School of Philosophy and Letters, UNAM

Transcription

the tragedy of the commons as an argument often used for the privatization of shared or public resources the title comes from an influential paper by Garrett Hardin in nineteen sixty eigth Hardin takes is model the shared pastor of the medieval peasant village in his model this pasture is open to anybody who wants to send cattle there so if i'm a peasant and here's my skinny cow i can send her to the common pasture to fatten around or course either peasant are going to do the same thing Hardin argues that it's in the each of our interests to maximize our benefit or profit from the pasture by sending as many cows as we can the problem is if there are too many cows they will gobble up all the grass and ruin the pasture for everybody Hardin call this a tragedy not only because it's a bad outcome but because he argues it's inevitable even though i know that sending too many cows will use up the land I also know that if i don't do it somebody else probably will so i might as well get the grass while the going is good everybody knows this and reasoning the same we all collectively destroy the pasture this has happened with real world resources for example fishing stocks in the oceans commercial fishing fleets regularly overfish If i'm a fishing fleet operator i know that the fish that are there today may not be there tomorrow because someone else may catch them so even though in the long run it's going to destroy my business it's in my interests to catch everything i can now as profit as much as i can now the one of the solutions given to this is regulation by the central government the problem with that is that the government often doesn't have a lot of information about what's actually happening so it's difficult for them to regulate use of the resource this is really obvious in the case of fish another proposal that's often made is privatization instead of having a shared pasture we divided up into individually owned plots so i may own my piece of land and i traceback my cows there and i know that i'm not going to offer grades likewise i'm not going to let anybody else overgrazing my area también all the owners can do this and hence the resource can be used eficiently that's the argument however it doesn't reflect what really happened in the real commons particularly the famous commons of england there if you assumptions that Hardin makes that don't actually correspond to what happened there the first is the assumption that peasants want to maximize their profit the truth is that peasant in the commons weren't interested maximizing profit at all because they weren't operating out of money economy the other asumption is at the people using the commons don't communicate each is treated as an individual who's reasoning on his own to maximize his benefit and finally the commons is treated as something is open to everyone in reality in the real commons the commons is not a simply resource we have to zoom out of debt and look at the village around it and realize that it's part of the community peasants that live together and work with side each other and know each other and communicate and as i said they're not operating in a market or money economy they're not buying their food is supermarket they're growing up in cells the main usa peasants for money was to pay taxes that happens but these peasants know that because they rely on this resource for food if they don't preserve it they will starve of course they don't want to starve so they assure that it's not ruined they regulated and they watch each other to make sure that nobody over uses the resource the result was that the commons in england existed successfully for hundreds of years and never succumb to tragedy and likewise many other commons arrangements around the world survive for a long period of time Elinor Ostrom an economist wrote a book called governing the commons about commons arrangements in many different societies and how they succeeded one of her examples in fact is a fishery she won a nobel prize in two thousand nine for her work so the tragedy the commons is not inevitable nevertheless the peasant commons in england were ultimately enclosed but not because they succumb to tragedy ironically the few cases we know of tragedy and overgrazing where is the result of large landowners who deliberately over grazed the commons not so that they could gain more fat fodder for their cattle but so that the commons would fail and would be privatized where the theory has privatization is a solution overgrazing in reality it was a motive for overgrazing in any case economists will argue that there were a number of economic benefits to enclosure and this is true private owners of land were prompter about adopting new innovations and improving agricultural output although the benefits may not have been very great but a larger scale the result for the peasants was devastating they no longer have the means of sustenance in their villages hundreds of villages vanished they were abandoned as the people who had lived there went elsewhere looking for work looking for a way to get food but i'll talk about that in another video