
The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons - headalgorithm
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/
======
ApolloFortyNine
>But here are some inconvenient truths: Hardin was a racist, eugenicist,
nativist and Islamophobe. He is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a
known white nationalist. His writings and political activism helped inspire
the anti-immigrant hatred spilling across America today.

There's a difference between being anti-immigrant and being anti-illegal-
immigrant. The media seems to be desperately trying to merge the two together,
with calling illegal immigrants undocumented immigrants, or themselves piling
the two together, but there is a major difference.

I don't doubt people are against immigration entirely, but the way this is
phrased seems to playing up to today's immigration talks, which are almost
entirely having to do with illegal immigration.

~~~
lumberjack
>There's a difference between being anti-immigrant and being anti-illegal-
immigrant.

I used to think that too. I don't anymore. People are anti-immigrant. The law
determines whether the immigrant is legal or not, but that does not matter to
the anti-immigrant. Let us be generous and say the anti-immigrant is so
because of economic reasons, depression of wages and what not. Then does it
matter that the immigrant is here legally? No. He is nonetheless contributing
to the depression of wages (ex. H1-b). And then maybe if the economy is super
healthy and there is labour shortage, would it then matter if the now desired
immigrant is legal or not? No.

People are anti-immigrant because they see immigrants are others, as
competition who has no right to compete with them, or similarly, they seem
them as another people encroaching on their territory. Issues of legality
concern the state but they do not concern the individual anti-immigrant.

~~~
ApolloFortyNine
...No?

Everything you said remains accurate even if you replace immigrants with
illegal immigrants.

Particularly your entire last paragraph is what people have an issue with
illegal immigrants for, and why a large number of legal immigrants/H1-bs have
issues with illegal immigrants. Did you know it can take as long as 15 years
for an H1-b to get a green card? Did you know an H1-b can have their
application rejected and then have to return home?

>People are anti-immigrant because they see immigrants are others, as
competition who has no right to compete with them, or similarly, they seem
them as another people encroaching on their territory. Issues of legality
concern the state but they do not concern the individual anti-immigrant.

------
rayiner
How does an obviously ad hominem attack get into Scientific American, of all
places?

Also, I would urge you to weigh SPLC's hit list with a grain of salt. SPLC
does great work, but its hit list is poorly researched and ignorant. SPLC has
repeatedly crossed the line from calling out hate, into trying to impose the
views of liberal Americans (and overwhelmingly white ones at that--SPLC's
board has just one person of color) onto people of color criticizing the parts
of the world they themselves come from.

~~~
rectang
Do you believe that Garret Hardin specifically is being unjustly characterized
by the SPLC?

------
pdpi
> But the facts are not on Hardin’s side. For one, he got the history of the
> commons wrong. As Susan Cox pointed out, early pastures were well regulated
> by local institutions. They were not free-for-all grazing sites where people
> took and took at the expense of everyone else.

This only goes to further the value of the metaphor! The hypothetical problem
of the pasture being overgrazed has a well-documented solution, and intuition
is that similarly-shaped solutions (regulation) would help solve metaphorical
"overgrazing" in other areas.

------
driveby1212
An observation remains true independent of the moral virtueous or villaneous
the obsever is. This article is just an ad hominem.

~~~
ApolloFortyNine
This article really does seem to exemplify what's wrong with modern
journalism. It pretends to be attacking the idea, but spends a large portion
of the article attacking the man behind it instead.

~~~
mijamo
I disagree. The article acknowledged that point and criticized the idea
itself. It still talked about the man first because this is essential to
understand the context and the ideology behind the idea. The tragedy of the
commons leads very quickly to some elitism and hatred of the masses and the
other, and that is easy to understand once you know the origin of the concept.

On the other hand those comments are pretty typical for HN, where people like
to criticize journalists and think they would do so much better about
basically everything.

~~~
ApolloFortyNine
>It still talked about the man first because this is essential to understand
the context and the ideology behind the idea.

The idea however has been around for ages. Wikipedia points out a source from
1833 [1], but the idea that people act in their own best interest (greed) has
been known for thousands of years. Hence why Christianity considers it a sin.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)

------
sn41
In case you'd like to read a counterbalance to "Tragedy of the Commons", I
highly recommend Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom's works which describe how
commons actually work and regulate themselves in the real world, and how they
avoid tragedies.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom)

I remain optimistic about our future.

~~~
pdpi
> describe how commons actually work and regulate themselves in the real world

There's an important point there — the Tragedy models the outcome of
selfishness, short term thinking, and deregulation governing the usage of the
commons. Ostrom's work provides a model for what regulation can achieve.

Putting the two together, whenever you see somebody somebody pushes for
deregulation at the government level and little to no effort towards self-
regulation at the industry level, you can conclude following that course of
action will lead to the Tragedy scenario.

~~~
notacoward
> Putting the two together

That's the key. Treating these as contradictory, as though Ostrom's work
refutes the very possibility of TotC, is just weird. It's like saying that the
existence of a measles vaccine means that measles can't exist. Solutions don't
apply themselves, even when well known and once ubiquitous. Hardin's idea and
Ostrom's seem strongly complementary to me.

------
throwawayxzy987
"Of course, plenty of flawed people have left behind noble ideas. That
Hardin’s tragedy was advanced as part of a white nationalist project should
not automatically condemn its merits.

But the facts are not on Hardin’s side. For one, he got the history of the
commons wrong. As Susan Cox pointed out, early pastures were well regulated by
local institutions. They were not free-for-all grazing sites where people took
and took at the expense of everyone else"

------
csours
Tragedy of the Commons is a good first order heuristic, but like all first
order heuristics it is incomplete. (See also yesterday's discussion of the 5
Whys tool -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19625754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19625754)
)

------
legitster
I'm scratching my head a bit about this. The allegory of "the Tragedy of the
Commons" makes a strong case for regulation. This article says that the
allegory is wrong, and the actual solution we need is regulation?

If the Tragedy of the Commons is incorrect, then self-regulation is a viable
option?

------
ggm
It may be ad-hominem but its also worth knowing. I know Shockley was a
eugenics nut, it doesn't diminish his work on the transistor with the others
at Bell Labs. For Hardin, his racism informed his field of study. I find it
hard to go past the impact of decisions about aid and welfare he made, based
on his views because the commons metaphor went to the same place.

So yes, it _has_ aspects of Ad Hominem but not solely. You can't divorce this
from his work, the way you might for e.g. Shockley.

------
temp-dude-87844
Maybe so. So let's forego his metaphor, and say instead that climate change
puts us in a prisoner's dilemma. Maybe it's the same 90 companies polluting,
and clearly they've contributed to the structural choices in our lives to be
theirs, but what's the way out?

Barring further structural changes, one will gain little and just lose by
giving up their car, their electricity utility, the chemicals they use for
cleaning, the metals and plastics and synthetics they use for durability and
convenience. Some people do this for a moral boost, but usually because they
can afford to do so. Movements of people will have to band together to bring
about change through one of the usual methods: innovation (by making
additional choices available), regulation (by restricting certain choices), or
revolution (by throwing out the existing playbook, and assuming all the risks
of doing so).

Yet despite international coordination about climate change, the some of the
largest contributing countries are refusing to participate to protect their
own interests. The US, which hasn't ratified the Kyoto treaty, ostensibly
because they feel it gives certain other large developing, high-polluting
countries a pass, but perhaps to protect its energy industry. Canada, a very
advanced country built on an extraction economy, withdrew from the Kyoto
treaty, citing economic reasons. Australia, another extraction economy,
ratified the Kyoto treaty but made little progress on their mandatory
commitments.

In this world, if you're not the US, Canada, Australia, and neither are you
India, China, Indonesia, etc. what should you do? Curb your own contributions
to harmful externalities because it's the right thing to do, even though
people in countries who may live better than you do don't have to, and people
in very large developing countries won't out-pollute your per capita, but by
virtue of their population will out-pollute you in absolute numbers eight, ten
times over? It's a very hard sell.

The innovation of the international cooperation about climate change is
emissions trading: allowing the offsetting of pollution to be an economic
good, and fit neatly into the global economic system. This creates new
opportunities and incentives where there weren't many good ones before. But
even so, it's discouraging that so many people (represented by their
countries) have chosen to go their own way, and leave the rest of the world
having to deal with their waste.

------
DennisP
The article isn't great but this paper it links, on applying "catalytic
cooperation" to climate change, looks kinda interesting:

[https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-09/BSG-
WP-...](https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-09/BSG-
WP-2018-026.pdf)

------
lumberjack
Basically what the article is getting at, is that climate change is not really
a tragedy of the commons, because we already had/have institutions meant to
regulate the commons and avoid the tragedy. The real tragedy is that these
institutions were corrupted and rendered ineffective.

------
insickness
> He is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a known white
> nationalist.

The SPLC has no credibility. They throw around this type of defamation
constantly. Maajid Nawaz sued them and won $3.5 million in a settlement.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-southern-
poverty...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-southern-poverty-law-
center-has-lost-all-
credibility/2018/06/21/22ab7d60-756d-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.17d31d3d9d81)

