[ttiurani]

The whole notion of the "tragedy of the commons" needs to be put to rest. It's an armchair thought experiment that was disproven at the latest in the 90s by Elinor Ostrom with actual empirical evidence of commons.

The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea.

[wongarsu]

A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms. The classic examples like people grazing sheep or cutting wood are bad examples that don't really work.

But that doesn't mean the tragedy of the commons can't happen in other scenarios. If we define commons a bit more generously it does happen very frequently on the internet. It's also not difficult to find cases of it happening in larger cities, or in environments where cutthroat behavior has been normalized

[TeMPOraL]

> A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms.

That works while the size of the community is ~100-200 people, when everyone knows everyone else personally. It breaks down rapidly after that. We compensate for that with hierarchies of governance, which give rise to written laws and bureaucracy.

New tribes break off old tribes, form alliances, which form larger alliances, and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase.

This is sociopolitical history of the world in a nutshell.

[ttiurani]

> But that doesn't mean the tragedy of the commons can't happen in other scenarios.

Commons can fail, but the whole point of Hardin calling commons a "tragedy" is to suggest it necessarily fails.

Compare it to, say, driving. It can fail too, but you wouldn't call it "the tragedy of driving".

We'd be much better off if people didn't throw around this zombie term decades after it's been shown to be unfounded.

[lo_zamoyski]

Even here, the state is the steward of the common good. It is a mistaken notion that the state only exists because people are bad. Even if people were perfectly conscientious and concerned about the common good, you still need a steward. It simply wouldn’t be a steward who would need to use aggressive means to protect the common good from malice or abuse.

[jandrewrogers]

> A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario.

No it does not. This sentiment, which many people have, is based on a fictional and idealistic notion of what small communities are like having never lived in such communities.

Empirically, even in high-trust small villages and hamlets where everyone knows everyone, the same incentives exist and the same outcomes happen. Every single time. I lived in several and I can't think of a counter-example. People are highly adaptive to these situations and their basic nature doesn't change because of them.

Humans are humans everywhere and at every scale.

[Saline9515]

Ostrom showed that it wasn't necessarily a tragedy, if tight groups involved decided to cooperate. This common in what we call "trust-based societies", which aren't universal.

Nonetheless, the concept is still alive, and anthropic global warming is here to remind you about this.

[dpark]

She not “disprove” the existence of the tragedy of the commons. What she established was that controlling the commons can be done communally rather than through privatization or through government ownership.

Communal management of a resource is still government, though. It just isn’t central government.

The thesis of the tragedy of the commons is that an uncontrolled resource will be abused. The answer is governance at some level, whether individual, collective, or government ownership.

> The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea.

Right. And that’s what people are usually talking about when they say “tragedy of the commons”.

[gmfawcett]

Ostrom's results didn't disprove ToC. She showed that common resources can be communally maintained, not that tragic outcomes could never happen.

[8note]

i dont thjnk anything can disprove that ToC issues can happen under any situation.

that seems like an unreasonable bar, and less useful than "does this system make ToC less frequent than that system"

[b00ty4breakfast]

yeah, it's a post-hoc rationalization for the enclosure and privatization of said commons.

[TeMPOraL]

And here I thought the standard, obvious solution to tragedy of the commons is centralized governance.