The "Tragedy of the Commons" was invented by a white supremacist based on a false history, and it's toxic bullshit

White supremacy isn’t an “odd thing”, it’s a dangerous and violent ideology.

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Fuck that racist clown, and anyway Ed Ricketts is a far better nominee for the Godfather of Ecology.

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But avoid reading it too many times. That will ruin it for future generations.

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I think this is especially important given that more people will read the headline than the article or the comments, so factually incorrect headlines like this one spread misinformation at a rate higher than that of false claims in the articles themselves. The headline is demonstrably, and inarguably, false and is spreading false information.

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Glad I beat you about the head with Elinor Ostrom and the importance of her work. Good to know that you’ve read her work and learned some of her great lessons. Keep pushing her work into the conversation as it’s crucial in these times.

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  1. Hardin give credit to William Forster Lloyd in his essay.
  2. He does not make a history lesson about the English commons, but make a thought example on what would happen to an unmanaged commons. One borrowed from Lloyd.
  3. In a follow up from 1998 Hardin writes: "What I have realized from reading numerous criticisms of the theory of the commons is that both Lloyd and I were analyzing a subset of commons—those where “help yourself” or “feel free” attitudes prevail. This was the message European pioneers in North America thought they had been given by the land they chose to perceive as unpeopled. "
    That last sentence doesn’t suggest white supremacy to me.

Hardin also clarify: "To judge from the critical literature, the weightiest mistake in my synthesizing paper was the omission of the modifying adjective “unmanaged.” In correcting this omission, one can generalize the practical conclusion in this way: “A ‘managed commons’ describes either socialism or the privatism of free enterprise. Either one may work; either one may fail: ‘The devil is in the details.’ But with an unmanaged commons, you can forget about the devil: As overuse of resources reduces carrying capacity, ruin is inevitable.” "

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Well, people shouldn’t be reading Cory’s posts for facts.

Edited to add: /s

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That may work for regulars here in the know but the general public doesn’t know that. It makes more sense that Cory and BB should fix headlines and articles that are blatantly false such as this one. One can’t legitimately blame this on the audience.

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True; I should have made it clear I was being sarcastic in the earlier post!

This kind of sloppiness is not good for anyone, but Cory’s got a history of jumping for leftist outrage without checking the facts, which makes his posts to be dubious value.

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This is incorrect, by the way. Commons do still exist in England, there just aren’t nearly as many of them. And the extent to which they have been reduced was mostly before Hardin was writing. Honestly for some reason I thought the piece was from the 18th century, not written by a person who was still alive in the year 2000.

Facts aside, my general attitude towards the tragedy of the commons, (and many other oft-repeated idioms about human nature) is still that we should think more deeply about how true is really is, rather than accepting it because it sounds right.

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But it does result from an optimal strategy. It occurs when someone decides that their personal optimization is more important than society’s optimization, and no one has the tools to stop them.

Ah, got it. It’s frustrating because the actual info he mischaracterizes is typically still in favor of his cause (causes I support, too) and the misstatements are entirely gratuitous own goals.

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I realize English doesn’t always cooperate with me to express ideas, but what I really meant was that it is incorrect to assert, “overgrazing the commons is an optimal strategy for each individual” in a general sense, while allowing that it is also incorrect to assert, “overgrazing the commons is a sub-optimal strategy.” Except for the absolute simplest of games and motivations, there is no such thing as an optimal strategy.

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prince-harry-um-no

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I’ve said it before, maybe on this site, but whenever I saw that Tragedy of the Commons film in high school I would think to myself - wait a second, so here we are in rural England at nightfall and one guy in the rural area has been ripping off everyone else by grazing too much on the common area - shouldn’t he be going into the Wicker Man about now?

As an argument it just seems totally sensible in the abstract, but the particular circumstances given as an instance do not make sense given what is known about humanity’s propensity for violence,

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I believe the latest government shutdown where the national parks were forced to remain open with skeleton staffing proves the pudding. Many people exercised due care, but there were visitors who abused the land, leaving rubbish, going off trails, and generally being yahoos, since there was no enforcement of consequences.

I think the term might be ‘stewardship’.

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I was taught TTOC as a justification for private ownership over public in a graduate level economics course in 2018.

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Are you sure you got the joke?

Everyone should read Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons. It’s a real classic and crisply written to boot.

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