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The tragedy of the commons is a metaphor used to illustrate the conflict between individual interests and the common good. The term was popularized by Garrett Hardin in his 1968 Science article "The Tragedy of the Commons." In language, a metaphor is a rhetorical trope where a comparison is made between two seemingly unrelated subjects. ...
1968 was a leap year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1968 calendar). ...
Science is the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. ...
Hardin uses the example of English Commons, shared plots of grassland used in the past by all livestock farmers in a village. Each farmer keeps adding more livestock to graze on the Commons, because it costs him nothing to do so. In a few years, the soil is depleted by overgrazing, the Commons becomes unusable, and the village perishes. Royal motto: Dieu et mon droit (French: God and my right) Englands location within the UK Official language English de facto Capital London de facto Largest city London Area - Total Ranked 1st UK 130,395 km² Population - Total (2001) - Density Ranked 1st UK 49,138,831 377/km² Religion...
Commons are any sets of resources that a community recognizes as being accessible to any member of that community. ...
Sheep are commonly bred as livestock. ...
The cause of any tragedy of the commons is that when individuals use a public good, they do not bear the entire cost of their actions. If each seeks to maximize individual utility, he ignores the costs borne by others. This is an example of an externality. The best (non-cooperative) short-term strategy for an individual is to try to exploit more than his share of public resources. Assuming a majority of individuals follow this strategy, the theory goes, the public resource gets overexploited. This article is about utility in economics and in game theory. ...
An externality occurs in economics when a decision (for example, to pollute the atmosphere) causes costs or benefits to individuals or groups other than the person making the decision. ...
The tragedy of the commons is a source of intense controversy, precisely because it is unclear whether individuals will or will not always follow the overexploitation strategy in any given situation. However, experiments have indicated that individuals do tend to behave in this way.
Historical background
The originating metaphor is of a "common", which was not public land — the public at large had very limited rights (e.g. passing drovers could lease grazing for "thistle rent"). Only those locals who were also "commoners" had access to a bundle of rights; each commoner then had an interest in his own rights, but the common itself was not property. A commoner, in British law, is someone who is neither the Sovereign nor a noble. ...
Under many modern understandings of property, e.g. in the USA, the bundles of rights would not have been "property" either, since they could not be traded or otherwise disposed of. However these commoner's rights applied in a mediaeval culture which did recognise inalienable property (e.g. entailed inheritances), so under this system the bundles of rights were considered property. Use of the term The concept of property or ownership has no single or universally accepted definition. ...
In a traditional village these rights provided commoners with rights of grazing, gathering fuel wood non-destructively "by hook or by crook", etc. (the form "commons" is plural, and refers to the whole group of commons subject to these effects).
Consider an area used for grazing (among other purposes — it could be "Lammas Land", used for private crops in season) that can support 50 cattle indefinitely, a population of 25 peasant householders who keep cattle among a range of subsistence activities, and that each peasant can advantageously graze and profit from 2 cattle indefinitely. By grazing one extra cow, a peasant can make roughly 1/2 extra "profit" at a "cost" of only 1/50. Thus each peasant is logically tempted to keep adding cattle beyond the capacity of the common to sustain them all optimally. Where the grazing area could sustain 50 cattle indefinitely, this increased grazing load could diminish or even destroy the ability of the land to sustain any cattle, at least until it has recovered. (A tragedy of the commons can occur even without complete and permanent destruction of a resource, although such things as overfishing can indeed do that.) Overfishing is a situation where one or more fish stocks are reduced below predefined levels of acceptance by fishing activities. ...
Though this metaphor is not an accurate description of how the system worked during most of its history, it serves here for purposes of illustration. Historically, no single common was ever truly public but was reserved for its own commoners, whose own use was also restricted in various customary ways (which differed from place to place). The system indeed began to behave in the ways described, but that was not its standard mode of operation but rather a late response to internal and external stresses, e.g. from demographic and cultural shifts.
Modern equivalents Modern equivalents include: The contribution of each actor is minute, but summed over all actors, these actions degrade the resource. Biodiversity or biological diversity is a neologism and a portmanteau word, from bio and diversity. ...
Fossil fuels are hydrocarbon-containing natural resources such as coal, petroleum and natural gas. ...
Pollution is the release of harmful environmental contaminants, or the substances so released. ...
For another article about a different type of logging, see data logging. ...
This article is about forests as a massing of trees. ...
Overfishing is a situation where one or more fish stocks are reduced below predefined levels of acceptance by fishing activities. ...
A small variety of cars, the most popular kind of automobile. ...
For the culinary term see poaching (cooking). ...
Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ...
This article is about spam, the abuse of electronic communications media to send unsolicited bulk messages. ...
Population growth is changing of the amount of population over time. ...
Possible solutions to the 'tragedy' The tragedy of the commons can be seen as a collective prisoner's dilemma. Individuals within a group have two options: cooperate with the group or defect from the group. Cooperation happens when individuals agree to protect a common resource to avoid the tragedy. By cooperating, every individual agrees not to seek more than his share. Defection happens when an individual decides to use more than his share of a public resource. Will the two prisoners cooperate to minimise total loss of liberty or will one of them, trusting the other to cooperate, betray him so as to go free? The prisoners dilemma is a type of non-zero-sum game. ...
Game theory shows that cooperation maximizes every individual's benefit in the long run (i.e. the 'tragedy' does not happen, the commons are preserved and can be used indefinitely), while defection maximizes an individual's benefit in the short run at the expense of destroying it in the long run (i.e. the 'tragedy' happens and all individuals lose). Thus, a possible solution to the tragedy of the commons is to simply have a group of far-sighted individuals who can see their long-term interest. Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that uses models to study interactions with formalised incentive structures (games). It has applications in a variety of fields, including economics, international relations, evolutionary biology, political science, and military strategy. ...
Articulating solutions to the tragedy of the commons is also one of the main problems of political philosophy. Many such solutions involve enforcement of conservation measures by an authority, which may be an outside agency or selected by the resource users themselves, who agree to cooperate to conserve the resource. Another frequently-proposed solution is to convert each common into private property, giving the owner of each an incentive to enforce its sustainability. Effectively, this is what took place in the English "Enclosure of the Commons"; this case highlights the effects of hidden wealth transfer in privatization, if no or inadequate matching compensation occurs. Political philosophy is the study of the fundamental questions about the state, government, politics, property, law and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it should...
Inclosure (also commonly enclosure), refers to the process of subdivision of common lands for individual ownership. ...
Privatization (sometimes privatisation, denationalization, or, especially in India, disinvestment) is the process of transferring property, from public ownership to private ownership and/or transferring the management of a service or activity from the government to the private sector. ...
A popular solution to the problem is also the "Coasian" one. In law and economics, the Coase theorem, attributed to Ronald Coase, is a theorem relating to the economic efficiency of a governments allocation of property rights. ...
In Hardin's essay, he proposed that the solution to the problem of overpopulation must be based on "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" and result in "relinquishing the freedom to breed." Hardin discussed this topic further in a 1979 book, Managing the Commons, co-written with John A. Baden[1] (http://www.ecobooks.com/commons.htm). 1979 is a common year starting on Monday. ...
See also In the analyses of economics and political science, free riders are actors who take more than their fair share of the benefits or do not shoulder their fair share of the costs of their use of a resource, involvement in a project, etc. ...
The Rev. ...
The tragedy of the anticommons occurs when too many individuals have rights of exclusion (such as property rights) in a scarce resource. ...
External links and references - The original article by Garrett Hardin and responses to it (http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/sotp/commons.shtml) From the Science Magazine website.
- "Global Tragedy of the Commons at COP 6" (http://www.greens.org/s-r/24/24-26.html) by John Hickman and Sarah Bartlett
- What about the "Tragedy of the Commons"? Surely communal ownership will lead to overuse and environmental destruction? (http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secI6.html) -- Libertarian Socialist critique of the "Tragedy of the Commons"
- "The Tragedy of the Advertising Commons" (http://www.marketingprofs.com/4/syrett5.asp) by Matthew Syrett
- A documentary was broadcast on cable TV in February 2005 that illustrated the "Tragedy of the Commons."
- Slate: "Awareness bracelets and the tragedy of the commons" (http://slate.msn.com/id/2113014/) by Timothy Noah.
- The Nuts Game: A Concise Commons Dilemma Analog (http://www.g-r-e-e-d.com/Nuts%20Game.htm)
- Property Rights & the Tragedy of the Commons - Fishing Game (http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:oZV5Qfj30jAJ:www.fraserinstitute.ca/teachercentre/pdf/Property_Rights.pdf+%22tragedy+of+the+commons%22+%2Bexperiments&hl=en) Instruction on performing a classroom experiment to illustrate the behavior
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