On 10/27/2011 05:38 PM, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
On Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:17:22 -0000, Brian Johnson said:
So... I'm in complete agreement with your statement, but The Wikipedia reference is not pertinent.
So I point out the tragedy of the commons, you agree with it, but the Wikipedia reference that talks about the same exact thing isn't pertinent? How does that follow? :) Maybe he is concerned that the Wikipedia article gets into nit-picking about the ownership of the commons that isn't relevant to our problem, and also is rather long-winded. Hardin got into some things at the end of his paper that probably aren't either (but then, he was a population biologist and not an economist). BTW - that paper is a good read and not too long. The journal link (reference 1 in the wikipedia article) actually works openly (AAAS only blocks full access for a while...)
For our purpose, the ownership of the commons in question truly isn't relevant; the fundamental statement of the tragedy for us is that a "useful" resource that is incrementally free (or even cheap enough) to a large number of participants will get exploited and probably overused. I'm not aware of any solution to this problem with commons that doesn't involve a central authority :-( In feudal practice the landlord could do some enforcement; the spanish alcaldes were another good example of a semi-central solution to the commons problem (water rights in their origins, though their authority grew over time). Classic economics says that market pricing is the solution, but that tends to result in another kind of tragedy. -- Pete