In 1968 Garrett Hardin published an article in Science entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons”, which built upon ideas originally developed by William Forster Lloyd in a parable published in 1833 in his book on population. Over the intervening half century, Garret’s metaphor has been widely misunderstood, largely as a result of people who have never read the paper misusing the title as an apologetics for whatever privitzation scheme they wished to see enacted.
Hardin begins by positing that there are certain types of problems that cannot be solved by technical means and sets out to place resource usage in that class; particularly that there is no foreseeable technical solution to increasing both human populations and their standard of living on a finite planet.
Having laid out his thesis, Hardin moves on to non-technical resource management solutions to population and resource problems. Famously, his hypothetical example of these problems is a pasture shared by local pastoralist herders. The herders are assumed to wish to maximise their yield, and so will increase their herd size whenever possible. The utility of each additional animal has both a positive and negative component.
Hardin’s basis premise is that the herder receives all of the proceeds from each additional animal, while the pasture is slightly degraded by each additional animal so that the disadvantage is shared between all herders using the pasture. His conclusion is that the rational course of action for the herder is to continue to add extra animals. Since all herders reach the same conclusion, overgrazing and degradation of the pasture is its long-term fate. Nonetheless, the rational response for an individual remains the same at every stage, since the gain is always greater to an individual than the distributed cost is.
Hardin then concludes by restating the maxim “Freedom is the recognition of necessity“, often attributed to Hegel, but actually written by Engels. By recognising resources as commons in the first place, and by recognising that, as such, they require management, Hardin believes that “we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms”.
The most interesting thing about Hardin’s paper is not that it supposedly repudiates the laissez-faire approach to resource problems as not always providing the optimal solution, but that it is essentially a discussion of morality in public life in one of the scientific community’s premier journals. Notably, the subtitle to the essay is The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality”.
Despite my basic disagreement with the idea, pampant in economic, that rational action is always a synonym of “short-sighted self-interest”, the major problem of Hardin’s essay is in the “application” of it to real situations.
Libertarians, who have rarely read the article, use its title alone to defend the privatisation of commonly owned resources. Ironically, given his original hypothetical example, this misunderstanding of Hardin’s ideas is often applied to grazing lands. More generally, Hardin made it very clear that usage of public property could be controlled in a number of different ways to stop or limit over usage. His advocacy of clearly defined property rights has frequently been misread as an argument for privatization, or private property, per se.
In specific, Hardin was used as apologetics for the Colonial practice in the Sahel zone of Africa for the armed transfer of land from tribal peoples to the state or to individuals, claiming that mismanagement by pastoralists was to blame for desertification and depletion of resources in the area. he problems were actually due to previous colonial interference and particularly severe climate conditions, and further modernization and privatization programs not only actually worsened the ecological impact but destroyed the livelihood of the pastoralist societies.
Interestingly enough, Hardin advocates exactly the solution to the “tragedy” that pastoralist societies had long relied on; “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon”. This is a far cry from the Lockean principle of homesteading as a means of dividing the commons into private parcels.
Tags: economics, Garrett Hardin, laissez faire, libertarian
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So his solution is that people should beat each other up when they feel that they are over-consuming? That is, indeed, a far cry from anything sane people would recommend. Much better for one person to buy the property, compensating each member of the group which formerly owned it, and to take responsibility for maintaining it and governing access to it, charging each user an amount proportional to his use. This way resources consumed are paid for by those that consume them, maintenance is guaranteed (unless the new owner wants to lose his investment), and people are not limited to an arbitrary level of production. They can produce as much as they like, they are just charged for the consumption implied by their production.
I believe that you are misunderstanding, perhaps deliberately, the point of the article.
The lat paragraph:
spells it out pretty explicitly. There are a multiplicity of possible ways to govern severally owned property, and turning all of it into singly owned property is not the only, or best, way to do so, per se.
I think Jon is clear in his description: that there are other ways to manage a resource in a cooperative and mutually beneficial way. It is becoming increasingly normal in our society to determine that the only alternative to communal disagreement or problem is privatization, whereas Hardin’s reference to morality means taking responsibility for a shared resource, at least on a small scale. For example, herders in the pasture recognize the limits of a finite resource and self regulate without having to go through the destructive process of a “prisoner’s dilemma” - or relearning over and over - to reach a fair conclusion. At the same time, it is ownership by a group that although it has its own problems, keeps control and benefits locally, profits are shared equitably and the process is hopefully transparent. This seems to be a lesson Hardin is aiming for.