Our Common Tragedy and the Tragedy of the Commons
My economics teacher (or The Prof, as I would call him if we were at all familiar) mentioned the "Tragedy of the Commons" today, and I really had to squirm to prevent myself from interjecting the status of that story as being debunked. It's still meaningful as a parable but it should come with some serious asides. This article details what I'm talking about better (or at least more authoritatively, with citations and stuff) than I could, but it's pretty simple:
(warning: skip this paragraph if you're damn well familiar with the "Tragedy of the Commons")
In days of yore, every populated area would have a common area which was free for anyone to use. An individual enjoys full benefit of making more use of this common land while only suffers a small share of the cost of its depletion. Since it is in the best interest of an individual herder to allow more of their cattle to graze or collect more firewood from this land, and since all the herders in the community are rational and rationally concerned primarily with their short-term personal gain, the tragedy (in the Grecian-play kindof way because it's unplanned and inevitable, not because it's sad) is that the land will eventually become useless to everyone. The original article then made the case that it was in everyone's best interests to prevent this from happening by privatizing everything that's still considered common.
Unfortunately, as of the time of this parable's creation in the 1960's, this had never happened, or at least not in the way described. A "commons" had existed in many (maybe even most) small and moderately sized communities for hundreds of years before the practice gave way to enclosure, nationalism, industrialism, and capitalism. The real tragedy of the commons was that wealthy land owners, getting rich off the problem of population growth racing against food supply, flooded the commons with their own cattle in an effort to push off their poorer and more altruistic neighbors. Until then, the communities would meet together with regularity to ensure equitable and sustainable use of the land. So, proven to be untrue, how can this parable retain relevance?
Ian Angus, in the article I mentioned before, describes my thoughts best with this comparison: "a community that shares fields and forests has a strong incentive to protect them to the best of its ability, even if that means not maximizing current production, because those resources will be essential to the community's survival for centuries to come. Capitalist owners have the opposite incentive, because they will not survive in business if they don't maximize short-term profit."
The new tragedy of the commons is that corporations are bound to destroy the commons in search for increased profit margins by externalizing costs and reaping cheap resources. On top of the Holocene extinction event, skyrocketing cancer-rates, and global warming, our economy is "headed for the wall." Higher unemployment and uncertainty about the dollar is part of why there was a death-by-trampling at Wal-Mart on Black Friday even though retail shopping averages have been even worse than expected.
Analysis: people will KILL for extra savings on plastic nativity scenes from after Thanksgiving sales, but can't afford to shop in general.
Opinion: consumerism is morally bankrupt and inefficient as a system of resource distribution.
(warning: skip this paragraph if you're damn well familiar with the "Tragedy of the Commons")
In days of yore, every populated area would have a common area which was free for anyone to use. An individual enjoys full benefit of making more use of this common land while only suffers a small share of the cost of its depletion. Since it is in the best interest of an individual herder to allow more of their cattle to graze or collect more firewood from this land, and since all the herders in the community are rational and rationally concerned primarily with their short-term personal gain, the tragedy (in the Grecian-play kindof way because it's unplanned and inevitable, not because it's sad) is that the land will eventually become useless to everyone. The original article then made the case that it was in everyone's best interests to prevent this from happening by privatizing everything that's still considered common.
Unfortunately, as of the time of this parable's creation in the 1960's, this had never happened, or at least not in the way described. A "commons" had existed in many (maybe even most) small and moderately sized communities for hundreds of years before the practice gave way to enclosure, nationalism, industrialism, and capitalism. The real tragedy of the commons was that wealthy land owners, getting rich off the problem of population growth racing against food supply, flooded the commons with their own cattle in an effort to push off their poorer and more altruistic neighbors. Until then, the communities would meet together with regularity to ensure equitable and sustainable use of the land. So, proven to be untrue, how can this parable retain relevance?
Ian Angus, in the article I mentioned before, describes my thoughts best with this comparison: "a community that shares fields and forests has a strong incentive to protect them to the best of its ability, even if that means not maximizing current production, because those resources will be essential to the community's survival for centuries to come. Capitalist owners have the opposite incentive, because they will not survive in business if they don't maximize short-term profit."
The new tragedy of the commons is that corporations are bound to destroy the commons in search for increased profit margins by externalizing costs and reaping cheap resources. On top of the Holocene extinction event, skyrocketing cancer-rates, and global warming, our economy is "headed for the wall." Higher unemployment and uncertainty about the dollar is part of why there was a death-by-trampling at Wal-Mart on Black Friday even though retail shopping averages have been even worse than expected.
Analysis: people will KILL for extra savings on plastic nativity scenes from after Thanksgiving sales, but can't afford to shop in general.
Opinion: consumerism is morally bankrupt and inefficient as a system of resource distribution.