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

[anothernewbbaccount]

@tuhu

“Survival of the Fittest” started as a business term

Any citations for that? I always believed it was a third party’s erroneous simplification of Darwin and not something he said.

Survival of the fittest

I have never seen any reference to it being a common phrase relating to business, prior to Darwin.

[Ratel]

I was of the understanding that Darwin never used or liked it, but it was coined by Huxley.

In any event, as Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, it’s a tautology. How do we define fitness? “The organism survived.”

Edit, oh, it was Spencer? Anyway.

[anothernewbbaccount]

Yeah - and either way there is (as yet) no evidence it was a term applied to business prior to Darwin (or, as it turns out, Spencer).

No idea where Spencer got it from. But it WAS (as @tuhu noted) deployed by business later on to ‘prove’ that successful businesses must, by dint of success itself, be ‘fit’ - thus justifying whatever shenanigans, jiggerypokery and fuckwittery made them ‘successful’ (i.e. their worst goals and behaviours’ as tuhu stated) in the first place.

[tuhu]

I was clumsily referring to what happened with Spenser in a shorthand, as he was mostly concerned with the sociology of economic competition, and whether the poor should be eaten cold or cooked first. When he used the phrase first, he was trying to say something about markets, not generations of animals, and people pushed that back again on Darwin.

I didn’t mean people were using it every day but that people with one focus can use a term for one end, and someone with a different focus can run with it in a different way, which is what also happened with “Tragedy of the Commons”.

[anothernewbbaccount]

@tuhu

people with one focus can use a term for one end, and someone with a different focus can run with it in a different way, which is what also happened with “Tragedy of the Commons”.

Roger That!

[GabuEx]

Wait, I’m confused, people used the Tragedy of the Commons to argue against the privatization of the common area? I’ve literally never heard of this before. The whole point of the Tragedy of the Commons is that it’s a case of market failure: if each individual acts according to their own narrow personal self-interest without regard the bigger picture, that will fail to arrive at the optimal outcome. How can this possibly be spun to justify privatization?

[anothernewbbaccount]

@Skeptic

The headline is demonstrably, and inarguably, false and is spreading false information.

Well, really it’s just a typo. @doctorow simply mis-spelt ‘subverted’. It is not spelt ‘invented’. I’m sure he’ll fix it once he realises.

[tekk]

TotC is one of the the standard “reasons” for why things belong in private hands in undergrad economics courses.

[jerwin]

Thank god for the Inclosure Acts! Tragedy avoided!

Inclosure Acts

[inactivist]

“The law locks up the man or woman who steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater villain loose who steals the common from the goose.”

-Old Saying

[Wanderfound]

@natehoffelder

According to Wikipedia, the term was actually coined in 1833

…and it was propagandistic garbage even then, based upon nothing but fact-free upper-class prejudice. It was rapidly deployed to justify inclosure and the genocidal starvation of Ireland.

—

Regarding Hardin’s essay:

http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=316

Given the subsequent influence of Hardin’s essay, it’s shocking to realize that he provided no evidence at all to support his sweeping conclusions. He claimed that the “tragedy” was inevitable — but he didn’t show that it had happened even once.

Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real commons: self-regulation by the communities involved . One such process was described years earlier in Friedrich Engels’ account of the “mark,” the form taken by commons-based communities in parts of pre-capitalist Germany:

“[T]he use of arable and meadowlands was under the supervision and direction of the community …

“Just as the share of each member in so much of the mark as was distributed was of equal size, so was his share also in the use of the ‘common mark.’ The nature of this use was determined by the members of the community as a whole. …

“At fixed times and, if necessary, more frequently, they met in the open air to discuss the affairs of the mark and to sit in judgment upon breaches of regulations and disputes concerning the mark.” (Engels 1892)

Historians and other scholars have broadly confirmed Engels’ description of communal management of shared resources. A summary of recent research concludes:

“[W]hat existed in fact was not a ‘tragedy of the commons’ but rather a triumph: that for hundreds of years — and perhaps thousands, although written records do not exist to prove the longer era — land was managed successfully by communities.” (Cox 1985: 60)

Part of that self-regulation process was known in England as “stinting” — establishing limits for the number of cows, pigs, sheep and other livestock that each commoner could graze on the common pasture. Such “stints” protected the land from overuse (a concept that experienced farmers understood long before Hardin arrived) and allowed the community to allocate resources according to its own concepts of fairness.

The only significant cases of overstocking found by the leading modern expert on the English commons involved wealthy landowners who deliberately put too many animals onto the pasture in order to weaken their much poorer neighbours’ position in disputes over the enclosure (privatization) of common lands. (Neeson 1993: 156)

Hardin assumed that peasant farmers are unable to change their behaviour in the face of certain disaster. But in the real world, small farmers, fishers and others have created their own institutions and rules for preserving resources and ensuring that the commons community survived through good years and bad.

[Wanderfound]

@Quinquennial

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.

The US should give up on the illusion that its society has ever been truly based upon freedom and democracy, because it was founded by genocidal slaveholders whose toxic influence has never been honestly addressed.

[ildrk]

This thread needs to be framed and displayed in a museum. It has everything: people immediately agreeing with the article, people correcting it and posting the Wikipedia article, someone #DisappointedInBoingBoing, despite all the corrections more people agreeing with the article. There’s even time travel.

[ildrk]

From the Ian Angus article:

“The Tragedy of the Commons” has been anthologized in at least 111 books, making it one of the most-reprinted articles ever to appear in any scientific journal.

This can’t be true, can it?

[Wanderfound]

@ildrk

This can’t be true, can it?

I believe it to be a standard inclusion in ECON101 readers and the like. Generally presented in a “and this is why collective ownership of resources is bad” context.

[Lev_Lafayette]

Can I recommend that, before anyone makes claims that Hardin’s approach (a) ignored real commons and (b) was only an argument for the privitisation of natural resources that they :

1. Actually read the original essay with a little more care; and
2. Read Hardin’s follow up publication in 1994 " The tragedy of the unmanaged commons"
   https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0169534794900973
   … where he specifically states: “The title of my 1968 paper should have been `The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons.’”

This shouldn’t be too much to ask.

[anon61221983]

Did anyone else?

[anon61221983]

Because the meaning of phrases are not stable, but change over time according to reality, ideology, and need.

[anon3072533]

I got the joke, but I didn’t get the gif. What are you saying with it? I know it’s Prince Harry, but what is he doing?? Is he chewing up the Poors and eating them??

[anon61221983]

Whatever YOU want it to mean…