Being common is tragic, but the tragedy of the commons is still true Something popped up in the comments from BobRocket a couple of weeks back, namely that the Tragedy of the Commons is a myth spread by the landgrabbers, and Elinor Ostrom proved this was wrong. Well, no, not really; not at all in fact. What Ostrom did show was hugely more interesting than simply disproving Garret Hardin's …
various taboos and customs are put in place to manage the stock.
That sounds like the "Priesthood" approach, which is surely just a variant on the Government-controlled one? People with power (either physical or spiritual) lay down the rules, and define the punishments that will happen if they are broken.
"That sounds like the "Priesthood" approach, which is surely just a variant on the Government-controlled one? People with power (either physical or spiritual) lay down the rules, and define the punishments that will happen if they are broken."
Not really, no.
Firstly, we'd probably be better off thinking of government-control as a variant on Priesthood, rather than the other way round, since in the earliest large organized societies 'priest' and 'bureaucrat' were largely the same thing ('bloke who can read and write and is allowed to go up the ziggurat').
But secondly, custom and taboo lead to priests, rather than the other way around. Priesthood is pretty intimately tied to the beginnings of agrarianism (where you get large groups of people staying in one place for hundreds of years), while custom is largely present in hunter-gatherer groups. Most groups of people (even those with less than 20 members) will develop customs and taboos over time, but you don't start getting priesthoods until you have emergent hierarchies and fairly big societies.
Archaeological evidence suggests that notions of custom and taboo clearly date back to at least 20,000 years ago, if not 40,000 (judging from funerary behaviour and cave art - hell, even other hominids appear to practice some degree of custom); conversely, full-on priesthoods imposing 'the will of god' are unlikely to predate Gobeki Tepi and Catalhoyuk (around 9,000 years ago).
So for those of us who live in cities or large towns (the great majority) voluntary solutions will not work because there are too many people.
Mr Cameron, prime minister of the UK and leader of the Conservative Party, had ideas of a Big Society that would harness the charitable instincts of people. In his own constituency, a small country town, it might sometimes work; but not for most of us.
"So for those of us who live in cities or large towns (the great majority) voluntary solutions will not work because there are too many people."
Possibly. Although it's remarkable how small the actual living unit is, even in those large towns. Neighbourhoods really do exist.
As to how to determine what will and will not work all I can suggest is the suck it and see approach.
Neighbourhoods work like small villages when the "haves" and "have nots" are spread about randomly and the people interact. But in most cities, the haves are in one neighbourhood and the have nots are in another. Village effect breaks down.
Welfare is hard to re-localise once the government has stepped in. The government welfare programs give anonymity to the transaction. You're getting welfare from "the government", so you don't feel any moral compunction to the bloke next door who's paying through taxes. This feeds a feeling of entitlement.
From the other side, the anonymity also makes the beneficiaries a faceless group. No longer is it the community gathering together to help Old Pete. It's now faceless taxpayers vs faceless bludgers - many miles away.
Exactly. There are places where the Community (a more sensible name for the Big Society) works well, but they're limited.
People used to believe that the Community, under the guidance of wise and benevolent leaders, could be extended to a national and global scale. They called it Communism, and in practice it proved to have far worse problems that the Capitalism it competed against.
Did Cameron resurrect the communist dream? He was thinking of something good: the way the voluntary/charity sector works, and even more so the way it could work if not crippled by red tape. It's a valuable resource, and has more potential than ever, not least from an army of fit&healthy pensioners with time on their hands. Logically speaking, he should have slashed lots of red tape. But the things he should have done are far too sensitive. For example, he should have made it less of a bureaucratic nightmare to work with children, and given them back a lot more of our streets. But as soon as he does that, the handful who suffer become screaming headlines, while the million who benefit go unnoticed.
I guess it's the modern tragedy of the commons: trial by media. Which joins the old Malthusian trouble that's gone global since some idealistic nutters in the 1980s thought they could end famine without doing anything to slow the birthrate.
"the handful who suffer become screaming headlines, while the million who benefit go unnoticed."
Hammer. Nail. Head.
Or as others might put it, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Almost certainly the biggest problem in so-called democratic governments around the world today. Politicians want to be re-elected so have to be seen to be "doing something" and the easiest route to that is to pander to pressure groups who've managed to grab the medias attention, no matter the actual need ot benefit to the country or electorate as a whole.
"...the handful who suffer become screaming headlines, while the million who benefit go unnoticed."
Handful? Have you NOT been paying attention to population numbers? Or math in general?
The UK population is currently at 64.1 MILLION. If just one percent of that population is in dire straits or suffering some consequence of bad policy, that's 640,000 people. That is not "a handful" in anyone's book. Anyone sane, that is.
Now extrapolate to the other nations numbers. At some point, it goes beyond "mere" suffering and straight into "barely holding back anarchy and government overthrow that will result in mass deaths". Like yours.
See the problem?
So the millions who benefit can still have it taken away by those kinds of destabilizing forces. Many, many a government and leader thought those who suffered could just eat cake.
Think of it in terms of small villages along a river. In any given small village people will cooperate and not fall victim to the tragedy of the commons. They don't want to do something that hurts others in the village because they have to live there.
But when they create effects beyond their village, they no longer care. For instance, people who live on the upstream end of the village won't dump sewage in the river, because doing so would negatively affect their friends and neighbors who use the river for drinking water and washing clothes. But the one who is most downstream won't care, because none of his neighbors will be affected. He will affect the village three miles downstream, however.
This is why, if you want to limit CO2, voluntary restrictions cannot work. The CO2 emitted in the US doesn't stay in the US, nor do its effects. Even if everyone in the world universally agreed that AGW is happening and humanity needs to reduce CO2, there is little societal pressure on a factory owner to spend money to do so. He'll know the CO2 he emits is a rounding error on a rounding error, and no one driving by can look at the smokestack and tell how much CO2 is coming out of it. So even if he believes what everyone else does, it is in his own best financial interest to not spend the money to reduce his CO2 emissions.
CO2 emitted by the US has reduced steadily as technology addresses efficient energy extraction from hydrocarbons. We aren't really short of hydrocarbon fuels, but the common belief is that we are and that most of our energy derives from overseas sources - it doesn't. In fact, the US continues to produce a large fraction of the energy it needs, and doesn't export oil despite the whinging demands that two-way trade in oil be opened up by the government. US energy is among the cheapest on the planet largely because of the lower need for the US to compete for foreign oil.
Also, when thinking about CO2 consider this. All that green stuff out the window, the chlorophyll-bearing plants are composed primarily of two chemical compounds: water and CO2. There are traces of other elements (nitrogen and a bit of magnesium for instance) many of which remain as ash when you burn a plant, but the immense bulk consists of CO2 and water converted to carbohydrates (e.g. potatoes and wood). Burning them returns the CO2 and water to circulation (you can fry and then metabolize the potato if you like - same difference). When you say "fossil fuel" you are saying that the water and CO2 that composes that fossil fuel has only recently become available once more for use by plants - and thus by other organisms as well. Anyone who has actually studied historical geology in the whole is not worried about CO2, unless perhaps they are concerned that current biologically available supplies are the lowest they have reached since the end of the Permian - 250-million years ago. Plants need CO2 and we need plants.
I think though the problem with a lot of Government regulation vs Private regulation isn't simple.
Some Governments are traditionally really controlled by Civil Servants*, others by corruption. The problem too with Government can be lack of enforcement or penalties for complex reason. The World Bank uses the Privatisation of Eircom (Ireland) as a case study of how NOT to put regulation in place and privatise a Semi-State or State company. If Greece manages sell off and regulation of near monopolistic business badly the results can be worse than doing nothing.
Long term Profit isn't always the motivation of Business, but can be asset stripping or other short termism policies.
[* Yes Minister is a documentary on the subject]
The entire discussion has been going on for a long time. In California old-growth timber is in short supply largely because of both government and private mismanagement. Some of that is due to basic ignorance masquerading as knowledge - e.g. replacement of natural forest structures with even-age management, monoculture and the like. Ideas that are formed and guided by a peculiar mix of OCD engineering (people prefer things to be neat or at least simple) and many engineers in forestry are dreadfully bad at forestry, and short term profit maximizing.
Occasionally you have an operation that historically does an excellent job of maintaining their resource, but then gets bought out by a clown in an Armani suit who realizes all that good wood could be cut down and turned into profit in a year. Of course once the wood is gone, for his intentions and purposes the land is now useless. This kind of action is often described as "capitalism," but is in fact not capitalism at all. It is much closer to the free ride syndrome at best. The previous owner (private property right there) managed the forest "sustainably" for over a century, at a steady profit, selectively selecting and felling trees, resisting increasing demand by increasing the cost of first rate wood, and letting new "profit" grow to maturity.
Cheers for the callout, whilst my opinions may often be wrong, as long as they provoke thoughful responses and interesting rebuttals I will keep on expressing them (and changing them when I see fit).
I agree that there was a market for buffalo leather, I am of the opinion that the extermination of the Great Plains herds was encouraged for the political reason of ridding that area of the native inhabitants.
http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/aboutbuffalo/bisonslaughterhistory.html
The community limitations of 2 to 3 thousand have been broken by social media / internetworking, an individual can be a member of many communities whereas in the original each individual was a member of only one.
Social capital has more leverage than tradional capital.
'Owners of “Rights” are evolving into Nova-Luddites under the relentless onslaught of social media Apps and Ostrum Principles'
http://andreswhy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/nova-luddites.html
"The community limitations of 2 to 3 thousand have been broken by social media / internetworking,"
I think to an extent that is true. One of the times when I agree with Marx: the means of production determine social relations. So, new technologies can change the optimal sizes of organisations, say.
Entirely happy with that.
How much that change changes things I'm not all that sure. That we can all Twatter each other is true, but I would need some serious convincing that this makes, say, organising the management of deep sea fishing stocks easier.
Tim, I share your sceptisim about internetworking.
The basic question is what are the factors that allow small communities to work, but that no longer work with larger number of people.
It could be communication, in which case internetworking would be helpful.
However, it could also be other factors, such as the collective ability to enforce compliance, or the need to set down 'laws', or even the fundamental organization to do any of the above: i.e., it might be most efficient to organize some kind of hierarchical organization: i.e., government (I'm not necessarily arguing the inevitability of government, just positing the segue from community to government). In all these, internetworking can be a facilitator, but is not the solution.
> The community limitations of 2 to 3 thousand have been broken by social media / internetworking, an individual can be a member of many communities whereas in the original each individual was a member of only one.
I seem to recall some study from a while back that looked at the average size of a medieval village vs the number of "friends" people had on FB and they were roughly the same. I suspect that you are right, though , in that community sizes remain roughly unchanged, it's just that people may now more easily identify with more than one community due to this "social-meeja" thing.
As a matter of historical fact access to commons was formally regulated by the manorial court. You don't usually have to read far through manorial court rolls to discover this. Although it would normally be the community via their sworn men who would raise the issue at court it would be the lord of the manor or his steward who would rule and the lord who would profit by the subsequent amercement (fine). But I've seen at least one example where an entire township was pained about over-exploitation.
I'm unconvinced by your examples of Mongolian shepherds and nomads. Unless there is evidence to the contrary, it seems to me more likely that over a 5000 year time scale their populations have varied for the same reasons that animal populations rise and fall. In those marginal environments climate variation will control population. A few successive hard winters or dry summers can wipe out whole families by starvation or being forced to sell their livestock and adopt a different lifestyle. The recent succession of droughts in the Sahel exemplify this. In richer environments disease may cause a similar effect - eg the Black Death.
It is interesting to speculate what will happen when a virus appears that is as lethal as Ebola and as infectious as influenza.
Yes, we have air travel to spread the 90% fatality 1 month incubation time, spreadable before symptoms appear parasite/fungus/bacteria/virus.
People going to public toilets, using door handles and exchanging money and not washing their hands too. Have we really changed much or just have a lot more gadgets?
The world might be a different place but the people are the same. Humans are humans the world over and they do the same things humans in the past did. It might look different but its still humans reacting to the environment around them in the same way as they did in the past.
>humans the world over and they do the same things humans in the past did.
Not quite. What has changed is tech, industrialisation and massive global trade which are all rather new. In the past, there was little to be gained by having ever-large flocks of sheep and the size of the flock was governed to an extent by the grass available. Now we ship artificial feed so we grow the flocks beyond what can be reasonably supported. We have massive trade which means surplus resources can be converted to cash and we have industrialised tech which gives us something to spend the money on. In the past, supply was fairly limited and demands were simple and few. You had food, clothing and a place to live. You could always have more food and more clothing but there is a limit on how much food you can consume. The opportunity for greed is now much higher than it used to be. Massive amounts of gold made you a target for revolution, war and theft. Large flocks could be rustled and tend to have limited growth potential. Now we have bank accounts with infinite growth potential and almost global protection.
The tragedy of the commons of the high seas is made possible by fishing tech, industrialised fish processing and global trade which makes fishermen consuming more fish than they can personally use or personally sell, lucrative. Likewise, farmers produce on an industrial scale, kill insects on an industrial scale, killing other plant-life on an industrial scale, removing habitat for animals on an industrial scale, generally thinking they can "manage" the environment through tech, externalising the cost of doing so to some future or not-so-future time. To support the farming industry over-production, corn is turned to sugar and enters the food industry very cheaply. The cost of industrialised over-production of corn is externalised from the industry where it negatively impacts the nations' health. Logging the world's rainforests wouldn't be demanded if there wasn't tech for massive wood-processing and global trade to disperse the goods.
Human nature hasn't changed, but our capacity to consume (for ourselves or in trade) has massively increased and it is massively damaging.
@P.Lee In the past, there was little to be gained by having ever-large flocks of sheep
On the contrary, Eastern England has many insignificant villages with magnificent churches paid for out of wool profits. The fact that the Lord Chancellor sits on something called the Woolsack is an indication of the money in sheep-runs.
Perzacktly, The Mongolian steppes looks like that precisely because they have been denuded by the human population. As the steppe was denuded too much to support the human population, the human population died off, allowing the food resources (the steppe) to recover, allowing the resourse exploiter population. (the humans) to recover. Classic foxes'n'rabbits ecological dynamic balance. It's just, to paraphrase Tim, nowadays people tend to frown upon starvation as a means of limiting resource use.
Foxes and rabbits indeed but even more like rabbits and myxomatosis. The problem I had was with Tim's picture of 5000 years of cooperation by what he calls Mongolian shepherds. Even today anyone who watches television will have seen that "shepherd" is not a good description of the mounted, armed Mongolian nomads. We are also told that they were a byword for tribal conflict prior to the arrival of the Genghis Khan. Maybe the last 1000 years has been relatively peaceful - for them if not for the rest of Eurasia but the previous 4000 not so much :-(
It is interesting to speculate what will happen when a virus appears that is as lethal as Ebola and as infectious as influenza.
I was speculating on exactly this on my comute this morning, as the heavy set woman on the other side of the aisle hacked, coughed, sneezed and wheezed her way through the journey. Seriously people, if you're sick, just stay home.
How does the 'capitalist solution' hold up when corporations are, as is increasingly the case, utterly focussed on this years figures? Screw the catastrophe that's 3 years down the road, that's someone else's problem.
It may not be logical to critically deplete a particular resource.... but it happens all the time.
But it's necessary to show that corporations are utterly focussed on that short term. And I've not really seen any evidence of it. As far as I can tell the human organisations with the longest planning horizons are still those large corporations. Exxon, Shell, etc, take on projects with 40 year lifespans, plan out to 50 and 60 years into the future.
Other than pension actuaries I don't actually know of anyone else who is that long term.
However, I don't think you can hold up mineral extraction companies as great examples of preserving the commons.
Certainly they are going to maximise the value of their investment, but that is done by (a) stripping it as fast as possible and (b) stripping as much as is economically possible. It's not as if the mine will replenish itself if you extract at a lower rate.
You're sharp-shooting the industry-sector here:
Firstly, as you know *perfectly well*, the oil industry is unusual that the size of the reserves depends inversely on the extraction-rate. If you extract slower, the total amount that comes out of the ground increases. Oddly enough, oil companies rape less than aluminium smelters
Secondly, the oil industry is unusual that there are very little structural alternatives (sort of coal, but not really). Therefore, pushing extraction beyond peak oil gets a much higher price on the market. Oddly enough, different market dynamic to cod fisheries off the Grand Banks - once the cod are gone, people eat something else, because the price can only increase to the most expensive food source
"I don't know anyone else who is that long-term". Umm - other than the Chinese government? You're just being silly here to make a point.
The Chinese government aren't long term thinkers. Sure they have a reasonable leadership strategy, of changing the top echelons every ten years, so they don't ossify. And they have five year plans.
But they based their whole development model on mercantilism. Which is known not to work long term. They repressed internal demand in the ecnomy, partly for political reasons I suspect, as they were worried about an assertive middle class wanting more power. This was done by artificially lowering exchange rates. In the short term this was great, as they could artificially boost their export industries, keep the economy growing fast and outcompete Western factories.
But, this isn't a viable long term strategy. Because you start buidling up huge profits. And you can't use them in your own economy, because you don't want the currency to rise, or the workers' wages to become uncompetitive. So you invest that money abroad, recycled back to the countries that are buying your stuff. Which you need to do, because you're running huge trade surpluses with them, and you're repressing your internal demand, so not buying their stuff from them, so they haven't got the money to buy your stuff from you.
So they borrow massively. And they borrow your profits. But eventually this comes to an end, with them having huge asset bubbles that pop, and recessions due to lack of demand, as many of their jobs have migrated to your economy. But you're now sad, as you've loaned them loads of money they may not be able to pay back. And now you've got a huge export industry with no-one to sell to, as you've helped crater their economies, but your internal market is under-developed. So you get deflation at home and abroad, and a financial crisis. See also the North-South divide in the Eurozone.
The Chinese have been scrabbling to deal with that clearly foreseeable crisis since 2008 - same as the rest of us.
"Running the lifeboats is similarly (and to the mystification of other nations) in the UK left to charity. But while the fundraising is national that also really works because the crews are coming from small communities and are welded together socially."
As a crew and helm for the RNLI for 15 years it is indeed a unique organisation.
I believe that there was an attempt for a limited period in the 1970s to have it run by government, but as with many government projects, it was just another department that could have its costs cut as civil servants and their masters saw fit.
The RNLI management felt that this was not in the best interests of the Institution and decided to become completely independent again.
What is amazing is the that the management have a rolling program to visit every station about once every 5 years to meet the workers at the coal face. Having sat in on a couple of meetings face to face with the top brass it was amazing to be able to say exactly what you thought with no fear of reproach, and then seeing ideas mooted put in to practice.
As the then Chief Exec said "You have to tell us what you need. Our job is to provide it. You risk your lives for free. Our job is make sure you have the best equipment we can find to make your job as easy and safe as possible. If we are getting it wrong then tell us to our faces."
I can't imagine many organisations anywhere that have that level of interaction between the top and the bottom.
It is not the sort of attitude you get in government run bodies (ask anyone in the Armed Services..... I have two relatives 'in' and the treatment of our serving soldiers/sailors/airmen is quite frankly atrocious)
I still fail to understand how the Institution does what it does and raise the level of money that it does - I am sure Tim has a theory on how it works economically ! Yes, the crews are local and tightly welded but I think that there is quite a degree of separation of them from the largest body of donations.
The biggest chunk does indeed come from legacies, but that is in the decline and has been for some time (I remember discussing it at one of those meetings probably 15 or 20 years ago), presumably due to social changes. Hence they have turned to other ways of raising funds. Note that the Institutions financial planning extends something like 50 years ahead....
What is most staggering is going to the annual RNLI presentations in London where fund raisers and crew are honoured. I was pretty well in tears most of the time. Little ladies from some small village who had barely been to the seaside, let alone been to sea, spending 50 years collecting safety pins for scrap or somesuch and raising 10s and 10s of thousands of pounds. We loudly applauded every single one. My hands hurt for days, but it was worth it.
Why do they do it ? There is an emotive link somewhere I guess. Island nation, tales of derring-do on the high seas by 'heroic volunteers' (read 'idiots like me' !!!) etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynmouth_Lifeboat_Station for instance
It truly is an amazing organisation. One of which I was proud to be a member of. But what makes it all possible is the phenomenal support of the public. To everyone of you who has ever put a penny in a box, or ridden, or walked, or jumped, or shaved your head for the RNLI, a huge thank you from me for all your support.
What also fascinates me is the international aspect to it, since (despite having "Royal National" in its name) the RNLI also operates sea rescue for the Republic of Ireland. It's truly a organistion dedicated to a common goal, saving lives at sea, and with both UK and RoI being island, seafaring nations, it seems to transcend any petty differences.
Contrast it to groups like the RSPCA, which seems to have become an activist lobbying group and has long forgotten its real goal. I can't see the RNLI going that way, and you (poster above) have every right to be proud of your part in it. I have friends and family who sail, and although they've never needed you (yet) it is very reassuring to know you are there.
The RoI think is easy enough: back at founding it was all the UK. and it covers the I of Man as well: which it should do of course, because that's where it was really founded. But Lord of Man's Lifeboat Service doesn't have quite the same ring (that being what the Queen is when she's there).
Trinity House (the lighthouses) was also, at least until recently, all British Isles for the same historical reason, the date of founding.
Top notch there, top notch.
And the only economic story I know is that the RNLI did take government funds at some point. Really not sure whether that was 1970s or 1870s tho;. But they soon stopped. They found that they were losing more than £1 in donations for every £1 they were getting from government.
two examples used in this essay which are invalid - or possibly give alternative options
1) the near-extinction of the plains buffalo was due to direct government encouragement to deprive the native indians of their food source. The use of the resulting carcass was immaterial - in many cases they were simply left to rot, and the killers were simply paid a bounty for slaughtering the beasts. What happened was due to a desire to destroy the resource, not harvest or perpetuate it.
2) using mountain farmers as an example is dodgy.......the general trend worldwide has been to stuff as many sheep or goats on the hills as possible and graze the grassland to destruction. With low population levels maybe use was in line with sustainability, but I doubt if you'll find any valid examples now - or indeed anywhere in the last 100 years.
No, private ownership of deep sea fish would NOT lead to sustainable management, due to the concept of Net Present Value.
All future cash flows are discounted by the discount rate, defined as the rate of return expected on other investments of similar risk. Put simply, with a discount rate around 6.6 %, maintaining any fish to catch at all more than about thirty years in the future is virtually irrelevant, as they don't contribute to NPV calculation. From a company capital perspective, far better to scoop them all up today and sell them before the future discounts them. 6.6% is equivalent to P/E ratio 15 that most companies operate on today.
This is the much more general point - anything with a recovery period longer than the discount rate => Market PE ratio, will always get raped rather than sustained. Philosophically, there might even be a point to that - maximising utility to human beings - except for one thing. People's own, human, discount rate is much longer. If I told you that trees wouldn't exist in 200 years time, you would not be exponentially disinterested in that by e^-18.
THAT is the purpose of government regulation: to preserve societies discount ratio in the face of short term private enterprise
Couldn't upvote you enough.
The trouble with economics is that it does not know how to value the so-called 'intangibles'.
Some have argued, for a while now, for adding the value of intangibles (e.g., air, water quality, esthetics) to the economic equation. They continue ot face an uphill struggle.
Kinda. But no.
Scooping up as many fish as you can now would massively depress the price of fish to virtually zero, they tend not to be a great store of value. And given the massive increase in price next year due to scarcity anyone not engaging in the frenzied orgy of overfishing would make enormous profits in future years. Assuming the fishing rights were based on sea area and fish didn't travel too far.
Plus many fishermen are in a family business so are unlikely to mess up their children's legacy in search of short term profits, especially ones that don't exist.
"All future cash flows are discounted by the discount rate, defined as the rate of return expected on other investments of similar risk."
There is a circularity in your argument because you assume that the people making the investment are always people who use banking methods of assessment. Not everybody does. That is why there are farms, houses and companies that have been in the same families for hundreds of years.
Regulation is actually needed because assets like fisheries are subject to competition; people competing for the same asset will extract it as rapidly as they can. But if a deep sea fishery could be controlled by a powerful clan or family, the attitude wouldn't be bean counting, it would be "I want this still to be here for my grandchildren." Just as farmers acquire land in the belief they will have more descendants than there are now, and they want to provide for them.
I am reminded of a comment by a former chief executive of Rolls Royce; that if the company never delivered a new engine after that day, it would still be around in 50 years servicing the old ones.
I just found out about CIC and I am very impressed and would value @Tim Worstall's thoughts on them. They may be the future of the NHS.
CICs are limited companies so the are easy to run and grow using conventional management techniques but they have an "asset lock" so the non-community stakeholders (Investors, Directors, Employees) can not do a runner with the assets. Crucially they are real companies and can more easily pay market rate for employees than charities and it is hoped that this will enable social entrepreneurs. The "asset lock" means that it is politically acceptable to gift public assets such as hospitals to them.
I think they might be the next big thing.
Hmm. Just an initial thought.
Could well work in the short term. But in the long term not so much. Because we actually want it to be possible for assets to change their use. For, as technology (and population, taste, etc) changes the most valuable use of any asset can change.
Locking in asset use for the long term isn't therefore really what we want to do.
To take two different examples: OK, fine with the idea that Barts has been a hospital site for a millennium now. OK. But imagine that someone had set up a site to deal with horse shit in the 19th century. It was a real problem, maybe someone would have done this. But what if we now had that same central London site locked in as only to be used for dealing with horse shit?
We really do want it to be possible for assets to be sold for new uses over time.
Regarding the third choice: the finding is correct that above certain populations sizes, the voluntary system no longer works. That's why it's so rare.
People really are, for the most part, stupid. It's also why psychopaths politicians and self made leaders are able to get away with the crimes they do.
When they gave the Nobel price to Olstrom I thought:
Are they really giving someone a Nobel price for describing how the Water Court works?
Kind of easy, isn't it?
My knowledge of nomadic pastoralists is meagre, to say the least, and previous posts have made it clear that the vision of peaceful sharing in the Mongolian steppes could not be further from the truth. The repeated invasions of Europe from the East* were more likely to have been caused by resource depletion than mindless aggression.
That said, I suspect that in practice the tragedy of the commons must depend on the efficientcy of the feedback loop. If shortage of resources culls the population of depleters fast enough, then a stable state can be achieved. The problem is that although homo sapiens has fairly low fertility, the resilience and adaptability of the species are such that it can usually survive exhaustion of one resource and go on to deplete another.
Lemmings have a large 3-4 year population cycle that might be due to this kind of feedback. I suppose we have yet to find if there's an equivalent cyle for us.
* Huns and possibly Goths, as well as Mongols.
'Worstall @ the Weekend Something popped up in the comments from BobRocket a couple of weeks back, namely that the Tragedy of the Commons is a myth spread by the landgrabbers, and Elinor Ostrom proved this was wrong. Well, no, not really; not at all in fact.'
Well, no, not really; not at all in fact !
This was the post.
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/2561737
I did say 'The Tragedy of the Commons is a myth spread by the land grabbers.' and underneath I did post a link to Elinor Ostrom but nowhere did I say that she had proved this wrong.
She did prove 'This inevitableness of destiny' was wrong and that there are instances of working commons.
It's my opinion that these 'working commons' actually fall into one of the two classic styles rather than representing a third way.
The Governmental type (quango) on commons usage with open access, restrictions are enforced through peer pressure / local byelaw changes.
The Private model where access is restricted to a select group (live within boundaries for example)
They are all 'Landgrabbers', they want some kind of hold over a naturally occurring resource to the exclusion of others and will use whatever excuse serves their purpose.
I don't have a problem with that per se but as natural resources are a 'Common Good' it is only fair that the holders pay the excluded a share for the use.
Finally, about social media,
'but I would need some serious convincing that this makes, say, organising the management of deep sea fishing stocks easier.'
Because of consumer pressure you get things like Dolphin friendly tuna and fairtrade chocolate. Corporates, large or small. will change their behaviour or suffer loss of business.
If you were worried about deep sea fish stocks 30 years ago it was very difficult to challenge the status quo, today you can start a campaign in the morning, take to twatter and form a likeminded community to do something about it and by the afternoon you can be affecting the share price.
Social media allows the formation of ad hoc single issue pressure groups that can and do affect the bottom line.
Demand and supply are put back into their correct order and the customer rightly regains his crown.
This
https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/ge/gepotatoban.php
lead to this
http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/latestnews/entryid/1639/campaign-win-m-s-drop-grouse.aspx
On the whole it was a good article and provoked some interesting responses, that it also exposes Elinor Ostrom to a wider audience is definitely for the common good.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
