# The Tragedy of the Commons  ## Episode metadata - Episode title: The Tragedy of the Commons - Show: Stuff You Should Know - Owner / Host: iHeartPodcasts - Episode publish date: 2025-02-06 - Episode AI description: Delve into the fascinating concept of the Tragedy of the Commons, where individual exploitation threatens shared resources. Discover humorous historical connections and thought experiments about grazing fields. Explore misinterpretations affecting environmental policies and the rise of privatization. Navigate environmental trading markets and critique neoliberal ideologies while celebrating community-centric management. Hear success stories of local practices that empower self-regulation, emphasizing the balance between individual autonomy and collective well-being. - Mentioned books: [Governing the Commons](https://share.snipd.com/book/406130c2-2d59-4395-b2ab-07568085f50a) by [Elinor Ostrom](https://share.snipd.com/person/71846159-f321-4ee9-aafe-f1f63fefc0b5) - Duration: 49:48 - Episode URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/episode/fe8e0665-ba0e-499a-a661-eb5e4b1ef7b5) - Show URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/show/145ea529-ce54-40de-ab9d-10dd8b65f7e4) - Export date: 2026-02-17T23:37:33 ## Snips ### [Tragedy of the Commons Explained](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bf665e16-c4be-4b2d-a962-9339e66be68f) 🎧 01:25 - 02:07 (00:42) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/ef8b6256-fb7b-44f9-91da-b2ef876d36b4" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - The tragedy of the commons describes how shared resources get ruined. - It assumes self-interest leads to overuse and depletion of common goods. #### 💬 Quote > The Tragedy of the Commons, the idea that humans will inevitably ruin any resource we all share [...]. > — Josh Clark Josh Clark explaining the Tragedy of the Commons #### 📚 Transcript **Josh Clark:** think that's one of the reasons why it's had such an enormous impact on the world. Yeah. Because it is so easy to wrap your head around. We should probably say we're talking about the tragedy of the commons. And for those of you who aren't familiar, it's this idea, this concept that if you have a shared resource, a commons, say, and people are able to use it at their own leisure for their own purposes. Eventually, as they seek to maximize their profits, they're going to overuse this commons and inevitably it'll be ruined because people can't have anything nice, essentially. --- ### [Here are five quotes from the podcast episode that I consider impactful:](https://share.snipd.com/snip/39a9d866-7791-4e36-9fe3-51f42b999ff8) 🎧 02:08 - 42:18 (40:10) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/ac0c7ddc-fe7e-40e1-9445-3b37f5f91054" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> Here are five quotes from the podcast episode that I consider impactful: > The central area of my high school was called the Commons. And it just occurred to me 35 years or so after I graduated that that's what that meant. > > — **Chuck Bryan** This quote highlights the everyday, unintentional connection to the concept of "the commons". > If everybody was making one dollar off of their cows when everything was being grazed on sustainably, then if you add one more cow, now everybody's making 85 cents off of their cows because you're starting to overtax the commons. > > — **Josh Clark** This quote illustrates the economic mechanism behind the Tragedy of the Commons. > The reason why the world is headed toward a bad place or a bad place already is because freedom to breed is intolerable. So there's just too many people. > > — **Chuck Bryan** This quote reveals Garrett Hardin's controversial views on overpopulation. > The tragedy of the commons played out, I feel like, for the most part, when things were privatized and outside industry were allowed to come in and have a share of the commons. That's when it was, that's when the problems really began. > > — **Josh Clark** This quote offers a counterpoint to Hardin's theory, suggesting privatization exacerbated the problem. > It's got to be the local parties that come up with these rules. The addition of outside people stepping in, it seems to be when all of the problems start because their interests are not the same as local interests. > > — **Chuck Bryan** This quote summarizes one of Eleanor Ostrom's key findings on successful commons management. #### 📚 Transcript **Chuck Bryan:** know what's funny? You're going to laugh at me here. They're **Josh Clark:** all going to laugh **Chuck Bryan:** at you. The central area of my high school was called the Commons. Yeah. And it just occurred to me 35 years or so after I graduated that that's what that meant. **Josh Clark:** Oh, I see. I thought you were going to say, like, my teenage years were the tragedy of the Commons. **Chuck Bryan:** No. I just, I don't know. I never thought about the word because it was when you're in high school, it's just selling the commons, we'll meet in the commons. But it never occurred to me that that's what that meant. Just like a common area shared by **Josh Clark:** everybody. It didn't either. To me, I know exactly what you're talking about. There was, if not high school, then maybe middle school. There was some school where that was called that too. And I wonder if it was like a surreptitious shot at kids, like they're all sheep. Because I don't think that's true. But one of the major uses for commons traditionally has been for grazing. That's a really good example. If you let a bunch of people graze on a shared resource, but they're taking what they can from that resource to make money for themselves, to support themselves, then just because humans are rational, selfish, horrible beings, that meadow or that high school cafeteria will be ruined. Yeah, **Chuck Bryan:** that's right. And the idea of the tragedy of the commons started out in 1968 in an article from Science, the journal Science. It was called The Tragedy of the Commons, and it was by a biologist named Garrett Hardin. And he was sort of piggybacking on a 19th century English mathematician and economist named William Forster. I **Josh Clark:** would say piggybacking or hijacking. **Chuck Bryan:** Hijacking. William Forster Lloyd. And you mentioned grazing, and this is sort of the thought experiment Hardin went with, which is like you have a grazing field, and let's say three farmers have use of it, and they're letting their cows and sheep graze out there. But at some point, one of them is going to get an extra fat cow that they sell for pretty good money. And they're like, hey, well, if that worked out, maybe I can add like an additional cow and maybe it'll make, you know, the value of all of these cows go down a little bit, including my own, because they're not getting as fat because I've added another cow here. Right. But if I can sell it for this much money and it's only costing me a fraction of that for, you know, the, uh, um, what would you do? Extra cow? Well, I mean, it would only cost a fraction of loss, uh, of resources for the other cows. Like I'm still coming out ahead. And so bada bing, bada boom, that's what I'm going to do. **Josh Clark:** Right. Yeah. So if everybody was making one dollar off of their cows when everything was being grazed on sustainably, then if you add one more cow, now everybody's making 85 cents off of their cows because you're starting to overtax the commons. But that person who added that cow, that's an extra 85 cents they wouldn't have had before, right? Yeah. **Chuck Bryan:** And if you able to sell that cow for like five bucks, that 85 cents is a pittance compared to what you're making on the other side. **Josh Clark:** Right. So there's always under the logic of the tragedy of the commons, there's always a reason to add another cow and add another cow and add another cow because your returns are always going to be more than the cost that you can offset with the returns, right? **Chuck Bryan:** Well, that and you're also on the assumption that like everyone else is going to be adding cows. So I'm not going to be the only sucker not adding cows. Right. **Josh Clark:** So you're either a sucker or you're just somebody who wants to survive because if people start adding cows and you're the one farmer who's like, I'm not going to do that. I find that morally repugnant. I really like sustainably grazing here and I'll just take one for the team. In very short order, that would find that they were no longer making money. No more team. Exactly. Because each additional cow was taking an additional fraction. So let's say that every time you added a cow, it reduced the price that all the other cows got by 15%. That's not a steady price because if you reduce a dollar by 15%, now you're getting 85 cents for a cow. But now when you're adding another cow, that reduces that 85 cents by 15%. So all of a sudden you're making 72 cents and then 61 cents and then 52 cents, right? But again, if you're adding cows, that's always extra almost found money. If you're not adding cows, then the cows that you had originally are now getting less and less and less until you're making zero money. So you are forced into adding cows. And that's why it's considered the tragedy or why Garrett Hardin called it the tragedy of the commons, because inevitably, under these circumstances, which have long been considered to be universal circumstances, basically, the commons will always get ruined and depleted and everybody will be totally up the creek. That's **Chuck Bryan:** right. And if Hardin was basically like there's a couple of solutions here, you can either divide this area up and now each person has their own little private part of the pasture that they're only in control of and no one else can get on it and graze there. Or a government body is going to have to step in and regulate this stuff and manage it. And, you know, if you listen to Hardin and we'll talk a little bit about the problems with this guy in a second. **Josh Clark:** Yeah. **Chuck Bryan:** But if you listen to Hardin, he'll say, when you divide this thing up and make it just private and everyone, you know, is incentivized to basically preserve their plots and do it sustainably so their profits are maximized with, you know, making sure the land isn't ruined so they can keep profits maximized. **Josh Clark:** Yeah, because now it's their land and they suddenly realize, oh, this is a finite resource. If I start to degrade this land, it's only coming out of my profits because the other farmer's land is not degraded. So I'm the only one in competition with myself here, really. And I need to make sure that this land is preserved because now it's the goose that laid the golden egg and I need to keep it nice and healthy and happy. That's the direct result of privatization, as far as Garrett Hardin was explaining, as far as the tragedy of the commons goes, right? Simple solution. Just give people an incentive to take care of it by making it their own. And the other way, like you said, is government intervention. And this seems to be what Harden's big, like this is his favorite, I think, solution was bring the government in and just say you can't overgraze. You can't graze more than these number of sheep. And if you do, we'll wipe out your entire family line. Something along those lines. **Chuck Bryan:** Yeah, but here's the thing. It wasn't like he was some big champion of the government because if you read the whole article, Hardin is like, and another thing. The reason why the world is headed toward a bad place or a bad place already is because freedom to breed is intolerable. So there's just too many people. We're making too many babies. And the welfare state that the government is encouraging is taking away the natural consequence of what happens if you have too many kids. Like they're going to not be able to sustain that and the kids are going to starve to death. So we're overbreeding and all of a sudden everyone's going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And he said, and another thing, he said, this overbreeding, it could actually be a strategy where a cohesive group could come along to increase their power. And they're like, wait a minute, are you talking about the great replacement? And he said, I don't know what that is. Right. And they said, well, it'll be a thing at some point. **Josh Clark:** He's like, I like the ring of it, though. Yeah, exactly. It's So, yeah. Yeah, his whole thing was we, using scare quotes, are overbreeding meant poor nonwhite countries are overbreeding. That was basically his whole thing. And that, yes, because there was such thing as international aid in the way of food, in the way of money, that people could just keep having kids and knowing that the Western wealthier governments were going to take care of them. he was like, that's not what we should be doing. And here's why the tragedy of the commons. And to say that, by the way, I read another paper of his too called Lifeboat Ethics. The argument against helping the poor. Yeah. That was the subtitle. So he really just put it out there. But he basically said, OK, let's imagine that all of the countries in the world are lifeboats. Some are ridiculously overloaded with people, others, the wealthier, more advanced ones. Let's say that they're in a lifeboat that seats 100, and they only have 90 people. But there's tons of people swimming around them trying to get in the lifeboat. you pick 10 people out of these thousands of people out there to let come into your lifeboat? If so, how do you pick those people? What do you tell the people you don't pick? And he ultimately concludes that just don't help anybody. Then you don't have to worry about playing favorites or anything like that. Plus, you keep your 10-person safety buffer in case things change for you and your lifeboat, and you're fine. He actually argues against guilt. You shouldn't feel any guilt. And as a matter of fact, we shouldn't put guilt on people for making decisions like these because they're just smart. And then secondly, he also says that if you are one of those people like that one farmer who is like overgrazing, is morally repugnant, and I'm not going to do it. If you were like that farmer in this lifeboat and you said, I just, I can't do this. I can't sit there and watch people drown while I'm sitting here. I'm going to give up my seat for somebody else. Harden argued that just by virtue of a person accepting your seat, they are less moral than you. And that over time, as more people in the lifeboat give up their seat for moral reasons, morality will be replaced in this lifeboat with self-interest. And then what do you have then? So he makes all these like. Like if you're a rational person and you take emotion out of it, you're like, you know, I guess that kind of makes sense in a little bit. But the moment you add in any a drop of humanity to it, you're like, this is horrible that this guy wrote a series of papers arguing this. **Chuck Bryan:** Yeah. And he, you know, as far as the tragedy of the commons goes, he very explicitly says, like, you know, you got to prioritize yourself here and you're what you're doing and maximize your profits. And if you don't, if you have ethics or something, then you're you're not a smart person. Right. **Josh Clark:** Exactly. So this is his whole thing that, you know, like all of it was overpopulation. The thing is, it got diluted or taken very literally very quickly. And it was applied to actual commons, as we'll see. was stripped of its overpopulation, xenophobia, racism, all of that stuff, and just got applied to real world commons management. And to say like it changed things is the understatement of the century, Chuck. That's **Chuck Bryan:** right. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's. All right. We'll be right back, everybody. **Josh Clark:** Stay up to the same way Hey, everybody. It's Chuck and Josh here to talk to you about Squarespace. Squarespace makes it easy to build the website of your dreams and do whatever you like with it. That's **Chuck Bryan:** right. They make it really easy to sell access to content on your websites like online courses, blogs, videos, and memberships. You can earn recurring revenue by gating your content behind a paywall even. Simply set the price and choose whether to charge a one-time fee or subscription for access. **Josh Clark:** Yeah, and when it's time to collect that money, Squarespace offers an easier way to collect payments so you can focus on growing your business. You can invoice clients and get paid for your services, turn leads into clients with proposals, estimates, and contracts, and simplify your workflow, and manage your service business on one platform. What else could you possibly ask for? **Chuck Bryan:** That's right. Just go to squarespace.com/stuff for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code stuff by ask have the info on your W-2, just the ticket for criminals to steal your identity. No wonder the IRS reported tax fraud due to identity theft went up 20% last year. You need LifeLock. They monitor millions **Josh Clark:** of data points per second and alert you to threats you could miss. If your identity is stolen, LifeLock's U.S.-based restoration specialists will fix it, backed by the million-dollar protection **Chuck Bryan:** package. And restoration is guaranteed, or your money back. Don't let identity thieves take you for a ride. Get LifeLock protection for tax season and beyond. Join now and save up to 40% your first year. Call 1-800 and use promo code IHEART or go to lifelock.com/IHEART for 40% off. Terms apply. You know, we've all been there. You're sick. You're trying to schedule a doctor's appointment only to spend hours on hold. And then you find yourself crammed into a crowded waiting room with other sick people. And don't get me started about the prescriptions. That's a whole other story. **Josh Clark:** Yes. Well, Amazon understands, which is why they created Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy. They're designed to remove these pain points from health care. With Amazon One Medical, you get 24-7 virtual care so you can see a provider within minutes and avoid those long, annoying That's **Chuck Bryan:** right. And with Amazon Pharmacy, your prescriptions are delivered directly to you quickly and affordably. That means no more trips to the pharmacy and no more surprise costs at the cash register. Thanks **Josh Clark:** to the ease and convenience of Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy, health care just got less painful. Learn more at health.amazon Okay, so the tragedy of the commons became like the dominant way of looking at the world among Western nations because it did two things. It said that you can solve this problem everyone is going to have. Anytime you have a shared resource, people are going to deplete it. That's what it said, no matter where you are in the world, no matter who you are. But we want to save these shared resources because this paper came out at about the same time that environmental consciousness came up. So it was like perfect timing for that. But it also said, just privatize, buddy. And at that neoliberalism was on the rise. And they're like, yes, privatize. Take all these government run things and put them in the hands of corporations and we'll all be better off. **Chuck Bryan:** Yeah. And, you know, one of the ways that happened was and we're going to talk about sort of different versions of this here and there in this episode. environmental trading markets emerged and that came from Canada, actually, an economist named J.H. Dales in 1968. But the 80s and 90s are when they really kind of started flying off the shelf. But that's like when the government comes in with a regulation, let's say, to cap whatever. In this case, like, let's say they're capping emissions on— Baseball caps. Baseball caps? I need to get rid of some baseball caps, so that's great. Oh, **Josh Clark:** you have too many? Do you have any good Hawks ones? I'm on the lookout for those. **Chuck Bryan:** I have one Hawks cap that I wear. I **Josh Clark:** got you. **Chuck Bryan:** I just gave away a second one because it was too big, but your head is too small for this thing. It **Josh Clark:** is a really tiny head. I'm like that one Safari Hunter in Beetlejuice. Do you know what your hat size is? Like.6? Okay. That's good. **Chuck Bryan:** So let's say it's fisheries because we're going to talk about fisheries a lot. So, you know, the government will come in and say, hey, you're overfishing. So we're going to cap how many fish you can harvest or make it a certain size in a certain area or something like that. And then here's your permit, fishery A, and here's your permit, fishery B and fishery C. And they grant these permits. But, and this is the key to the ETMs, environmental trading markets, the word trade, you can trade as, i.e., buy and sell these permits, which, and this is something that I don't fully understand, or maybe I do understand, and that's the whole point. But if company A is, well, let's say it's environmental, like, hey, you're a factory, and we're incentivizing you to clean up your pollution, and here's your permit or whatever. If company A does a really good job and does the right thing and comes in, like way under the amount of emissions that they're supposed hit. By simply selling that to company B, who's like, man, we're not too good at that. I mean, is it creating like, doesn't that kind of defeat the whole purpose? **Josh Clark:** No, it doesn't. And we talked about this in the acid rain episode. Do you remember whatever happened to acid rain, that thing? Oh, yeah. We it can work and it does work. We actually reduced sulfur dioxide emissions that were associated with acid rain so much that acid rain went away. And it was like the ozone layer of like the early 80s, I think, in 70s. Like it was a big, scary thing. And **Chuck Bryan:** we took care of it because **Josh Clark:** of cap and trade schemes. **Chuck Bryan:** So it can work. But how? That's what I don't get. If one company is lowering their output, but another one is increasing theirs because they just bought the other companies, then how is that a net loss? Because **Josh Clark:** of the cap, because you put the cap at something close to a target that you want to reduce things to. So you don't make like some sky high cap that's more than what you're at now. You make it less. And then maybe a couple years later, you make it less than that. So those caps, those little shares or whatever, those allowances that they can trade, they get more and more valuable the less and less they represent, because the law is kind of bringing these emissions down further and further. So ultimately, you're rewarding a company by reducing their emissions because they can make money selling that to another company. And that other company is actually technically being punished because they're having to shell out more money than they budgeted for because they're emitting more than they are supposed to. So ultimately, you're penalizing and rewarding through this cap and trade scheme, but you're also creating an artificial cap. All these companies could just pollute as much as they want. But this government is saying, no, you actually can't. Here's your level. Here it is divided among the 10 companies. Go to town. Does **Chuck Bryan:** that make sense? Well, yeah. The thing I still don't get, though, is is the company that's, you know, buying extra emissions, whatever, output from the company that's like really good at it, are they allowed to go over the cap? No. **Josh Clark:** But let's say they have a cap to put out 10 pounds of CO2, right? Yeah. And they know they're putting out 15 that year. Well, this other company that's putting out five pounds of CO2 that year, they can sell their other five pounds. So no one goes over the cap, the total cap, but different companies can contribute different amounts based on how much of those allowance shares they can purchase or sell. Does that make sense? **Chuck Bryan:** Yeah, I guess so. **Josh Clark:** I promise it works. It worked for sulfur dioxide. It does work. The problem is, is it's also like it requires a lot of buy in from industry or really heavy handed government regulation. **Chuck Bryan:** Well, either way, it became a big deal in the 80s. And by the end of the 80s, the World Bank referred to Tragedy of the Commons as, quote, the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues. policies in a bunch of different areas. So you can't just look at the entire thing as a whole and say like, well, it's been a huge success. Like you can pick out something like acid rain, say it was a success in this case. But there's humans involved. So you never can tell. Well, it's not like you never can tell. I guess they can forecast. But there's not just one big blanket like, nope, this is the exact solution. Right, **Josh Clark:** for sure. And it depends on the right? Like you said, acid rain, that was a great success story. Fisheries are another example. If you take a fishery, like you were saying, and you divide up the total catch between companies, those companies can actually go around and buy, you know, huge portions of the other company's shares, right? And so all of a sudden, they're basically one company with all of the rights to catch all of the fish in that fishery because they managed to consolidate the shares over time. And that's a huge problem. That's not at all what you want. Like, yeah, that fishing company is still staying within the total number of fish that can be caught annually, but they ran all the other people out of business. So that's not at all what you want with it. So there's pluses and minuses. It's situational. The thing is, is the tragedy of the commons has largely been overblown. And the idea that you can come out on top just by privatizing things like natural resources has been a lesson learned the hard way that that's just overall, that's not necessarily the best way to do it. And it can really, really harm some groups while enriching others tremendously. Well, **Chuck Bryan:** yeah. And like in the case of a fishery, like if you're a small fishing crew or something, good luck kind of working your way up and maybe establishing yourself as one of the larger companies, especially if the people that are buying these things up are people that don't live around there, these corporations that don't have necessarily a local interest. And again, while they might be like hitting, you know, staying under the threshold environmentally, it might be working out, but you're consolidating the wealth. Sometimes there's regulations on that where they say you have to be, you know, like on the fishing boat and like, you know, like Chick-fil if you're going to buy a Chick-fil franchise, you got to manage that thing. Exactly **Josh Clark:** right. You want that Chick-fil Cadillac. Exactly. But sometimes **Chuck Bryan:** there aren't regulations like that. what's been proven over and over, especially with ETMs, if there's a way for a system to be exploited for profit, then a company will come along and do it no matter what. **Josh Clark:** That's basically the neoliberalism T-shirt, what you just said. Yeah, exactly. **Chuck Bryan:** Here's the thing. If you look at the actual tragedy of the commons, Hardin sort of just conveniently leaves a lot of stuff out. Like he's assuming in this argument that like the people, the farmers that are sharing this grazing spot aren't talking to each other at all about what's going on and saying like, hey, we're ruining this land, by the way. Maybe we should dial it back. Like everybody get rid of two cows. And it also assumes that their only interest is to maximize profit and to not care for the land. And that's just not always the case. No, **Josh Clark:** I mean, that's really a tough sell to a neoliberal policymaker. Like they, they're just like, you're crazy. You're so naive for even thinking that. Of course, their goal is to maximize profits. But what's really cool, as we'll see a little later on, real world examples prove that that's not true. They disprove the tragedy of the commons by themselves. It wasn't like, oh, let's set up this crazy, really kind of rickety experiment and see if we can disprove the tragedy of the commons. No, people went out and looked at real world, for example, indigenous treatment of common resources. And they're like, these people have been managing and not depleting these things for thousands of years now because they came up with their own sensible rules that aren't neoliberal in nature. Yeah, **Chuck Bryan:** for sure. If you look at the original sort of like it's not just a theoretical thing. If you look at the paper by William Forrester, I think it said Forrester earlier, not Forrester, Lloyd, this is the one Hardin, would you say hijacked to begin with? did. He did. He was talking about actual English commons, which was how it to work in medieval England was the Lord would own all this land, but there were people that lived on it. It wasn't like, hey, this is my private land. No one can be here at first. Yeah. So the people that lived there, they, you know, they had to graze their animals and fish out of the streams and ponds and things like that. And they were allowed to with, you know, certain age old customs, sometimes the local government would step in and kind of help manage this stuff and limit grazing and things like that. But it wasn't like this set codified system in place all over England. It was just they had been working it out for centuries like this. It wasn't perfect, but it was sustainable and they didn't just destroy their land because they all had self-interest to keep it sustainable. **Josh Clark:** Right. And then they were enclosed, and enclosure was this huge, massive, overlooked, world-changing event. And we need to do an episode on the fencing of the commons someday because it's just, it changed the entire mentality. Remember our episode on the Luddites and how they emerged from a world that was just, it just completely turned everything on its head? Yeah. That's what happened with Enclosure when they fenced the commons. It changed everything. And the concept of private property, like, really kind of developed out of that, at least in the West. Right. So we'll do a whole separate episode on that. But suffice to say that it seems to be once the commons were fenced and were no longer a shared resource, that's when the issues started to come up. If you ask Karl Marx, he would have said that this is where we came up with the landless proletariat, the working class who had to work for wages because they no longer owned anything. It created the very, very wealthy class that didn't actually have to do anything because all they had to do was start renting this private property of theirs to the people who needed to work. It created a whole system of problems. And in fact, some people are like, however you feel about capitalism, you can kind of trace this back to the beginning of capitalism, the fencing of the commons. The irony of all this is that William Forrester Lloyd was arguing against Adam Smith's capitalist that the invisible hand of the market will always guide things to a good outcome, he created ultimately the tragedy of the commons as a thought experiment to show, like, no, actually, people don't, people aren't guided to this bottom good. Instead, they are going to act in their own self-interest and destroy this stuff. So Hardin actually took it and turned it around as an argument for capitalism, for private enterprise, for privatizing stuff, this argument that was originally used to disprove that. **Chuck Bryan:** Yeah. And if you were enclosing your own comments or arguing in that favor at the time, you were saying, hey, everything has been chaos up into this point. It's very inefficient. And there's got to be a more organized way to do this. And that was, you know, it wasn't a guise, I guess. But what they were really saying was, is we want this area. Right. **Josh Clark:** It's ours. **Chuck Bryan:** Yeah. I mean, let's just oversell the chaos maybe because it was actually working out okay for many centuries. **Josh Clark:** But **Chuck Bryan:** we're going to just sell it as this chaotic mess that needs to be cleaned up and organized. Right. **Josh Clark:** That's how it's done, it seems like, isn't it, Charles? Like people come along and create a problem that's not actually there for their own benefit ultimately. **Chuck Bryan:** Yeah, I have a friend who ever since college, he was just one of those guys that while we were just like, whatever. About what? About everything, about the world, about politics, about, you know, that period of college where you just kind of check out and all you care about is where you're going that night. All that to say he was a very smart guy back then, and he used to just say stuff that used to shake all of us to our core about what's coming, about this, that, or the other with the government. And he would always say, but here's how they're going to sell it to you. And that always stuck with me. And he's totally right. Like, they'll sell it to you as this, but then it becomes this. **Josh Clark:** Right. Yeah. That's really interesting. I love stuff like that about how just massive sweeping changes come from just a change in an idea, a change in perspective. of the commons was. It was an idea. It was a perspective. Like Garrett Hardin didn't undertake a bunch of different experiments or field studies or anything like that in his paper, which was published in Science, by the way. It was an essay about his own thoughts on something that he presented so reasonably that people who were, again, neoliberals who were in favor of privatizing everything, including common resources, could go to government policymakers and be like, here's how it works. Doesn't that make sense? And the government said, yes, that makes sense. Let's start privatizing everything. And it was just because this guy took this idea and made it approachable. That's it. It's not, it became fact, even though it was never fact. I just find that fascinating how something like that can just change the world. Well, **Chuck Bryan:** you know, I think there were so many people licking their chops. They like, oh, here's a great opportunity for us to jump on this bandwagon to take more for ourselves. **Josh Clark:** Right. But what if the bandwagon had never been there? Would anyone have figured out how to manipulate things so thoroughly, especially so quickly, too, without this one paper this one biologist wrote? Yeah, **Chuck Bryan:** someone would have. **Josh Clark:** Yeah, but it would have happened piecemeal, I think. I don't know. It's questionable that it would have happened like it had. Yeah, **Chuck Bryan:** maybe. Let's take a break. All right. We'll be right back. We're going to contemplate that and come back with a definitive answer right after this. **Josh Clark:** We can't stop you so long. **Chuck Bryan:** You know, we've all been there. You're sick. You're trying to schedule a doctor's appointment only to spend hours on hold. And you find yourself crammed into a crowded waiting room with other sick people. And don't get me started about the prescriptions. That's a whole other story. **Josh Clark:** Yes. Well, Amazon understands, which is why they created Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy. They're designed to remove these pain points from health care. With Amazon One Medical, you get 24-7 virtual care so you can see a provider within minutes and avoid those long, annoying waits. **Chuck Bryan:** That's right. And with Amazon Pharmacy, your prescriptions are delivered directly to you quickly and affordably. That means no more trips to the pharmacy and no more surprise costs at the cash register. Thanks **Josh Clark:** to the ease and convenience of Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy, health care just got less painful. Learn more at health.amazon **Chuck Bryan:** Hey, folks, American Public University understands the challenges of balancing education with a busy, ever-changing life. Whether you're part of a military family, managing PCS moves, or a working professional juggling career and family, APU offers the flexibility you need to succeed. **Josh Clark:** Yep, delivered online, APU's programs make it possible to learn wherever life takes you. And courses are offered in 8- and 16-week formats with monthly start dates so you can begin when it's convenient and progress at a pace that's comfortable for you. **Chuck Bryan:** APU is committed to making education affordable for everyone. For active duty military and their families, the preferred military rate is just $250 per credit hour. Veterans and their families can benefit from the Veteran Grant, which provides 10% undergrad and master's level tuition. And for everyone else, the Opportunity Grant offers the **Josh Clark:** visit apu.apus slash military to learn more. American Public University, education that moves with you. If you're driving right now, look around. I'll wait. All those cars you see, they're all probably on Autotrader.com. **Chuck Bryan:** That's right. That's because Autotrader has the largest selection of new cars, used cars, electric cars, even flying cars. Well, actually not flying cars yet, but as soon as those get invented, they'll be on Autotrader. **Josh Clark:** Autotrader's been attracting car shoppers for years now, and for good reason. Not only do they have supercharged search features that allow you to easily find your perfect car, Autotrader has Kelley Blue Book My Wallet. From credit scores to down payments to interest rates, we all know that car buying requires a lot of math. So enter My Wallet on Autotrader. **Chuck Bryan:** That's right. It's a tool that helps you know exactly how much you'll pay each month for your car, so you never have to do car math again. You're welcome. So whether you're into timeless classics or the latest trends, or whether you just want something practical with no surprise costs, if you see a car you like, it's probably on AutoTrader. See it, find it. AutoTrader. Uh, we don't have a definitive answer. I just kidding. You got me. We should talk about Eleanor Ostrom, though. This is a woman who wrote a book in 1990 called Governing the Commons, colon, the evolution of institutions for collective action. And she's probably like at the top of the list for really bringing this to the upper echelons of the political world worldwide, guess. She took a bunch of examples all over the world of controlled CPRs like grazing areas. It's always a good one in Switzerland in this case, forests in Japan, meadows in Japan, and of course fisheries and things like that, in this case in the Philippines. So kind of really kind of picking different spots all over the world and examining these and how they've worked out. And basically argued that like, hey, these things had been working out for centuries. And it worked out pretty good because lived there who was involved. And when you have local people that have long-term interest in the well-being of their land and their area and keeping that up, then the economic side of things is not going to go away, but it's going to take a backseat to ensuring that this land that they live in stays as close to as it is as possible. **Josh Clark:** Yes, and. So she was the one who went out and actually did those field studies that Garrett Hardin didn't. Like she had the receipts to back up what she was saying, which was the tragedy of the commons isn't actually true. It's certainly not in every case. And the ironic thing is this, Chuck. The tragedy of the commons played out, I feel like, for the most part, when things were privatized and outside industry were allowed to come in and have a share of the commons. That's when it was, that's when the problems really began. Yeah. So I want to say one other thing too, because I know I'm kind of known for having a very hard-nosed certain opinion about things and it slants, you know, in this particular direction typically. Okay. I don't know. In the last, like, year or so, I've kind of lost my taste for rigidity like that or black and white thinking. So I don't want anybody to think that I'm just, like, neoliberalism equals bad. Alternatives to neoliberalism, all good. Yeah, yeah. Like, I just don't see the world like that anymore. So I don't want anybody to think that I'm just, like, I'm bashing neoliberalism as if there's no redeemable quality to it whatsoever. I just don't believe that. But in the case of the tragedy of the commons, I feel like more often than not, neoliberal policies, again, privatizing shared resources or taking oversight away from the government and just putting it in the hands of the market, has been disastrous for the world over the last like 40, 50 years. It's been really good for wealthy people and helping other people get wealthier, but that ignores the expense on the backs of other people that it's created, too. I just wanted to put that out there, that I don't want anybody to think I'm just bashing neoliberalism, because it does help in a lot of ways. **Chuck Bryan:** No, and I know you well, and I can tell everybody that you are a very varied person who looks at things all angles and is very considerate of, you don't just shut anything down outright. You like to consider things. No. Okay, so back to Ostrom, though. She argues that, hey, we've shown time and time again, I show in these real-world examples in my books, in Japan and in Switzerland and in the Philippines with the fisheries, that this can work. But there's some parameters that have been shown to ensure that it works. And you got to follow these or it's not going to work. And she narrowed it down to eight principles of like a successful, you know, regulation of a commons, which is clearly defined boundaries. So who can use this area? What is this area? Rules that fit local needs. And this is something we've been kind of hammering on. It's got to be the local parties that come up with these rules. The addition of outside people stepping in, it seems to be when all of the problems start because their interests are not the same as local interests. --- ### [The Extra Cow](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d5dfbe0d-d486-46b6-a50d-b74162d618e3) 🎧 03:51 - 05:20 (01:29) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/172fc46d-e5ec-47f2-aa88-b4b1291d3cdf" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Hardin's thought experiment involves farmers sharing a grazing field. - One farmer adds an extra cow, increasing profits despite slight overall value decrease. #### 💬 Quote > one of them is going to get an extra fat cow that they sell for pretty good money. And they're like, hey, well, if that worked out, maybe I can add like an additional cow [...]. > — Chuck Bryant Chuck Bryant illustrating the tragedy of the commons with a grazing example. #### 📚 Transcript **Chuck Bryan:** Hijacking. William Forster Lloyd. And you mentioned grazing, and this is sort of the thought experiment Hardin went with, which is like you have a grazing field, and let's say three farmers have use of it, and they're letting their cows and sheep graze out there. But at some point, one of them is going to get an extra fat cow that they sell for pretty good money. And they're like, hey, well, if that worked out, maybe I can add like an additional cow and maybe it'll make, you know, the value of all of these cows go down a little bit, including my own, because they're not getting as fat because I've added another cow here. Right. But if I can sell it for this much money and it's only costing me a fraction of that for, you know, the, uh, um, what would you do? Extra cow? Well, I mean, it would only cost a fraction of loss, uh, of resources for the other cows. Like I'm still coming out ahead. And so bada bing, bada boom, that's what I'm going to do. **Josh Clark:** Right. Yeah. So if everybody was making one dollar off of their cows when everything was being grazed on sustainably, then if you add one more cow, now everybody's making 85 cents off of their cows because you're starting to overtax the commons. But that person who added that cow, that's an extra 85 cents they wouldn't have had before, right? Yeah. **Chuck Bryan:** And if you able to sell that cow for like five bucks, that 85 cents is a pittance compared to what you're making on the other side. --- ### [Privatization and Sustainability](https://share.snipd.com/snip/004cc8ef-0411-4ef8-a297-eab103805c72) 🎧 07:22 - 08:37 (01:15) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/983c5143-b9ae-448f-bcae-b4256fd71d7d" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Privatization incentivizes sustainability, according to Hardin. - Owners become responsible for preserving their own resources for continued profit. #### 💬 Quote > When you divide this thing up and make it just private [...], everyone [...] is incentivized to basically preserve their plots [...]. > — Chuck Bryant Chuck Bryant on Hardin's solution of privatization #### 📚 Transcript **Josh Clark:** That's **Chuck Bryan:** right. And if Hardin was basically like there's a couple of solutions here, you can either divide this area up and now each person has their own little private part of the pasture that they're only in control of and no one else can get on it and graze there. Or a government body is going to have to step in and regulate this stuff and manage it. And, you know, if you listen to Hardin and we'll talk a little bit about the problems with this guy in a second. **Josh Clark:** Yeah. **Chuck Bryan:** But if you listen to Hardin, he'll say, when you divide this thing up and make it just private and everyone, you know, is incentivized to basically preserve their plots and do it sustainably so their profits are maximized with, you know, making sure the land isn't ruined so they can keep profits maximized. **Josh Clark:** Yeah, because now it's their land and they suddenly realize, oh, this is a finite resource. If I start to degrade this land, it's only coming out of my profits because the other farmer's land is not degraded. So I'm the only one in competition with myself here, really. And I need to make sure that this land is preserved because now it's the goose that laid the golden egg and I need to keep it nice and healthy and happy. --- ### [Overpopulation and Welfare](https://share.snipd.com/snip/50175cd2-b271-4be7-b376-9843f4e5f1eb) 🎧 09:15 - 10:12 (00:56) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/dad683ce-2d83-4761-a472-c0c7bfa1c0c9" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Hardin links societal problems to overpopulation and the welfare state. - He argues against international aid, fearing it enables unsustainable population growth. #### 💬 Quote > The reason why the world is headed toward a bad place or a bad place already is because freedom to breed is intolerable. > — Chuck Bryant Chuck Bryant on Hardin's view on overpopulation. #### 📚 Transcript **Chuck Bryan:** Yeah, but here's the thing. It wasn't like he was some big champion of the government because if you read the whole article, Hardin is like, and another thing. The reason why the world is headed toward a bad place or a bad place already is because freedom to breed is intolerable. So there's just too many people. We're making too many babies. And the welfare state that the government is encouraging is taking away the natural consequence of what happens if you have too many kids. Like they're going to not be able to sustain that and the kids are going to starve to death. So we're overbreeding and all of a sudden everyone's going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And he said, and another thing, he said, this overbreeding, it could actually be a strategy where a cohesive group could come along to increase their power. And they're like, wait a minute, are you talking about the great replacement? And he said, I don't know what that is. Right. And they said, well, it'll be a thing at some point. --- ### [Lifeboat Ethics](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cb8fd4d8-7adc-4d94-b7bc-4ef31a72db77) 🎧 10:12 - 13:12 (02:59) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/85ef0916-d24d-40d8-8d06-e40494f4089b" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Hardin's "Lifeboat Ethics" uses a lifeboat metaphor to argue against aiding the poor. - He suggests limited resources necessitate prioritizing one's own group. #### 💬 Quote > Let's imagine that all of the countries in the world are lifeboats. > — Josh Clark Josh Clark explaining Hardin's lifeboat ethics. #### 📚 Transcript **Josh Clark:** He's like, I like the ring of it, though. Yeah, exactly. It's So, yeah. Yeah, his whole thing was we, using scare quotes, are overbreeding meant poor nonwhite countries are overbreeding. That was basically his whole thing. And that, yes, because there was such thing as international aid in the way of food, in the way of money, that people could just keep having kids and knowing that the Western wealthier governments were going to take care of them. he was like, that's not what we should be doing. And here's why the tragedy of the commons. And to say that, by the way, I read another paper of his too called Lifeboat Ethics. The argument against helping the poor. Yeah. That was the subtitle. So he really just put it out there. But he basically said, OK, let's imagine that all of the countries in the world are lifeboats. Some are ridiculously overloaded with people, others, the wealthier, more advanced ones. Let's say that they're in a lifeboat that seats 100, and they only have 90 people. But there's tons of people swimming around them trying to get in the lifeboat. you pick 10 people out of these thousands of people out there to let come into your lifeboat? If so, how do you pick those people? What do you tell the people you don't pick? And he ultimately concludes that just don't help anybody. Then you don't have to worry about playing favorites or anything like that. Plus, you keep your 10-person safety buffer in case things change for you and your lifeboat, and you're fine. He actually argues against guilt. You shouldn't feel any guilt. And as a matter of fact, we shouldn't put guilt on people for making decisions like these because they're just smart. And then secondly, he also says that if you are one of those people like that one farmer who is like overgrazing, is morally repugnant, and I'm not going to do it. If you were like that farmer in this lifeboat and you said, I just, I can't do this. I can't sit there and watch people drown while I'm sitting here. I'm going to give up my seat for somebody else. Harden argued that just by virtue of a person accepting your seat, they are less moral than you. And that over time, as more people in the lifeboat give up their seat for moral reasons, morality will be replaced in this lifeboat with self-interest. And then what do you have then? So he makes all these like. Like if you're a rational person and you take emotion out of it, you're like, you know, I guess that kind of makes sense in a little bit. But the moment you add in any a drop of humanity to it, you're like, this is horrible that this guy wrote a series of papers arguing this. --- ### [Neoliberalism and Privatization](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a74c9e21-804e-4330-9bac-eb29ba8192e4) 🎧 17:02 - 18:13 (01:11) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/f86021ac-a48e-4c47-a4fb-e97f766d18f3" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - The tragedy of the commons influenced the rise of neoliberalism. - The idea of privatization as a solution gained traction during the environmental movement. #### 💬 Quote > It said that you can solve this problem [...] [by] privatiz[ing]. > — Josh Clark Josh Clark on how the tragedy of the commons idea affected policy. #### 📚 Transcript **Josh Clark:** to the ease and convenience of Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy, health care just got less painful. Learn more at health.amazon Okay, so the tragedy of the commons became like the dominant way of looking at the world among Western nations because it did two things. It said that you can solve this problem everyone is going to have. Anytime you have a shared resource, people are going to deplete it. That's what it said, no matter where you are in the world, no matter who you are. But we want to save these shared resources because this paper came out at about the same time that environmental consciousness came up. So it was like perfect timing for that. But it also said, just privatize, buddy. And at that neoliberalism was on the rise. And they're like, yes, privatize. Take all these government run things and put them in the hands of corporations and we'll all be better off. --- ### [Here are five reflection questions based on the podcast episode "The Tragedy of the Commons":](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f239f914-cf2c-4920-8029-0314a7f07f8a) 🎧 17:38 - 46:25 (28:46) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/6e06442b-1513-471d-97b3-73d4d9c499be" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> Here are five reflection questions based on the podcast episode "The Tragedy of the Commons": 1. **How has the concept of "The Tragedy of the Commons," despite its flaws, influenced environmental policy and resource management?** Consider both the positive and negative impacts of its widespread adoption. 2. **What are the limitations of applying a generalized model like "The Tragedy of the Commons" to diverse real-world situations?** Think about the importance of context, cultural differences, and local knowledge in managing shared resources. 3. **How can the principles outlined by Elinor Ostrom in "Governing the Commons" be applied to contemporary challenges related to climate change, pollution, and other global environmental issues?** Consider the role of local communities, collaborative governance, and the limitations of purely market-based solutions. 4. **To what extent do the assumptions underlying "The Tragedy of the Commons," such as inherent human selfishness and the pursuit of profit maximization, reflect accurate depictions of human behavior?** Consider alternative models that emphasize cooperation, community values, and long-term sustainability. 5. **What are the potential ethical implications of applying neoliberal policies, like privatization, to shared resources, particularly in light of the critiques of "The Tragedy of the Commons"?** Think about the distribution of benefits and costs, and the role of social justice in resource management. #### 📚 Transcript **Josh Clark:** It said that you can solve this problem everyone is going to have. Anytime you have a shared resource, people are going to deplete it. That's what it said, no matter where you are in the world, no matter who you are. But we want to save these shared resources because this paper came out at about the same time that environmental consciousness came up. So it was like perfect timing for that. But it also said, just privatize, buddy. And at that neoliberalism was on the rise. And they're like, yes, privatize. Take all these government run things and put them in the hands of corporations and we'll all be better off. **Chuck Bryan:** Yeah. And, you know, one of the ways that happened was and we're going to talk about sort of different versions of this here and there in this episode. environmental trading markets emerged and that came from Canada, actually, an economist named J.H. Dales in 1968. But the 80s and 90s are when they really kind of started flying off the shelf. But that's like when the government comes in with a regulation, let's say, to cap whatever. In this case, like, let's say they're capping emissions on— Baseball caps. Baseball caps? I need to get rid of some baseball caps, so that's great. Oh, **Josh Clark:** you have too many? Do you have any good Hawks ones? I'm on the lookout for those. **Chuck Bryan:** I have one Hawks cap that I wear. I **Josh Clark:** got you. **Chuck Bryan:** I just gave away a second one because it was too big, but your head is too small for this thing. It **Josh Clark:** is a really tiny head. I'm like that one Safari Hunter in Beetlejuice. Do you know what your hat size is? Like.6? Okay. That's good. **Chuck Bryan:** So let's say it's fisheries because we're going to talk about fisheries a lot. So, you know, the government will come in and say, hey, you're overfishing. So we're going to cap how many fish you can harvest or make it a certain size in a certain area or something like that. And then here's your permit, fishery A, and here's your permit, fishery B and fishery C. And they grant these permits. But, and this is the key to the ETMs, environmental trading markets, the word trade, you can trade as, i.e., buy and sell these permits, which, and this is something that I don't fully understand, or maybe I do understand, and that's the whole point. But if company A is, well, let's say it's environmental, like, hey, you're a factory, and we're incentivizing you to clean up your pollution, and here's your permit or whatever. If company A does a really good job and does the right thing and comes in, like way under the amount of emissions that they're supposed hit. By simply selling that to company B, who's like, man, we're not too good at that. I mean, is it creating like, doesn't that kind of defeat the whole purpose? **Josh Clark:** No, it doesn't. And we talked about this in the acid rain episode. Do you remember whatever happened to acid rain, that thing? Oh, yeah. We it can work and it does work. We actually reduced sulfur dioxide emissions that were associated with acid rain so much that acid rain went away. And it was like the ozone layer of like the early 80s, I think, in 70s. Like it was a big, scary thing. And **Chuck Bryan:** we took care of it because **Josh Clark:** of cap and trade schemes. **Chuck Bryan:** So it can work. But how? That's what I don't get. If one company is lowering their output, but another one is increasing theirs because they just bought the other companies, then how is that a net loss? Because **Josh Clark:** of the cap, because you put the cap at something close to a target that you want to reduce things to. So you don't make like some sky high cap that's more than what you're at now. You make it less. And then maybe a couple years later, you make it less than that. So those caps, those little shares or whatever, those allowances that they can trade, they get more and more valuable the less and less they represent, because the law is kind of bringing these emissions down further and further. So ultimately, you're rewarding a company by reducing their emissions because they can make money selling that to another company. And that other company is actually technically being punished because they're having to shell out more money than they budgeted for because they're emitting more than they are supposed to. So ultimately, you're penalizing and rewarding through this cap and trade scheme, but you're also creating an artificial cap. All these companies could just pollute as much as they want. But this government is saying, no, you actually can't. Here's your level. Here it is divided among the 10 companies. Go to town. Does **Chuck Bryan:** that make sense? Well, yeah. The thing I still don't get, though, is is the company that's, you know, buying extra emissions, whatever, output from the company that's like really good at it, are they allowed to go over the cap? No. **Josh Clark:** But let's say they have a cap to put out 10 pounds of CO2, right? Yeah. And they know they're putting out 15 that year. Well, this other company that's putting out five pounds of CO2 that year, they can sell their other five pounds. So no one goes over the cap, the total cap, but different companies can contribute different amounts based on how much of those allowance shares they can purchase or sell. Does that make sense? **Chuck Bryan:** Yeah, I guess so. **Josh Clark:** I promise it works. It worked for sulfur dioxide. It does work. The problem is, is it's also like it requires a lot of buy in from industry or really heavy handed government regulation. **Chuck Bryan:** Well, either way, it became a big deal in the 80s. And by the end of the 80s, the World Bank referred to Tragedy of the Commons as, quote, the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues. policies in a bunch of different areas. So you can't just look at the entire thing as a whole and say like, well, it's been a huge success. Like you can pick out something like acid rain, say it was a success in this case. But there's humans involved. So you never can tell. Well, it's not like you never can tell. I guess they can forecast. But there's not just one big blanket like, nope, this is the exact solution. Right, **Josh Clark:** for sure. And it depends on industry, right? Like you said, acid rain, that was a great success story. Fisheries are another example. If you take a fishery, like you were saying, and you divide up the total catch between companies, those companies can actually go around and buy, you know, huge portions of the other company's shares, right? And so all of a sudden, they're basically one company with all of the rights to catch all of the fish in that fishery because they managed to consolidate the shares over time. And that's a huge problem. That's not at all what you want. Like, yeah, that fishing company is still staying within the total number of fish that can be caught annually, but they ran all the other people out of business. So that's not at all what you want with it. So there's pluses and minuses. It's situational. The thing is, is the tragedy of the commons has largely been overblown. And the idea that you can come out on top just by privatizing things like natural resources has been a lesson learned the hard way that that's just overall, that's not necessarily the best way to do it. And it can really, really harm some groups while enriching others tremendously. Well, **Chuck Bryan:** yeah. And like in the case of a fishery, like if you're a small fishing crew or something, good luck kind of working your way up and maybe establishing yourself as one of the larger companies, especially if the people that are buying these things up are people that don't live around there, these corporations that don't have necessarily a local interest. And again, while they might be like hitting, you know, staying under the threshold environmentally, it might be working out, but you're consolidating the wealth. Sometimes there's regulations on that where they say you have to be, you know, like on the fishing boat and like, you know, like Chick-fil if you're going to buy a Chick-fil franchise, you got to manage that thing. Exactly **Josh Clark:** right. You want that Chick-fil Cadillac. Exactly. But sometimes **Chuck Bryan:** there aren't regulations like that. what's been proven over and over, especially with ETMs, if there's a way for a system to be exploited for profit, then a company will come along and do it no matter what. **Josh Clark:** That's basically the neoliberalism T-shirt, what you just said. Yeah, exactly. **Chuck Bryan:** Here's the thing. If you look at the actual tragedy of the commons, Hardin sort of just conveniently leaves a lot of stuff out. Like he's assuming in this argument that like the people, the farmers that are sharing this grazing spot aren't talking to each other at all about what's going on and saying like, hey, we're ruining this land, by the way. Maybe we should dial it back. Like everybody get rid of two cows. And it also assumes that their only interest is to maximize profit and to not care for the land. And that's just not always the case. No, **Josh Clark:** I mean, that's really a tough sell to a neoliberal policymaker. Like they, they're just like, you're crazy. You're so naive for even thinking that. Of course, their goal is to maximize profits. But what's really cool, as we'll see a little later on, real world examples prove that that's not true. They disprove the tragedy of the commons by themselves. It wasn't like, oh, let's set up this crazy, really kind of rickety experiment and see if we can disprove the tragedy of the commons. No, people went out and looked at real world, for example, indigenous treatment of common resources. And they're like, these people have been managing and not depleting these things for thousands of years now because they came up with their own sensible rules that aren't neoliberal in nature. Yeah, **Chuck Bryan:** for sure. If you look at the original sort of like it's not just a theoretical thing. If you look at the paper by William Forrester, I think it said Forrester earlier, not Forrester, Lloyd, this is the one Hardin, would you say hijacked to begin with? He He did. He was talking about actual English commons, which was how it to work in medieval England was the Lord would own all this land, but there were people that lived on it. It wasn't like, hey, this is my private land. No one can be here at first. Yeah. So the people that lived there, they, you know, they had to graze their animals and fish out of the streams and ponds and things like that. And they were allowed to with, you know, certain age old customs, sometimes the local government would step in and kind of help manage this stuff and limit grazing and things like that. But it wasn't like this set codified system in place all over England. It was just they had been working it out for centuries like this. It wasn't perfect, but it was sustainable and they didn't just destroy their land because they all had self-interest to keep it sustainable. **Josh Clark:** Right. And then they were enclosed, and enclosure was this huge, massive, overlooked, world-changing event. And we need to do an episode on the fencing of the commons someday because it's just, it changed the entire mentality. Remember our episode on the Luddites and how they emerged from a world that was just, it just completely turned everything on its head? Yeah. That's what happened with Enclosure when they fenced the commons. It changed everything. And the concept of private property, like, really kind of developed out of that, at least in the West. Right. So we'll do a whole separate episode on that. But suffice to say that it seems to be once the commons were fenced and were no longer a shared resource, that's when the issues started to come up. If you ask Karl Marx, he would have said that this is where we came up with the landless proletariat, the working class who had to work for wages because they no longer owned anything. It created the very, very wealthy class that didn't actually have to do anything because all they had to do was start renting this private property of theirs to the people who needed to work. It created a whole system of problems. And in fact, some people are like, however you feel about capitalism, you can kind of trace this back to the beginning of capitalism, the fencing of the commons. The irony of all this is that William Forrester Lloyd was arguing against Adam Smith's capitalist that the invisible hand of the market will always guide things to a good outcome, he created ultimately the tragedy of the commons as a thought experiment to show, like, no, actually, people don't, people aren't guided to this bottom good. Instead, they are going to act in their own self-interest and destroy this stuff. So Hardin actually took it and turned it around as an argument for capitalism, for private enterprise, for privatizing stuff, this argument that was originally used to disprove that. **Chuck Bryan:** Yeah. And if you were enclosing your own comments or arguing in that favor at the time, you were saying, hey, everything has been chaos up into this point. It's very inefficient. And there's got to be a more organized way to do this. And that was, you know, it wasn't a guise, I guess. But what they were really saying was, is we want this area. Right. **Josh Clark:** It's ours. **Chuck Bryan:** Yeah. I mean, let's just oversell the chaos maybe because it was actually working out okay for many centuries. **Josh Clark:** But **Chuck Bryan:** we're going to just sell it as this chaotic mess that needs to be cleaned up and organized. Right. **Josh Clark:** That's how it's done, it seems like, isn't it, Charles? Like people come along and create a problem that's not actually there for their own benefit ultimately. **Chuck Bryan:** Yeah, I have a friend who ever since college, he was just one of those guys that while we were just like, whatever. About what? About everything, about the world, about politics, about, you know, that period of college where you just kind of check out and all you care about is where you're going that night. All that to say he was a very smart guy back then, and he used to just say stuff that used to shake all of us to our core about what's coming, about this, that, or the other with the government. And he would always say, but here's how they're going to sell it to you. And that always stuck with me. And he's totally right. Like, they'll sell it to you as this, but then it becomes this. **Josh Clark:** Right. Yeah. That's really interesting. I love stuff like that about how just massive sweeping changes come from just a change in an idea, a change in perspective. of the commons was. It was an idea. It was a perspective. Like Garrett Hardin didn't undertake a bunch of different experiments or field studies or anything like that in his paper, which was published in Science, by the way. It was an essay about his own thoughts on something that he presented so reasonably that people who were, again, neoliberals who were in favor of privatizing everything, including common resources, could go to government policymakers and be like, here's how it works. Doesn't that make sense? And the government said, yes, that makes sense. Let's start privatizing everything. And it was just because this guy took this idea and made it approachable. That's it. It's not, it became fact, even though it was never fact. I just find that fascinating how something like that can just change the world. Well, **Chuck Bryan:** you know, I think there were so many people licking their chops. They like, oh, here's a great opportunity for us to jump on this bandwagon to take more for ourselves. **Josh Clark:** Right. But what if the bandwagon had never been there? Would anyone have figured out how to manipulate things so thoroughly, especially so quickly, too, without this one paper this one biologist wrote? Yeah, **Chuck Bryan:** someone would have. **Josh Clark:** Yeah, but it would have happened piecemeal, I think. I don't know. It's questionable that it would have happened like it had. Yeah, **Chuck Bryan:** maybe. Let's take a break. All right. We'll be right back. We're going to contemplate that and come back with a definitive answer right after this. **Josh Clark:** We can't stop you so long. **Chuck Bryan:** You know, we've all been there. You're sick. You're trying to schedule a doctor's appointment only to spend hours on hold. And you find yourself crammed into a crowded waiting room with other sick people. And don't get me started about the prescriptions. That's a whole other story. **Josh Clark:** Yes. Well, Amazon understands, which is why they created Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy. They're designed to remove these pain points from health care. With Amazon One Medical, you get 24-7 virtual care so you can see a provider within minutes and avoid those long, annoying waits. **Chuck Bryan:** That's right. And with Amazon Pharmacy, your prescriptions are delivered directly to you quickly and affordably. That means no more trips to the pharmacy and no more surprise costs at the cash register. Thanks **Josh Clark:** to the ease and convenience of Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy, health care just got less painful. Learn more at health.amazon **Chuck Bryan:** Hey, folks, American Public University understands the challenges of balancing education with a busy, ever-changing life. Whether you're part of a military family, managing PCS moves, or a working professional juggling career and family, APU offers the flexibility you need to succeed. **Josh Clark:** Yep, delivered online, APU's programs make it possible to learn wherever life takes you. And courses are offered in 8- and 16-week formats with monthly start dates so you can begin when it's convenient and progress at a pace that's comfortable for you. **Chuck Bryan:** APU is committed to making education affordable for everyone. For active duty military and their families, the preferred military rate is just $250 per credit hour. Veterans and their families can benefit from the Veteran Grant, which provides 10% off and master's level tuition. And for everyone else, the Opportunity Grant offers the **Josh Clark:** visit apu.apus slash military to learn more. American Public University, education that moves with you. If you're driving right now, look around. I'll wait. All those cars you see, they're all probably on Autotrader.com. **Chuck Bryan:** That's right. That's because Autotrader has the largest selection of new cars, used cars, electric cars, even flying cars. Well, actually not flying cars yet, but as soon as those get invented, they'll be on Autotrader. **Josh Clark:** Autotrader's been attracting car shoppers for years now, and for good reason. Not only do they have supercharged search features that allow you to easily find your perfect car, Autotrader has Kelley Blue Book My Wallet. From credit scores to down payments to interest rates, we all know that car buying requires a lot of math. So enter My Wallet on Autotrader. **Chuck Bryan:** That's right. It's a tool that helps you know exactly how much you'll pay each month for your car, so you never have to do car math again. You're welcome. So whether you're into timeless classics or the latest trends, or whether you just want something practical with no surprise costs, if you see a car you like, it's probably on AutoTrader. See it, find it. AutoTrader. Uh, we don't have a definitive answer. I just kidding. You got me. We should talk about Eleanor Ostrom, though. This is a woman who wrote a book in 1990 called Governing the Commons, colon, the evolution of institutions for collective action. And she's probably like at the top of the list for really bringing this to the upper echelons of the political world worldwide, I She took a bunch of examples all over the world of controlled CPRs like grazing areas. It's always a good one in Switzerland in this case, forests in Japan, meadows in Japan, and of course fisheries and things like that, in this case in the Philippines. So kind of really kind of picking different spots all over the world and examining these and how they've worked out. And basically argued that like, hey, these things had been working out for centuries. And it worked out pretty good because lived there who was involved. And when you have local people that have long-term interest in the well-being of their land and their area and keeping that up, then the economic side of things is not going to go away, but it's going to take a backseat to ensuring that this land that they live in stays as close to as it is as possible. **Josh Clark:** Yes, and. So she was the one who went out and actually did those field studies that Garrett Hardin didn't. Like she had the receipts to back up what she was saying, which was the tragedy of the commons isn't actually true. It's certainly not in every case. And the ironic thing is this, Chuck. The tragedy of the commons played out, I feel like, for the most part, when things were privatized and outside industry were allowed to come in and have a share of the commons. That's when it was, that's when the problems really began. Yeah. So I want to say one other thing too, because I know I'm kind of known for having a very hard-nosed certain opinion about things and it slants, you know, in this particular direction typically. Okay. I don't know. In the last, like, year or so, I've kind of lost my taste for rigidity like that or black and white thinking. So I don't want anybody to think that I'm just, like, neoliberalism equals bad. Alternatives to neoliberalism, all good. Yeah, yeah. Like, I just don't see the world like that anymore. So I don't want anybody to think that I'm just, like, I'm bashing neoliberalism as if there's no redeemable quality to it whatsoever. I just don't believe that. But in the case of the tragedy of the commons, I feel like more often than not, neoliberal policies, again, privatizing shared resources or taking oversight away from the government and just putting it in the hands of the market, has been disastrous for the world over the last like 40, 50 years. It's been really good for wealthy people and helping other people get wealthier, but that ignores the expense on the backs of other people that it's created, too. I just wanted to put that out there, that I don't want anybody to think I'm just bashing neoliberalism, because it does help in a lot of ways. **Chuck Bryan:** No, and I know you well, and I can tell everybody that you are a very varied person who looks at things all angles and is very considerate of, you don't just shut anything down outright. You like to consider things. No. Okay, so back to Ostrom, though. She argues that, hey, we've shown time and time again, I show in these real-world examples in my books, in Japan and in Switzerland and in the Philippines with the fisheries, that this can work. But there's some parameters that have been shown to ensure that it works. And you got to follow these or it's not going to work. And she narrowed it down to eight principles of like a successful, you know, regulation of a commons, which is clearly defined boundaries. So who can use this area? What is this area? Rules that fit local needs. And this is something we've been kind of hammering on. It's got to be the local parties that come up with these rules. The addition of outside people stepping in, it seems to be when all of the problems start because their interests are not the same as local interests. Yeah. **Josh Clark:** History kind of tells us that when outside groups come in and start pushing the people who've been using this thing for a thousand years, pushing them around, it just doesn't go very well typically because the outside groups don't necessarily understand this. And as we'll see, that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be the involvement of any outside groups. What Ostrom was saying that she found from these studies is that you have to begin the base, the people who are really laying the groundwork and setting the rules for this, they have to be the people who are actually using this resource. Yeah, **Chuck Bryan:** for sure. The third one is group decision making. So it's not just a couple of people or a small board deciding these things. Get as many people in there as possible, local people. Monitoring, you have to have people monitoring. And, you know, she used her forest land example in Japan was one where she was like, hey, they had locals monitoring the stuff and levying fines. So you've got to know that someone is out there doing this. So people, you know, know they're going to be held accountable. And then the next one ties into that. And then when you do that, you've got to start out small with these sanctions. It's got to be like a warning first and then a small fine. You can't just come in there with the billy club and say, you're out. It's got you've got to encourage people to to stick around and like, all right, here's a warning, but you can't keep letting this happen. That kind of thing. **Josh Clark:** I was really curious what the ultimate punishment is for repeat offenders. And the only example I could find was among a group in Bali. And ostracism is is what the person ultimately faces. Get out. Which, yeah, and that's bad enough in like a Western society, you know? Yeah. But also you can make do, you know? Yeah. There's the internet. If you go into a store, the person basically has to take your money for food. In more traditional culture, ostracism is like, you're in trouble because groups rely on one another for help. And the example they gave was if one of your relatives dies, there's certain rights you have to perform. And if you're ostracized, you have to figure that out all by yourself because the community is not going to show up and help you for these death rights that your ancestors demand of you because that's just tradition. **Chuck Bryan:** Yeah. Yeah, for sure. The last three of the eight, easy dispute resolution. So just something on the cheap that's pretty informal and not some big drawn out expensive, you know, tribunal or something like that. **Josh Clark:** Yeah. No wigs, no powdered wigs. **Chuck Bryan:** No powdered wigs at all. You have to have support from authorities. it may be a local thing, but you've got to have the blessing of a larger government body to, at the very least, not get in there and muck it up themselves and just sort of let you do your thing, but maybe also support. And then finally, building up to a larger system. So, again, keep it local, but if it's a system that connects to a larger system, like a creek that connects to a larger watershed, you're going to have to start linking up with other local groups and make it a larger thing. Right. **Josh Clark:** But the point that she made too, is that that works. That's actually scalable, which is good because like you said, you know, a creek is one thing, but it depends on a watershed. And so if you can get together with other people who are managing their own creeks, you can manage the watershed based on the individual common, I guess, rules that groups have come up with and that you can scale that into more modern systems too, right? So like say a city has somehow created a cap on how much emissions that the factories in the cities can create. You can combine that with other cities. And now you're starting to manage a larger part of the atmosphere. And then the state can come in and work with all of those cities. And then the state can work with other states. And all of a sudden, now you have regional air quality being controlled from the rules that are based on the actual stakeholders in each individual community. --- ### [Environmental Trading Markets](https://share.snipd.com/snip/85701cca-7f58-42c1-b8be-ac44322282cf) 🎧 18:28 - 21:05 (02:37) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/09a6a1ef-255c-4b31-8bfb-3f710d038b8d" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Environmental trading markets (ETMs) let companies trade emission permits. - This incentivizes pollution reduction while setting an overall emissions cap. #### 💬 Quote > environmental trading markets [...] [let you] buy and sell these permits [...]. > — Chuck Bryant Chuck Bryant explaining ETMs #### 📚 Transcript **Chuck Bryan:** Dales in 1968. But the 80s and 90s are when they really kind of started flying off the shelf. But that's like when the government comes in with a regulation, let's say, to cap whatever. In this case, like, let's say they're capping emissions on— Baseball caps. Baseball caps? I need to get rid of some baseball caps, so that's great. Oh, **Josh Clark:** you have too many? Do you have any good Hawks ones? I'm on the lookout for those. **Chuck Bryan:** I have one Hawks cap that I wear. I **Josh Clark:** got you. **Chuck Bryan:** I just gave away a second one because it was too big, but your head is too small for this thing. It **Josh Clark:** is a really tiny head. I'm like that one Safari Hunter in Beetlejuice. Do you know what your hat size is? Like.6? Okay. That's good. **Chuck Bryan:** So let's say it's fisheries because we're going to talk about fisheries a lot. So, you know, the government will come in and say, hey, you're overfishing. So we're going to cap how many fish you can harvest or make it a certain size in a certain area or something like that. And then here's your permit, fishery A, and here's your permit, fishery B and fishery C. And they grant these permits. But, and this is the key to the ETMs, environmental trading markets, the word trade, you can trade as, i.e., buy and sell these permits, which, and this is something that I don't fully understand, or maybe I do understand, and that's the whole point. But if company A is, well, let's say it's environmental, like, hey, you're a factory, and we're incentivizing you to clean up your pollution, and here's your permit or whatever. If company A does a really good job and does the right thing and comes in, like way under the amount of emissions that they're supposed hit. By simply selling that to company B, who's like, man, we're not too good at that. I mean, is it creating like, doesn't that kind of defeat the whole purpose? **Josh Clark:** No, it doesn't. And we talked about this in the acid rain episode. Do you remember whatever happened to acid rain, that thing? Oh, yeah. We it can work and it does work. We actually reduced sulfur dioxide emissions that were associated with acid rain so much that acid rain went away. And it was like the ozone layer of like the early 80s, I think, in 70s. Like it was a big, scary thing. And **Chuck Bryan:** we took care of it because **Josh Clark:** of cap and trade schemes. **Chuck Bryan:** So it can work. But how? That's what I don't get. If one company is lowering their output, but another one is increasing theirs because they just bought the other companies, then how is that a net loss? Because --- ### [Fisheries and Monopolies](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d9fc7536-f1d8-4392-aeb6-4a47435152d2) 🎧 25:08 - 26:04 (00:56) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/a9bdd5b6-7767-4165-b5fd-b6cdb1231296" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Privatizing fisheries can lead to monopolies despite catch limits. - Smaller fishing crews get out-competed by large corporations buying up permits. #### 💬 Quote > those companies can actually go around and buy [...] huge portions of the other company's shares, right? > — Josh Clark Josh Clark on issues with privatizing fisheries #### 📚 Transcript **Chuck Bryan:** yeah. And like in the case of a fishery, like if you're a small fishing crew or something, good luck kind of working your way up and maybe establishing yourself as one of the larger companies, especially if the people that are buying these things up are people that don't live around there, these corporations that don't have necessarily a local interest. And again, while they might be like hitting, you know, staying under the threshold environmentally, it might be working out, but you're consolidating the wealth. Sometimes there's regulations on that where they say you have to be, you know, like on the fishing boat and like, you know, like Chick-fil if you're going to buy a Chick-fil franchise, you got to manage that thing. Exactly **Josh Clark:** right. You want that Chick-fil Cadillac. Exactly. But sometimes **Chuck Bryan:** there aren't regulations like that. And been proven over and over, especially with ETMs, if there's a way for a system to be exploited for profit, then a company will come along and do it no matter what. --- ### [Overlooked Aspects](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2d3c0383-e678-466a-a1a9-55178724646b) 🎧 26:04 - 28:38 (02:34) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/a6d3b601-b704-4e05-a2b4-44d364fe39cb" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Hardin's tragedy of the commons framework overlooks communication and care for land. - It assumes profit maximization as the sole motivation, ignoring real-world complexities. #### 💬 Quote > [Hardin] assumes that [...] the farmers that are sharing this grazing spot aren't talking to each other at all about what's going on [...]. > — Chuck Bryant Chuck Bryant on Hardin's unrealistic assumptions. #### 📚 Transcript **Josh Clark:** That's basically the neoliberalism T-shirt, what you just said. Yeah, exactly. **Chuck Bryan:** Here's the thing. If you look at the actual tragedy of the commons, Hardin sort of just conveniently leaves a lot of stuff out. Like he's assuming in this argument that like the people, the farmers that are sharing this grazing spot aren't talking to each other at all about what's going on and saying like, hey, we're ruining this land, by the way. Maybe we should dial it back. Like everybody get rid of two cows. And it also assumes that their only interest is to maximize profit and to not care for the land. And that's just not always the case. No, **Josh Clark:** I mean, that's really a tough sell to a neoliberal policymaker. Like they, they're just like, you're crazy. You're so naive for even thinking that. Of course, their goal is to maximize profits. But what's really cool, as we'll see a little later on, real world examples prove that that's not true. They disprove the tragedy of the commons by themselves. It wasn't like, oh, let's set up this crazy, really kind of rickety experiment and see if we can disprove the tragedy of the commons. No, people went out and looked at real world, for example, indigenous treatment of common resources. And they're like, these people have been managing and not depleting these things for thousands of years now because they came up with their own sensible rules that aren't neoliberal in nature. Yeah, **Chuck Bryan:** for sure. If you look at the original sort of like it's not just a theoretical thing. If you look at the paper by William Forrester, I think it said Forrester earlier, not Forrester, Lloyd, this is the one Hardin, would you say hijacked to begin with? He He did. He was talking about actual English commons, which was how it to work in medieval England was the Lord would own all this land, but there were people that lived on it. It wasn't like, hey, this is my private land. No one can be here at first. Yeah. So the people that lived there, they, you know, they had to graze their animals and fish out of the streams and ponds and things like that. And they were allowed to with, you know, through age old customs, sometimes the local government would step in and kind of help manage this stuff and limit grazing and things like that. But it wasn't like this set codified system in place all over England. It was just they had been working it out for centuries like this. It wasn't perfect, but it was sustainable and they didn't just destroy their land because they all had self-interest to keep it sustainable. --- ### [Fencing of the Commons](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b6338ff3-c0f4-4efb-a11b-8062aeed1db6) 🎧 28:38 - 30:29 (01:51) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/9e9f1f87-9e21-4a69-ba70-0a95acedff59" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Enclosing the commons in England changed the concept of private property. - This shift arguably contributed to the emergence of capitalism and a landless working class. #### 💬 Quote > Enclosure was this huge, massive, overlooked, world-changing event. And we need to do an episode on the fencing of the commons someday because it's just, it changed the entire mentality. > — Josh Clark Josh Clark emphasizing the historical impact of enclosure. #### 📚 Transcript **Josh Clark:** Right. And then they were enclosed, and enclosure was this huge, massive, overlooked, world-changing event. And we need to do an episode on the fencing of the commons someday because it's just, it changed the entire mentality. Remember our episode on the Luddites and how they emerged from a world that was just, it just completely turned everything on its head? Yeah. That's what happened with Enclosure when they fenced the commons. It changed everything. And the concept of private property, like, really kind of developed out of that, at least in the West. Right. So we'll do a whole separate episode on that. But suffice to say that it seems to be once the commons were fenced and were no longer a shared resource, that's when the issues started to come up. If you ask Karl Marx, he would have said that this is where we came up with the landless proletariat, the working class who had to work for wages because they no longer owned anything. It created the very, very wealthy class that didn't actually have to do anything because all they had to do was start renting this private property of theirs to the people who needed to work. It created a whole system of problems. And in fact, some people are like, however you feel about capitalism, you can kind of trace this back to the beginning of capitalism, the fencing of the commons. The irony of all this is that William Forrester Lloyd was arguing against Adam Smith's capitalist that the invisible hand of the market will always guide things to a good outcome, he created ultimately the tragedy of the commons as a thought experiment to show, like, no, actually, people don't, people aren't guided to this bottom good. --- ### [Ostrom's Research](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7f53adfc-a3fa-4415-bfe7-c16b6f112862) 🎧 37:31 - 39:01 (01:29) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/ff140e1f-d28b-4358-8785-cb0e27c8eb97" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Eleanor Ostrom studied real-world commons governance, challenging Hardin's theory. - She found successful long-term resource management by local communities. #### 💬 Quote > Eleanor Ostrom [...] wrote a book in 1990 called Governing the Commons [...]. > — Chuck Bryant Chuck Bryant introducing Eleanor Ostrom's work. #### 📚 Transcript **Chuck Bryan:** Uh, we don't have a definitive answer. I just kidding. You got me. We should talk about Eleanor Ostrom, though. This is a woman who wrote a book in 1990 called Governing the Commons, colon, the evolution of institutions for collective action. And she's probably like at the top of the list for really bringing this to the upper echelons of the political world worldwide, I She took a bunch of examples all over the world of controlled CPRs like grazing areas. It's always a good one in Switzerland in this case, forests in Japan, meadows in Japan, and of course fisheries and things like that, in this case in the Philippines. So kind of really kind of picking different spots all over the world and examining these and how they've worked out. And basically argued that like, hey, these things had been working out for centuries. And it worked out pretty good because lived there who was involved. And when you have local people that have long-term interest in the well-being of their land and their area and keeping that up, then the economic side of things is not going to go away, but it's going to take a backseat to ensuring that this land that they live in stays as close to as it is as possible. --- ### [Commons Governance Principles](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4a4b913e-2d84-409b-a9b4-0ed9b15218d1) 🎧 41:39 - 43:41 (02:02) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/8495e60f-f0f7-4b8b-b2a9-d619689d9616" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Successful commons governance needs clear boundaries and locally tailored rules. - Group decision-making, monitoring, and graduated sanctions are crucial. #### 💬 Quote > clearly defined boundaries. So who can use this area? What is this area? > — Chuck Bryant Chuck Bryant on Ostrom's first principle for successful commons governance. #### 📚 Transcript **Chuck Bryan:** But there's some parameters that have been shown to ensure that it works. And you got to follow these or it's not going to work. And she narrowed it down to eight principles of like a successful, you know, regulation of a commons, which is clearly defined boundaries. So who can use this area? What is this area? Rules that fit local needs. And this is something we've been kind of hammering on. It's got to be the local parties that come up with these rules. The addition of outside people stepping in, it seems to be when all of the problems start because their interests are not the same as local interests. Yeah. **Josh Clark:** History kind of tells us that when outside groups come in and start pushing the people who've been using this thing for a thousand years, pushing them around, it just doesn't go very well typically because the outside groups don't necessarily understand this. And as we'll see, that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be the involvement of any outside groups. What Ostrom was saying that she found from these studies is that you have to begin the base, the people who are really laying the groundwork and setting the rules for this, they have to be the people who are actually using this resource. Yeah, **Chuck Bryan:** for sure. The third one is group decision making. So it's not just a couple of people or a small board deciding these things. Get as many people in there as possible, local people. Monitoring, you have to have people monitoring. And, you know, she used her forest land example in Japan was one where she was like, hey, they had locals monitoring the stuff and levying fines. So you've got to know that someone is out there doing this. So people, you know, know they're going to be held accountable. And then the next one ties into that. And then when you do that, you've got to start out small with these sanctions. It's got to be like a warning first and then a small fine. You can't just come in there with the billy club and say, you're out. It's got you've got to encourage people to to stick around and like, all right, here's a warning, but you can't keep letting this happen. --- ### [Maine Lobstermen](https://share.snipd.com/snip/86dbdf4f-caab-4094-8874-2f704ca4e49c) 🎧 50:50 - 52:30 (01:39) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/2e87daac-f934-4975-8d39-2ce8be08b476" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Maine lobstermen formed harbor gangs to self-police and enforce size limits. - They prioritized long-term sustainability over short-term gains, disproving Hardin. #### 💬 Quote > Maine lobstermen [...] started self-policing, and everyone bought into this idea that let's not ruin all of our livelihood here. > — Chuck Bryant Chuck Bryant on Maine lobstermen self-regulation. #### 📚 Transcript **Chuck Bryan:** All right. Well, let's finish up on Tragedy of the Commons because we can use an example of maine lobster fisheries as a pretty good example of how people can start to do the wrong thing but but correct course on their own yeah uh and that was the case in the 19th century when the state of maine started setting legal minimum sizes for catching lobsters and they couldn't enforce it that well at first. And people broke the rules and were like, you know, trying to make extra money or keep more lobsters than they should for a while. But eventually they were like, hey, wait a minute. We're not doing ourselves any favors here. And if we're going to all continue this to sustain our living doing this, we got to work together. So they form harbor gangs to start self-policing, basically. **Josh Clark:** So Maine lobstermen harbor gangs. Is there anything scarier than the sound of that? Just seeing them kind of slowly come up on your boat and they're all like they have chains in their hands. **Chuck Bryan:** Don't go over there. That's where the harbor gangs are. **Josh Clark:** Very nice. Boy, you just took me to Cabot Cope. **Chuck Bryan:** So they started self-policing, and everyone bought into this idea that let's not ruin all of our livelihood here. And one thing that gets pointed out is you can do this in a case like that because lobsters are close to shore. It's a small, small community. It's local people. In the case of COD, and at some point we should do one on the COD wars because that's where this factors in. COD travel long distances, and so it's hard to regulate something like that that's widespread and there's different countries involved. --- Created with [Snipd](https://www.snipd.com) | Highlight & Take Notes from Podcasts > [!note]+ Document Notes > Open source can avoid the tragedy of the commons by recognizing the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed, and educating people on this necessity. Individuals must understand the need for mutual coercion and work together to pass laws that will prevent overpopulation. This will ensure that everyone's best interests are taken into account, which is the only way to avoid the tragedy of the commons. > > This document discusses the tragedy of the commons, which is a situation in which individual freedom to exploit a shared resource leads to its destruction. It examines how the invisible hand of population control may not be enough to avoid this tragedy and looks at the need for laws, taxes, and other coercive devices to curtail the freedom to breed and access these resources. It concludes by asserting that freedom to breed must be abandoned and that education is necessary to reveal the necessity of this abandonment. > > Ghostreader works best when you ask a specific question related to the content of the document. A general question such as "Describe how this relates to open source" will not work. Instead, you should ask a more specific question related to the content of the document, such as "What are the consequences of freedom to breed in a commons?" or "How can laws be used to prevent the tragedy of the commons?". By asking a more specific question, you will receive more accurate and helpful results from Ghostreader. > > 1. What is the role of education in preventing the tragedy of the commons? > 2. What is meant by the term "invisible hand in population control"? > 3. What kind of laws or taxing devices can be used to prevent the tragedy of the commons? > > Task 1: > This article discusses the 'tragedy of the commons' phenomenon and its effects. It explains how the concept of 'commons' has been used for centuries and why it can be beneficial for society for some purposes. The article then explores how the tragedy of the commons can be avoided and how it can be used to generate better outcomes. It looks at how private ownership of resources can be beneficial, how new technologies can help to manage resources better, and how governments can play a role in creating incentives to avoid tragedy of the commons scenarios. Lastly, it looks at the implications of the tragedy of the commons on modern economies and the development of laws and regulations to address it. > > Task 2: > • Introduction: > - Definition of tragedy of the commons > - History of the commons > - Benefits of the commons > • Avoiding the Tragedy of the Commons: > - Private ownership of resources > - New technologies for resource management > - Government incentives > • Implications of the Tragedy of the Commons: > - Impact on modern economies > - Development of laws and regulations > > Task 3: > Paragraph 1: > The concept of a 'commons' has been around for centuries, referring to resources which are shared among members of a community. This can be beneficial for society, as it can lead to more efficient use of resources. > > Paraphrase: > The idea of a 'commons' has been used for centuries to describe resources that are shared among a group of people. This can be advantageous, as it can promote efficient utilization of resources. > > 1. What is the author's argument about the tragedy of the commons? > 2. How does the author suggest solving the tragedy of the commons? > 3. What is the author's view on freedom to breed and its potential consequences? > > The tragedy of the commons is a scenario first described in 1833 by William Forster Lloyd, where individuals share a limited resource but all act independently and in their own self-interest, leading to the depletion of the resource. This results in the destruction of the commons, as it is impossible for everyone to increase their share without limit. To prevent this, laws or taxes must be implemented to incentivize individuals to act in the common good and conserve the resource. Education is an important factor in helping people to recognize the necessity of this. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all, and the recognition of necessity is key to freedom.