Comment by jandrewrogers
1 day ago
> A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario.
No it does not. This sentiment, which many people have, is based on a fictional and idealistic notion of what small communities are like having never lived in such communities.
Empirically, even in high-trust small villages and hamlets where everyone knows everyone, the same incentives exist and the same outcomes happen. Every single time. I lived in several and I can't think of a counter-example. People are highly adaptive to these situations and their basic nature doesn't change because of them.
Humans are humans everywhere and at every scale.
While an earlier poster is over stating Ostrom’s Nobel prize winning work — it is regularly shown that averting the tragedy of the commons is not as insurmountable as the original coining of the phrase implied.