Comment by FreakLegion
1 month ago
The tragedy of the commons is in fact modeled as a game in the game-theoretic sense. It's called the CC–PP Game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CC%E2%80%93PP_game.
bob1029 wrote that "You can have 100% of participants operating in a locally-ideal way while still creating problems in aggregate", and the tragedy of the commons is exactly an instance of this. SaltyBackendGuy is right.
CC-PP is disproven directly from Elinor Ostrom's research studies in her book "Governing the Commons".
Elinor literally won a Nobel Prize for disproving the tragedy of the commons.
> It was long unanimously held among economists that natural resources that were collectively used by their users would be over-exploited and destroyed in the long-term. Elinor Ostrom disproved this idea by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters, and forests. She showed that when natural resources are jointly used by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2009/ost...
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/ostrom_lecture.pd...
> Ostrom showed that many real-world “commons dilemmas” are not fixed one-shot prisoner’s dilemmas but repeated interactions where people can communicate, build trust, and design rules, impose retaliation to rule breakers, and redefine the rules of the underlying game structure as time goes on.
No, Ostrom's law doesn't disprove anything. No, that's not why she was awarded the prize.
Ostrom accepted that there's a real problem, and that historically it has led to catastrophe. Her contribution was to see that in practice these catastrophes have been relatively infrequent, and why. This turns out to be an interesting story because previous work tended toward centralized control (government takeover or privatization) as a cure (global optimization), while most real-world cases have been dealt with effectively by community organization (local optimization). In other words, Ostrom didn't disprove the problem. She found alternative solutions.
But the dynamic of the tragedy of the commons is real. The Newfoundland cod fisheries did collapse. And there are many active catastrophes playing out at different scales and speeds as we speak.
Elinor Ostrom proved The Commons can be collectively owned and managed. It's nothing to do with the scale being small or large if you actually read her research studies and the game theory models she published you would know that but instead you seemed to have use an LLM to frame your argument.
The main findings from Ostrom's research on the success of managing commonly owned pooled resources, and how the Tragedy of the Commons was wrong, is basically just enforcing audits, and retaliating against selfish individuals as part of a system of rules and social reputation. The other major game theory element is pointing out humans interact many times not just once, and that much of the original game theory models had arbitrary rules like players cannot communicate, or assuming the game only happens once, or assuming that the game cannot change or new players may join the game and punish the players that have been mismanaging social trust and resource policies.
"Conventional wisdom says that common ownership is a bad idea. “That which is owned by all is cared for by none.” Therefore, all scarce resources should either be owned privately by individuals or be regulated by central authorities. Or should they? Elinor Ostrom rejects that conventional wisdom. Based on numerous empirical studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, she concludes that common property is often well tended."
There's a study of the grasslands in Mongolia, but that's just renforcing Ostrom's findings that the lack of auditing or policies for sustainability is what drives unsustainable behavior. Mongolia started to increase livestock and cashmere exports and their economy has not invested in modernizing or maintaining sustainable industrial scale livestock practices. Goats for cashmere has been a major source of income for Mongolian nomads but because they are essentially living out libertarian economics it's just more proof to validate the game theory factors Ostrom won the nobel prize for.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2009/ill...
From the Nobel Prize website:
2 replies →