Post No.: 0866
Furrywisepuppy says:
The ‘tragedy of the commons’ occurs despite, or because of, individuals behaving rationally and with self-interests. By doing so, shared common resources, like trees from public forests, fish from the sea, or clean air, eventually become depleted, meaning that everyone collectively ends up losing out eventually.
You’d think our rational self-interests ought to care about the biggest and longest-term picture foreseeable. But those who quickly act on their own individual rational self-interests and greedily claim all the shared resources they can for themselves in the short-term will actually be fine (and they’ll be serving their own long-term interests in the process too – even their own grandchildren will be fine with what they’ll get to inherit!) It’s easier to spend resources that are shared than just your own. It’s only those who aren’t so greedy or are too slow (perhaps because they’re not even born yet) who’ll lose out.
So the tragedy of the commons occurs when shared or common resources aren’t being conserved for long-term use, because people are individually thinking of their own utilisation maximisation. This leads to an eventual depletion of that resource.
The conundrum is that, if several companies were allowed to tap the common resource (a competitive environment) then more of that resource will be used up collectively because each would individually act selfishly to exploit it (until depletion because each are only considering their own costs and benefits and won’t care about the bigger picture of eventual resource depletion, especially if others don’t care either and are grabbing as much as they selfishly can too – you snooze, you lose). But if only one company were allowed to tap the common resource then they’d only use it to the point until it maximises their profits (which would lead to less resource consumption due to the rising costs and decreasing marginal revenues, so this company would effectively be weighing out the costs and benefits of the whole industry because it would effectively be the whole industry). However, it’s difficult to only allow one company to use the resource because it’s a common or public resource that’s not exclusively anyone’s.
Something that suddenly gets too big and greedy (like a predator that eats too much prey to be sustainable) will instigate its own decimation – but in doing so, they’ll take other things in the ecosystem down with them too (at least the prey and the other predators that relied on that prey, which would result in the tragedy of the commons). So grrreedy entities don’t just harm themselves with their own selfish behaviours – they pass costs onto others too.
The forces of supply and demand will also mean that rare things become expensive, and consequently they’ll be more sought after and exploited – which means that the more rare a species of tree or fish is, for instance, the more people will want to cut down such trees or catch those fishes to sell and profit from, until they’re gone. There are many real-world examples of species becoming extinct or endangered due to unfettered free market activity, like the dodo, various megafauna and the very useful silphium plant. Oysters used to be so cheap in England that pubs would give them away for free, but after over-harvesting them, they’re now quite expensive. This is why governments regulate certain resources and issue licenses/property rights, quotas and tolls.
Laissez-faire capitalism and consumption is environmentally disastrous. The free market prices we pay for products don’t fully take into account the environmental costs. It’s even frequently assumed that raw materials from nature come to us for completely free, leading to a tragedy of the commons. We must not only live within our personal financial means but also collectively within the Earth’s means, for we ultimately rely on the Earth to keep us alive. Woof!
Government regulations and conservation efforts can therefore solve these problems domestically. The greater problems, however, mostly concern globally shared common resources like the atmosphere and international waters, whereby one sovereign state cannot regulate how another sovereign state treats the air above them, even though that air could drift directly over the first country, and ultimately the pollution will drift and mix all over the world and contribute to a warming world collectively. So one country’s government cannot regulate another country’s actions. And if each country prioritises maximising its own immediate economic prosperity (which is usually a vote-winning policy, especially as countries are still trying to economically recover from the pandemic and individuals want their jobs and decent wages, and as this also attracts/keeps corporate investment from going abroad) above caring for the shared and under-regulated international commons – we’ll all globally collectively suffer in the end, or as we already are.
We regard the Amazon rainforest as ‘the lungs of the planet’ yet, outside of Brazil (and its neighbouring countries), we can’t just tell Brazil what to do with its own trees. If Brazilian voters wish to democratically elect a leader who’ll exploit these natural resources for the sake of maximising the Brazilian economy then it’s their own country. But what they choose will affect everybody around the world.
So nations acting according their own immediate self-interests by maximising their own economic output instead of curbing their own global pollution emissions do so at the expense of depleting the collective common good, and thus they drag everyone else down with them by passing on their costs. They’re free-riding on the collective efforts of others who materially attempt to conserve the global commons.
International treaties can be agreed upon, but they’re voluntary, and either not legally binding or not effectively enforced even when they are, which makes them, as they stand, essentially worthless.
The economically most powerful nations are the hardest to enforce against, like the USA and China, and this demonstrates how economic power equates to geopolitical power, and why GDP is going to be usually prioritised above (collective) environmental concerns. We’ve therefore got to somehow reconcile global competition with global cooperation. Innovative ideas appear needed since nothing is sufficiently working so far; yet we must be careful about any unforeseen consequences too.
We hope tech will be an answer. Renewable energy sources are already competing favourably on price against non-renewable energy sources when it comes to generating electricity. Fusion power is the ultimate goal for sustainable electricity production, and progress is slowly being made here too.
Yet the first reaction for most countries to the war in Ukraine that began in 2022 was to find alternative sources of gas and oil to Russia (e.g. the UK issuing new North Sea oil exploration licences and almost reversing the ban on shale gas fracking), instead of doubling down on renewables – because the immediate economy was prioritised before long-term concerns! That was, in some ways, understandable, so perhaps this just highlights a fundamental flaw in our economic systems?
We can be too hopeful that tech will save the day too. Gas will still continue to have its function in other applications apart from electricity generation. And there’s also more to this pollution and common-resource-depletion problem than greenhouse gases.
Plus the new challenge is that the commons should arguably not be commodified and traded. Nature doesn’t want money as compensation in return for environmental plunder either because money cannot replace non-renewable resources or an irreversible loss of biodiversity.
…Now regarding how some previously shared resources fall into private ownership – if you claim you bought a piece of land and so it’s now privately yours, then off who? How did the seller get to own it in order for you to buy it off them? Then how did that person, group or even government (that wasn’t elected by all those who aren’t even born yet but who’ll be affected by the decision – ‘owned by everybody’ should include them too) get to own it in order for them to sell or license it to private individuals? And so on until you realise that all privatisation, capitalism and the concept of individual legal ownership of any raw material or piece of land started from a theft from the commons or from everybody (which should also include other animals and life too, from what was shared in a finely-balanced ecosystem). This was raised in Post No.: 0860.
We can consider this with celestial objects right now, like the land on exoplanets – these are currently either nobody’s or everybody’s, so how can any individual, corporation or nation start to claim it as only their own property without first appropriating it for themselves? That’s why all those supposedly purchased Moon plots are worthless – the companies that sold them didn’t own those plots in the first place and therefore no transfer of ownership could go to anyone as a result of any sale.
The phrase ‘property is theft’ is too pithy that it’s self-contradicting, like saying ‘black is white’ or ‘hot is cold’. But we can say that ‘all property stems from a theft from the commons’. This isn’t a comment on whether this is right or wrong but on the way it all happened. I’m not saying there are better solutions but it’s something to ponder. In some ways wild nature is better because everything gets utilised by whatever needs something when it needs it (e.g. a bird will use a tree to build its nest for its family without regard towards whether that tree is some other bird’s second holiday home that doesn’t get used by its owner except for two weeks annually, and that other bird won’t bring legal charges against them(!)) Yet we don’t want to live like wild animals who can take whatever they can by virtue of whoever’s mightier than another (e.g. a bigger bird just taking a nest built by a smaller bird because it can).
It’s not our fault that we weren’t born early enough when no one (well no human – lots of other life productively used these lands or waters way before the first humans appeared) had yet claimed these common resources privately for themselves (no other animal species does such hogging or hoarding if you want to appeal to nature too). If it’s to do with the work put into things then worms must own soil for they make soil, not humans. It’s arrogant of humans to think that wildlife is encroaching on their homes – humans built their homes on top of their habitats (and then refused to share it), not the other way around. And it’s not like these creatures ever get capitalistically compensated for this theft from the commons – not that they want money.
Nations often pilfered resources via the process of invasion, imperialism and colonisation anyway (e.g. colonial Europeans forcefully taking land from the Native American commons, who were there first). And with territory disputes, what tends to happen is that one group of people will argue along the lines of ‘this land belonged to our ancestors 500 years ago’ and then another will argue back with ‘no this land belonged to our ancestors 800 years ago’ – when really at one point it was either nobody’s or everybody’s. These historical injustices need to be corrected today by arguably putting those resources back into the commons or some other form of better sharing and maintenance by all. Perhaps a ‘Grand Reset’ would put everyone in the world at an equal material starting point right now to at least undo all the arbitrary thefts of the past, from the commons or otherwise. This would be a serious practical nightmare to execute however!
Woof. Capitalism isn’t natural whatsoever, and it’s hardly the most tried-and-tested concept for sustainability – actually, it’s proving to be quite unsustainable. Without private property ownership though, what’ll incentivise us to invent, create or build great things – for as soon as we do, all our efforts could be instantly snaffled away. And appealing to nature isn’t always progressive. However, I write these words to attenuate any extremist capitalist or anti-socialist rhetoric.
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