Returning to the question of population control, the author argues that population is a particularly
difficult challenge where the population uses the commons which are the resources of the
planet.
The reason it is a problem is because we generally hold the value of human life very highly appropriately
so.
We support people through all kinds of various relationships, through social structures,
through government programs etc., and as people use these resources they are resources that
are held in common.
The author then provides about five different solutions to the general problem of the "Tragedy
of the Commons."
One is that you can convert the commons into a private asset.
For example, in the case of ocean fishing you can imagine de-marketing out areas of
the ocean and selling them as tracks to individuals who are then responsible for managing that.
It is no longer a commons.
Only that individual has rights to that area to fish, and as a result they are incentivized
to manage it so that they will continue to extract profit from it in the long run.
In the case of carbon pollution, carbon dioxide pollution, you can create cap and trade markets.
Cap and trade markets give people the right to pollute if they have credits to pollute.
Those credits can be bought and sold on a market, but you are not allowed to pollute
unless you have those credits.
In that way you have created a market that distributes the resources of the commons rather
then enabling everyone to be able to use the commons at once.
This of course requires regulation and enforcement.
A third solution is to use mutual coercion.
This is basically a change in social infrastructure, social morality, in order to establish sustainability
to a commons.
For example, we don't allow bank robbers to treat our money like commons when they are
in a bank.
They can't just walk in and say hey, here's a lot of money.
It's just in common.
I'm going to take some of that for myself.
Instead we just completely prohibit it, and if we outlaw something like that we're using
the force of legal penalty, the force of state control, to prevent the use of something as
a commons.
A fourth solution would be to tax things or to treat them as a limited use environment.
For example, for parking spaces on the road, at least in urban environments, these are
like a commons and so in order to prevent it from being overused so that there is parking
available when you need it we tax them in a way with parking meters.
We usually put an absolute cap on the amount of parking that can be done by putting a two
hour, four hour limit, maybe an overnight prohibition on parking somewhere, and through
this we establish a proactive economic regulation of something that could otherwise be a commons.
A fifth example is through permitting.
If you take for example what hunters are allowed to do.
They are allowed to buy a permit to go in and hunt say deer in a particular area, and
the number of permits that are issued limit the amount of access to the wilderness which
is the commons so that the deer population can continue to exist in some healthy way.
Some hunters are allowed to hunt and in this way we're selling access to a commons.
Those are some solutions.
The problem, though, is that anytime you legislate the commons, you regulate the commons in some
way, that is necessarily infringing on someone's personal liberty.
If you legislate permits for hunting, hunters are no longer as free as they were.
If you put in parking meters people who park are no longer a free as they were.
If you regulate pollution manufacturers are no longer as free as they were.
This management of the commons is always going to have someone who is worse off for the benefit
of the commons as a whole.
This quote from the article says to sort of point that out "Individuals locked into the
freedom of the commons are free only to bring on universal ruin."
This is of course only relevant as population grows.
Not doing anything to protect a commons isn't a solution because ultimately the commons
will be destroyed as the usage grows.
So, any solution is going to have problems, and because of that we know that a solution
to the problem of the "Tragedy of the Commons" in that case the perfect is the enemy of the
good.
Trying to seek a perfect solution of managing the commons is probably not available, and
while you're searching for a perfect solution the commons may be degraded when a good solution
might be sufficient for protecting the commons.
If we return to the original question that Hardin introduced about limiting population
growth that sparked this whole thinking, this whole analytical process, it's important to
recognize that his argument didn't entirely turn out the way he envisioned it.
Various studies since 1968 have shown a population growth may actually be in the process of self-correcting.
This is because there are other forces at work besides just a real simple market-based
mechanism.
Population in the industrialized world appears to be leveling off.
These predictions here from the journal Nature indicate some predictions of how that might
be.
It's not sure why, but some proposed causes to why this leveling off has happened include
increased education, increased standard of living, increased rights for women particularly
over the access and ability to use birth control, urban lifestyles, secularism, cost of living
going up.
These are all things that have been proposed as causes for this leveling off of population
growth.
Irregardless, the idea of the "Tragedy of the Commons" remains a very useful and persistent
way and powerful way of looking at systems in which there is a commons at work.
In summary, the commons if justifiable at all is justifiable only under conditions of
low population density, and of course this is relative to the commons that you're talking
about.
As the human population has increased various commons have had to have abandoned in one
aspect or another.
For example, open farming that existed maybe during the westward expansion in the United
States had to be curtailed for private farms.
Open dumping of garbage into the woods behind your house might have been fine during colonial
times, but as population grew sewage systems and waste management were required.
Finally, open airways in which people fly planes wherever they would like to had to
be managed through flight plans and managed flight paths so that planes wouldn't crash
into each other as air travel grew.
Many of the challenges of the "Tragedy of the Commons" are now only appearing because
of the scale of the activities which we are now able to undertake.
When there is only one fishing boat there just isn't a problem.
When there are thousands of floating fish factories the situation has changed and we
have a problem.
Fortunately, information technology allows us to create more sophisticated and better
managed approaches to regulating the commons.
This includes the commons even when the commons are themselves technology so when we have
some commons that are all about technology like net neutrality, but it also means that
technology can be applied to manage commons which aren't part of technology by themselves
perhaps through the Internet 7:30 technology, perhaps through social organization, perhaps
through administrative structures that support that.
Some interesting places to look for these kinds of innovations include in highway traffic
management and in wireless broadband management.
Thank you very much.