of the Commons” as a seminal work of environmental literature.
Envronmentalism and white supremacism go back a very long way together.
At the very least, “going green” often overlooks the fact that the underprivileged can only afford a disposable lifestyle.
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eat the meat-eating Christian and the problem is solved.
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It’s why I rarely call them the alt-right, there’s nothing alt about them when comparing them to the older far right groups.
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This is like saying the United States should give up on the concept of freedom and democracy because it was founded by slave owners who saw black people as three fifths of a person and therefore it’s irredeemably toxic.
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I guess what I don’t love about repeating “the Tragedy of the Commons” is that it really is a bit of age-old philosophical musing that we just take for granted. People have anecdotes of it in action, but we probably also all have anecdotes of it working the other way - a shared resource being thoughtfully cared for by the people who use it (my office fridge is quite clean).
I’d stake a fair sum on it being deeply cultural, not a fact of human nature. And the more we repeat that it works this way, the more our culture reinforces it working that way. If the tragedy of the commons is the human condition, that serves as a justification to overuse the commons for individuals, which creates the tragedy of the commons.
It’s not like the tragedy of the commons results from some kind of optimal strategy, it results from short-sightedness and distrust. I think we live in an destructively individualistic society. I think this is a concept that needs some pushback.
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Would BB or Mr. Doctorow ever be interested in examining the ease with which false information is spread via social media, and their own propensity to be taken in by misstatements of fact and then amplifying them?
As has been pointed out several times by folks here, Hardin most definitely did NOT invent the concept of the “tragedy of the commons,” but did take that existing concept and shoehorn in a lot of unpleasant baggage. This is a far different proposition than the concept being rooted in that unpleasant baggage, but Mr. Doctorow apparently didn’t take even a moment to go beyond the Twitter thread being quoted to place things in context.
I know BB isn’t an academic journal, but don’t we all have at least a little responsibility to try and be factually correct about the things we’re adamant and/or outraged about?
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