Comment by FreakLegion
1 month ago
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:
> It's nothing to do with the scale being small or large if you actually read her research studies
You appear to be responding to the words 'global' and 'local', which are terms from mathematical optimization and have quite literally nothing to do with 'scale'.
That aside, you continue to misunderstand all of this on a basic level. The tragedy of the commons is a description of a dynamic. That dynamic is real. Ostrom acknowledged that it's real. Her work has value because it's real. Your repeated claim that she "disproved" it is simply wrong. There's nothing else to say here.
On that note, given your struggles with the subject matter, maybe don't accuse other people of being LLMs.
Okay fair point, so it seems we're miscommunicating the semantics. In math, there's proofs, so I'm not sure what term is better to say other than disprove, or to say the original claims of the Tragedy of the Commons has been refuted as dependent on false pretext or premise.
The meta problem with The Tragedy of the Commons is it was communicated almost as if it were some law of physics but the rules are synthetic and when the framework of ToC enters the real world it is invalidated and defeated by the human systems it exists in. ToC became a reference as a narrative weapon to justify social engineering policies, where lobbyists claim it as some sort of scientific finding. Ostrom researched case studies of common pool resources, and identified how to prevent the tragedy of antisocial exploitation through a system of accountability, auditing, and explicit retaliations. ToC is basically just libertarian/anarcho-capital dynamics.
So sure, ToC behavior exists and is a problem. Ostrom found the solutions to fix the problem.