The Tragedy of the Commons

Varun Bansal
517
 Garrett Hardin
American Ecologist and Microbiologist
(1915-2003)

“The Tragedy of the Commons”

Published in Science
magazine 1968
 Problems with no technical solution
Some problems cannot be solved with science, e.g. overpopulation
and competition for resources is this kind of problem.

Since no technical solution, the solution must be political.

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834, English

political economist):

Population grows exponentially, food

supply can only increase
arithmetically, so eventually we will
starve (or decrease population via
wars, disease or anarchy)
 The Commons

Commons: common land available to all for grazing

animals, gathering wood, etc.

Tragedy of the commons: every farmer will tend to

maximize their own profits by increasing their herd or
increasing their gathering of resources without regard
to the long-term depletion of the land. This is rational
because the benefit to the individual farmer (of, for
example, grazing one more animal on the commons) is
larger than that farmer’s share of the overall depletion
of the shared resource (i.e. the commons).
The tragedy of the commons is a metaphor for anything held in
common, used by all freely and not regulated.

Everyone will maximize his own benefit to the detriment of the whole.

Modern “commons” include:

The sea -- overfishing

The air, the land, rivers -- pollution
The public noise level -- sound pollution
National parks – overuse
The earth itself (energy, food supply, living standards) --
overpopulation
 Overpopulation
Hardin’s main concern.

“Freedom to breed is intolerable”

Overpopulation harms the world as a whole. The more

people there are, the fewer resources there are available to each
person.

As long as we have a welfare state, people will continue to have more

children than is good for society. Rational agents maximize their
own good (more children), when the cost to them is relatively low
because the cost is shared in common with society as a whole.

Assumption: each child is a net good to its parents but a net bad to
society.
 New Developments in World Population
Hardin’s work written in 1968. Since then:

China’s one-child policy

Nearly one hundred countries now have a fertility rate below

replacement level, Hong Kong is the lowest at .98 children per
woman.
 Solution
Hardin: appeals to individual conscience are bad because:

1) It discriminates against people of good conscience, and tends to

eliminate them from the population.

2) It won’t work in the long run. Nature’s revenge. People without

conscience will outbreed the others, and population will increase
again eventually.

3) It is not psychologically healthy to force people to act against their

own interests on the basis of conscience.

So the only choice is “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon”

Freedom must be limited.

Mutual Coercion Mutually Agreed Upon
Mutual coercion to solve population problem (government regulation
on number of offspring allowed) and other problems of the
commons:

Enclose the commons as private property,

Or limit usage of the commons (e.g. limits on people’s right to pollute,
to fish on the high seas, to increase public noise levels, etc.)

Rights and freedoms must be restricted for the good of everyone.

The right to breed in excess is like the right to steal from banks – it
must be controlled.
Thank You