In this lecture we're going to talk about a concept called the "Tragedy of the Commons."
This concept, the concept of the "Tragedy of the Commons" has been developed following
the introduction of the paper in which the idea was initially conceived in 1968 in the
Journal of Science.
There's a picture of the cover here, and you can download it on the Internet if you would
like to.
It's a very good article introducing this idea.
The article was written by Garret Hardin and it was about discussing primarily economic
problems that arise from things that are commons.
The author was particularly interested in applying different kinds of solutions and
analytic approaches to limiting population growth, but this concept has now been applied
as an analytical tool for a wide range of other problems and it has provided some understandability,
particularly towards trying to understand sustainability challenges.
This article starts with an interesting observation from the Cold War, the time when the United
States and the Soviet Union primarily were at odds with one another and were building
nuclear stockpiles in an effort to deter one another from war.
As the U.S. and the former Soviet Union stockpiled nuclear arms they were steadily increasing
their military power, but at the same time because of the amount of destruction that
was enabled by these weapons they were gradually eroding their national security simultaneously.
Through this example Hardin drew attention to the fact that this problem really doesn't
have a technological solution.
It required a change in human values or a change in the ideas of morality in order to
stop this ever-growing increase in nuclear weapons.
This problem in particular reminds me of our previous discussion during this class when
we were talking about the narratives of technological determinism.
Using that concept we like to conclude that technological solutions are always welcome
because of the technology, and they're new, and they appear to be in the future and necessarily
appear to be better because that's kind of this culture in which we live.
But, we can see that in the case of nuclear arms as one example the bigger picture was
not getting better, and that should serve as a warning sign about other places where
we just causally accept the idea that technological solutions are going to make things better.
The "Tragedy of the Commons" expands on this example of the nuclear arms race to create
a whole class of problems where a similar structure exists.
Another example would be the game of tic-tac-toe, just the very basic game of tic-tac-toe.
If you study this problem, if you study this game for a little while, it doesn't take a
lot of deep insight to understand that two sufficiently skilled players can create an
environment where no one can ever win the game.
In order to win tic-tac-toe it really requires redefining what win means in order to make
any progress or drastically changing the rules of the game.
For example, if you club your opponent over the head with some big stick and knock them
unconscious and that counts as a win you have fundamentally changed the rules of the game
so that the original analysis didn't work.
So, tic-tac-toe is an example of a situation where people can't win and, therefore, you
need a change in understanding about what winning means in order to make any sort of
progress in the game.
So, his overall purpose of his argument just personally makes me a little uncomfortable.
I'm a father of four kids so I have a pretty large family, and he was basically arguing
that human population growth is in this class of problems.
You know, in a lot of ways we can trace back many sustainability problems to the fact that
the world's population is increasing to a point at which the planet can't sustain that
population anymore.
So, the basic premise that he says is that the world is finite, limited resources, and
therefore can only support a finite population.
That means that at some point population growth must reach zero.
There is some maximum population that is theoretically possible, but if we ever reach that there
would be no margin for doing anything beyond merely sustaining our existence.
There would be no vacations, there would be no movies, there would be no sports because
every free moment, every calorie that you spent in moving your body and doing work would
have to be spent on collecting, raising and growing the next calorie just so that you
could sustain the population.
There would be no energy left over to do anything vaguely cultural.
Then we're faced with this very difficult question.
At what population should we stop, and how are we going to do that?
A common response to this would be to rely on market-based solutions.
A market-based solution would argue that individuals left to their own devices will stop having
children because they see that they are worse off at some point with more children then
they are with their current number of children.
Proponents of the market-based position argue quite strongly, and a well formulated argument,
that because everyone values different things in life differently, some people value children
more than they value vacations, we should just let everyone make up their own individual
choice and this will end up being best for everyone.
In order to counter the market argument, Hardin introduced the idea of the "Tragedy of the
Commons."
In this case when he says the word tragedy he doesn't mean just the common meaning of
the word, something sad, but he means rather the dramatic or the philosophical use of the
word which means that the essence of tragedy isn't unhappiness, but it resides in the solemnity
of the remorseless working of things.
He then referred back to a pamphlet from the 1700s in which this "Tragedy of the Commons"
idea was introduced in the context of a shepherd in a pasture.
Imagine or picture an open pasture that is open to everyone.
Each shepherd in that village that uses that pasture grazes a flock of sheep there in common
and everyone uses the pasture as a commons.
Let's say that there are 500 sheep per shepherd, it's a very large encumbrance, and that there
are 20 shepherds.
One day in a period of relative stability each shepherd starts to think about how they
can maximize their own profit.
They think well, what's the benefit to me of getting one more sheep?
Well, it's pretty good.
I get one more sheep.
What's the cost of that?
Well, the cost to me is very small.
There is a small cost to the commons and that cost is the pasture loss by introducing one
more sheep into the pasture.
It's very small because it's the difference between each sheep getting 1/10000 of the
pasture and the sheep getting 1:10001 of the pasture because the pasture is shared.
Overall it's a real good decision for me.
Adding together the benefits and the costs yeah, I'm going to get another sheep.
So, this herdsman gets another sheep and then does the calculation again and continues adding
more and more and more sheep.
Well, of course at the same time all the other shepherds, all the other herdsmen, are reaching
the same conclusion and so each individual is reaping the full benefit of having another
sheep, but the costs are being borne by the whole community and that is the tragedy of
course.
It's a tragedy because each shepherd is locked into a market-based system in which the choices
that they make in order to individually benefit themselves are destroying the very system
that they depend on which is a commons.
The quote from the article is that "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all" because you
get locked into this market-based behavior.
So, education.
Education can counteract this natural tendency to some degree.
If you understand what you're doing you may resist some of the temptation to buy another
sheep, but this puts people in a state of cognitive dissidence because they are required
to continually convince themselves not to take an action which would benefit themselves
when they look out and they possibly see other people walk around them taking the exact same
action to their benefit leaving the individual behind.
That's a very difficult position to put people in and to expect them to be able to behave
in a way that's good for the commons.
The structure of this argument generally has been applied as an analytical tool to a number
of different environmental sustainability challenges.
Take for example the issue of ocean fishing.
The ocean is a commons, and each company or person or government may think that adding
one more fishing boat, one more fishing pole, one more fishing fleet is going to be better
for them, and they're right.
They get additional fish as part of their harvest, but eventually there just won't be
enough fish left in the ocean in order to feed everyone.
Another example is pollution.
You can think of the air, the atmosphere, as a commons.
Each individual polluter thinks that increasing their manufacturing activity or whatever activity
they're doing that increases pollution isn't individually going to cause any substantial
harm, and they're right.
A little additional pollution put into the whole atmosphere by an individual isn't very
much cost compared to the benefit of the additional manufacturing activity, but pretty soon if
everyone does that places like Beijing become so badly polluted that you can barely see
any considerable distance on many days during the year.
A third example is peak oil.
Peak oil is an example where any individual drilling for a new barrel of oil reaps the
benefit of that barrel of oil, but at the same it is depleting the commons of the oil
that is available generally speaking everywhere that isn't renewable.
You get the benefit of one barrel of oil, but overall the amount of oil that is available
goes away.
These are some sustainability examples, but there are examples also that are specifically
in the technological realm.
For example, net neutrality.
If you as an individual consumer turn on Netflix and say oh, I'd like to download one additional
movie and maybe at one slightly higher quality level well, that's good for you.
You get a better movie experience, you paid for it basically, but pretty soon if everyone
does this you're going to saturate the bandwidth of the wires that bring those bits to your
house, or the wireless spectrum that brings those bits to your house, and no one is going
to be able to watch a movie because of the congestion.
Another example is spam e-mail.
Because spam is basically free to send any additional e-mail that gets sent by a sender
gives them some benefit.
Increased exposure and better marketing, but because it's very cheap the sender can receive
many, many e-mails and that's not good for the sender as they receive all of these things.
So, the receiver is kind of the commons of that example who receives many e-mails from
many senders and it destroys your ability to process information.
As well, the backbone on which e-mail travels gets saturated by all these e-mails.
The backbone is a commons, and the attention span of a receiver is a commons.
There are two technological examples.