The Tragedy of the Commons

Summary

Stuff You Should Know: The Tragedy of the Commons – Episode Summary

Release Date: February 6, 2025
Hosts: Chuck Bryant & Cara Price
Production: iHeartPodcasts

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Introduction to the Tragedy of the Commons

In this engaging episode of Stuff You Should Know, hosts Chuck Bryant and Cara Price delve deep into the concept of the Tragedy of the Commons—a foundational idea in economics and environmental science. They explore its origins, implications, and the real-world scenarios where this theory plays out.

Understanding the Tragedy of the Commons

[01:30] Cara Price:
"We're talking about the tragedy of the commons. For those unfamiliar, it's the idea that if you have a shared resource, people will overuse it to maximize their own profits, ultimately ruining the resource for everyone."

Chuck and Cara break down the basic premise: a shared resource (the "commons") is vulnerable to over-exploitation when individuals act in their self-interest without considering the collective impact. This often leads to the depletion or destruction of the resource.

Origins: Garrett Hardin and William Forster Lloyd

[03:30] Chuck Bryant:
"The tragedy of the Commons started out in a 1968 article from Science by biologist Garrett Hardin, who built upon ideas from 19th-century economist William Forster Lloyd."

Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" popularized the concept, using the example of farmers sharing a grazing field. He illustrated how individual incentives to add more livestock could lead to overgrazing, ultimately harming all users.

Critique of Hardin's Assumptions

[06:18] Cara Price:
"If people start adding cows and you're the one farmer who's like, 'I'm not going to do that,' you'll find yourself out of the team economically."

Chuck and Cara critique Hardin's assumptions, highlighting that he presumed individuals act solely out of self-interest without communication or cooperative strategies. This perspective, they argue, overlooks the potential for collective action and sustainable management.

Real-World Implications and Environmental Trading Markets

[16:30] Chuck Bryant:
"Environmental trading markets emerged from these ideas, with cap-and-trade systems designed to limit resource usage, such as fisheries or emissions."

They discuss how these markets attempt to regulate shared resources by setting caps and allowing the trading of usage permits. While effective in some cases (e.g., reducing sulfur dioxide emissions associated with acid rain), these systems can also lead to unintended consequences, such as market consolidation and exploitation.

Notable Quote:
[18:39] Cara Price:
"It worked for sulfur dioxide and reduced acid rain, showing that with the right framework, these systems can be effective."

Challenging the Dominance of the Tragedy of the Commons

[25:48] Chuck Bryant:
"If you look at indigenous management of common resources, these communities have sustainably managed their resources for centuries, disproving the inevitability of the tragedy."

The hosts introduce Elinor Ostrom's groundbreaking work, which challenges Hardin's pessimistic view. Ostrom demonstrated through extensive field studies that communities can effectively manage shared resources without resorting to privatization or top-down regulation.

Elinor Ostrom's Principles for Successful Commons Management

[37:22] Chuck Bryant:
"Ostrom outlined eight principles for managing commons successfully, including clearly defined boundaries, rules tailored to local needs, and robust monitoring systems."

The episode details Ostrom’s principles, emphasizing the role of local governance, collective decision-making, and adaptive management in preventing resource depletion.

Notable Quote:
[35:17] Cara Price:
"Ostrom went out and did those field studies that Hardin didn't, showing real-world examples where the tragedy didn't occur because communities managed their resources cooperatively."

Case Study: Maine Lobster Fisheries

[47:06] Chuck Bryant:
"In the 19th century, Maine implemented legal minimum sizes for lobsters. Initially, enforcement was lax, but local communities eventually self-policed through harbor gangs, ensuring sustainable fishing practices."

This example illustrates how local stakeholders took initiative to manage and protect a shared resource, aligning with Ostrom’s principles and avoiding the tragedy Hardin predicted.

Listener Mail and Additional Insights

Towards the end, Chuck and Cara engage with listener mail, addressing questions and expanding on topics related to the Tragedy of the Commons. They share anecdotes and personal stories that highlight the practical applications and challenges of managing shared resources.

[51:31] Listener Email:
A listener from the Netherlands shares insights about automats—self-service eateries—and their cultural significance, tying into the broader theme of resource management and community practices.

Conclusion: Re-evaluating Neoliberal Policies

[36:12] Cara Price:
"Neoliberal policies promoting privatization have often led to the consolidation of resources and wealth, neglecting the collective good and harming local communities."

The hosts conclude by reflecting on how the Tragedy of the Commons has influenced neoliberal policies over the past decades. While privatization can protect resources under certain conditions, it often disregards the nuanced needs of local communities, leading to inequitable outcomes.

[48:57] Chuck Bryant:
"The Tragedy of the Commons has been largely debunked in many contexts, especially where local management and community engagement are effective."

Final Thoughts

Chuck and Cara emphasize the importance of community-led resource management and the need to move beyond simplistic economic theories. By understanding and applying Ostrom’s principles, societies can foster sustainable and equitable use of shared resources.

[52:35] Josh Clark (Interlude):
"For more podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."

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Key Takeaways:

• Tragedy of the Commons: The theory posits that shared resources are prone to overuse and depletion when individuals act in self-interest.

• Garrett Hardin: Popularized the concept, advocating for privatization or government regulation to prevent resource depletion.

• Elinor Ostrom: Demonstrated through field studies that local communities can effectively manage shared resources using cooperative principles.

• Real-World Applications: Examples like Maine's lobster fisheries show that community-led management can sustain resources without external intervention.

• Policy Implications: Neoliberal approaches to resource management often overlook the benefits of local governance and can lead to inequitable outcomes.

This episode offers a comprehensive exploration of the Tragedy of the Commons, challenging traditional narratives and highlighting the potential for sustainable, community-driven resource management.

Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

Do you want to see into the future? Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? Do you want to experience the frontiers of what makes us human? On tech stuff, we travel from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars, from conversations with Nobel Prize winners to the depths of TikTok to ask burning questions about technology, from high tech to low culture, and everywhere in between. Join us Listen to tech stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Chuck Bryant]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Cara Price]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And it's just us again, Jerry who? And this is stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right, Another Econ edition. Typically not my favorite, but, you know, this one I could wrap my head around for the most part.

[Cara Price]

I think that's one of the reasons why it's had such an enormous impact on the world, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know what's funny? You're gonna laugh at me here.

[Cara Price]

They're all gonna laugh at you.

[Chuck Bryant]

Central. The central area of my high school was called the commons.

[Cara Price]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it just occurred to me 35 years or so after I graduated, that that's what that meant.

[Cara Price]

Oh, I see. I thought you were gonna say, like, my teenage years were the tragedy of the commons.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 sending the comments. 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 everybody.

[Cara Price]

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 graz 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, 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.

[Cara Price]

Not Foster, I would say piggybacking or hijacking.

[Chuck Bryant]

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, you know, a grazing field, and let's say three farmers have use of it, and they're letting their cows and sheep and, you know, 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. What would you.

[Cara Price]

Extra cow?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I mean, it would only cost a fraction of loss of resources for the other cows. Like, I'm still coming out ahead. And so bada bing, bada boom, that's what I'm gonna do, Right?

[Cara Price]

Yeah. So if Everybody was making $1 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?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And if you're 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.

[Cara Price]

Right. So there's always, under the. The logic of the tragedy of the comments, 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 Bryant]

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.

[Cara Price]

Right. So you're either a sucker or you. 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 farmer would find that they were no longer making money.

[Chuck Bryant]

No more team.

[Cara Price]

Because. 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 ext. 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 are. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's 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 if you listen to Hardin, and we'll talk a little bit about the problems with this guy in a second, but if you listen to Hardin, he'll say, when you divide this thing up and make it just private and everyone is incentivized to basically preserve their plots and do it sustainably so their profits are maximized with making sure the land isn't ruined so they can keep those profits maximized.

[Cara Price]

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 farmers 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, the gold, the goose that laid the golden egg and I need to keep it nice and healthy and happy that 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 Hardin's big. Like this is the. His favorite, I think solution was bring the government in and just say, you can't over graze. 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 Bryant]

Yeah. But here's the thing. Like, 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 gonna not be able to sustain that and the kids are gonna starve to death. So we're overbreeding and all of a sudden everyone's going, whoa, 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.

[Cara Price]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And they said, well, It'll be a thing at some point.

[Cara Price]

He's like, I like the ring of it though.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly.

[Cara Price]

It's catchy. So, yeah, yeah. His whole thing was we using scare quotes are overbreeding meant poor non white countries are overbreeding.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Cara Price]

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, that people could just keep having kids and knowing that the western wealthier governments were going to take care of them. And he was like, that's, 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, okay, 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. Do you pick 10 people out of these, you know, 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, um, 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, over grazing 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. Hardin 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 Bryant]

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 very smart person.

[Cara Price]

Right, exactly. So this was 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, and just it 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. Should we take a break?

[Cara Price]

Yeah, let's.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, we'll be right back, everybody.

[Josh Clark]

Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Osvaloshin, one of the new hosts of the long running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical, but obsessively intrigued.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I'm Cara Price, the other new host, and I'm ready to adopt early.

[Josh Clark]

And often on tech stuff. We travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology.

[Chuck Bryant]

One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians. Like data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality. How is it possible that the world's.

[Josh Clark]

New energy revolution can be based in.

[Chuck Bryant]

This place where there's no electricity at night? Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you understand how tech is changing our world and what you need to know to survive the singularity.

[Cara Price]

So join us.

[Josh Clark]

Listen to tech stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Cara Price]

Okay, so the tragedy of the commons became like the. 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 time 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 Bryant]

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, but 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.

[Cara Price]

Oh, you have too many. Do you have any good Hawks ones? I'm on the lookout for those.

[Chuck Bryant]

I have one Hawks cap that I wear.

[Cara Price]

I gotcha.

[Chuck Bryant]

I just gave away a second one because it was too big. But your head is too small for this thing.

[Cara Price]

It is a really tiny head. I'm like that one safari hunter in Beetlejuice.

[Chuck Bryant]

Do you know what your hat size is?

[Cara Price]

Like 0.6.

[Chuck Bryant]

0.6. Okay, that's good. So let's say it's fisheries because we're going to talk about fisheries a lot. So the government will come in and say, hey, you're overfishing. So we're going to capture 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 ETM's 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, or let's say it's environmental like hey, you're a factory and we're incentivizing you to clean up your, 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 to hit by simply selling that to company B who's like, yeah, we're not too good at that. I mean, is it creating like, doesn't that kind of defeat the whole purpose?

[Cara Price]

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, it can work and it does work. We actually reduced sulfur dioxide emissions that were reduced, 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 we took care of it because of cap and trade schemes. So it can work.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 of the cap?

[Cara Price]

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, those, 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 that make sense?

[Chuck Bryant]

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?

[Cara Price]

They. No, but let's say they have a cap to put out 10 pounds of CO2, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Cara Price]

And they're going, they know they're putting out 15 that year. Well, this other company that's putting out 5 pounds of CO2 that year they can sell their other 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 Bryant]

Yeah, I guess so.

[Cara Price]

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 Bryant]

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. So I mean you can't, like there's a bunch of different 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 and 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.

[Cara Price]

Right? For sure. And it depends on the 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 that fishing company is still staying within the, the total number of fish that can be caught annually. But they ran all the other people out of business that, so that's not at all what you want with it. So there's, there's pluses and minuses, there's, 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, and learn the hard way that just overall that's not necessarily the best way to do it. And it can really, really harm some groups while enriching others tremendously.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, 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, that don't have a, 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 A. If you're going to buy Chick Fil A franchise, you got to manage that thing.

[Cara Price]

Exactly right. You want that Chick Fil A Cadillac.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly. But sometimes there aren't regulations like that. And 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.

[Cara Price]

That's basically the neoliberalism T shirt what you just said, you know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly. 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 that 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.

[Cara Price]

No, 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 is 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, 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 Forester Lloyd, that this is the one. Hardin, what'd you say hijacked to begin with?

[Cara Price]

He did, he did.

[Chuck Bryant]

He was talking about actual English commons, which was how it used 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.

[Cara Price]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 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 like just destroy their land because they all had self interest to keep it sustainable.

[Cara Price]

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 common 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Cara Price]

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 we're 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, whether 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 Forester Lloyd was arguing against Adam Smith's capitalist idea 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. 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 Bryant]

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 gotta 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.

[Cara Price]

Right. It's ours.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, let's just oversell the chaos, maybe because it was actually working out okay for many centuries, but. But we're going to just sell it as this. This chaotic mess that needs to be cleaned up and organized.

[Cara Price]

Right. That's how it's done, it seems like, isn't it, Charles? Like people. People come along and create a problem that's not actually there for their own benefit ultimately.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. My. I have a friend who, ever since college, he was just one of those guys that, while we were just like whatever he was.

[Cara Price]

About what?

[Chuck Bryant]

About everything, about the world, about politics, about, you know, that period of college where you just kind of check out and all like 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. 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 I was. That always stuck with me. And he's totally right. Like, they'll sell it to you as this, but then it becomes this.

[Cara Price]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Cara Price]

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. And that's a really great. That's what the tragedy 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 that makes sense. Let's start privatizing everything. And it was just because this guy took this idea and made it approachable. That's became fact, even though it was never fact. I just find that fascinating how something like that can just change the world.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, you know, I think there are so many people licking their chops. They were like, oh, here's a great opportunity for us to jump on this bandwagon, to take more for ourselves.

[Cara Price]

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?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, someone would have.

[Cara Price]

Yeah. But it would have happened piecemeal, I think. I don't know. It's questionable that it would have happened like it had.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, maybe.

[Cara Price]

Let's take a break.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, we'll be right back. We're going to contemplate that and come back with the definitive answer right after this.

[Josh Clark]

Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Os Velocian, one of the new hosts of the long running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical, but obsessively intrigued.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I'm Cara Price, the other new host, and I'm ready to adopt early.

[Josh Clark]

And often on tech stuff. We travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology.

[Chuck Bryant]

One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians. Like data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality. How is it possible that the world's.

[Josh Clark]

New energy revolution can be based in.

[Chuck Bryant]

This place where there's no electricity at night? Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you.

[Cara Price]

Understand how tech is changing our world.

[Chuck Bryant]

And what you need to know to survive the singularity.

[Cara Price]

So join us.

[Josh Clark]

Listen to tech stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Chuck Bryant]

We don't have a definitive answer. I was just kidding.

[Cara Price]

You got me.

[Chuck Bryant]

We should talk about Eleanor Ostrom, though. This is a woman who wrote a book in 1990 called Governing the Commons, 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 guess she took a bunch of examples all over the world of controlled CPRs, like grazing areas, that'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 everybody 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 back seat to ensuring that this land that they live in stays as close to as it is as possible.

[Cara Price]

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 what's, what's 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Cara Price]

So I want to say one other thing too, because I know I'm kind of known for having a very hard nose, certain opinion about things, and it slants, you know, in this particular direction typically.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Cara Price]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Cara Price]

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, that I don't want anybody to think I'm just bashing neoliberalism, because it does help in a lot of ways.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, and I know you well and I can tell everybody that you are a very varied person who looks at things from all angles and is very considerate of you. Don't just shut anything down outright. You like to consider things now. Okay, so back to Ostrom, though. She argues that, hey, this we've shown time and time again, I show in these real world examples in my books in Japan and in Switzerland and 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 gotta follow these or it's not gonna work. And she narrowed it down to eight principles of, like a successful 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 seems to be when all of the problems start because their interests are not the same as local interests.

[Cara Price]

Yeah. 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, the, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, 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 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 gotta know that someone is out there doing this so people know they're gonna be held accountable. And then the next one ties into that. And then when you do that, you gotta start out small with these sanctions. It's gotta 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. You've gotta encourage people to stick around and like, all right, here's a warning, but you can't keep letting this happen, that kind of thing.

[Cara Price]

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 what the person ultimately faces get out. Which. Yeah, and that's bad enough in like a. Like a Western society, you know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Cara Price]

But also you can make do. You know, there's the Internet. If you go into a store, the person basically has to take your money for food. In a more traditional culture, ostracism's like, you're in big 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's not going to show up and help you for these death rites that your ancestors demand of you. Because that's just tradition.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Cara Price]

Yeah. No wigs. No powdered wigs.

[Chuck Bryant]

No powdered wigs at all. You have to have support from authorities, and 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.

[Cara Price]

Right. 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 that's. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. And didn't she win something for this work?

[Cara Price]

She won the Nobel, which Livia. Foot in parentheses, fake Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Because that's not one that was actually organized originally.

[Chuck Bryant]

She meant by that. But one of the things that came out of the book, there's a University of Chicago legal scholar named Lee Ann Fennell who points to that book and says, you know, this is sort of corrects these legal theories that say property is all or nothing. Like, you either own it and have total control over it, or you don't. And it's actually possible. You can have a common. You can have an area that people share. And the example that. And still have some autonomy. And the example that Livia gave was like a house. And if you got a family in the house, you know, let's say, you know, two people that have coupled up and have children, you know, it's a collective. But, like, you know, generally speaking, unless you. You live in a. In a. In a terrible house with an authority authoritarian dictator as the head of the household.

[Cara Price]

Or a stepdad that makes you feel stupid.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Or stepdad that makes you feel dumb. You've got, you know, your kid has your room. And you know what? You can. This is your room. You know, you have a right to your room. And you can basically decorate it how you want within. Within reason and do what you want in here. But. But it's still part of the. The house.

[Cara Price]

Right. And technically, your parents own that room, but because of custom and tradition, they probably respect that room as your private space.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And that's something, as a parent, I found is super important, because at a certain age, and this has been the last couple of years with Ruby, like, you know, I'm gonna go into my room and shut the door.

[Cara Price]

Yeah. And you're like, no, you're not.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I'll open the door. Because I just like. And it's not in a spy way. I just like peeking in and seeing the fun stuff she's doing. And Emily's like, you know, leave the door shut. She's got to have that autonomy. And I'm like, I know.

[Cara Price]

Good for Emily. That's really sweet. When you open the door, do you suddenly open and go, what are you doing?

[Chuck Bryant]

I'll give a little knock. Now you know. And you know, she's usually in there drawing pictures of cats and listening to.

[Cara Price]

Music, reading Teen Beat. Yeah, man. Do you remember? So was your room your own private sanctuary?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, Scott and I shared a room until I was. I feel like I was probably 10 or 11.

[Cara Price]

That's the room age right there.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And that's when we split. But we were upstairs at our house. It was just two bedrooms separated by a joined bathroom. And my sweet brother, he. I was so sad about moving out of his room at first. He agreed to keep his bathroom door open so I could lay in bed and see through the bathroom to him and his room.

[Cara Price]

Oh, my God, he is such a guy. He'd be the rancher. That would be like, I'm not over grazing. I'll just die.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know. He's one of the best, but. Yeah, so I had my own room and it was like my sports posters and I went through a Marilyn Monroe phase for some reason, where I had a bunch of her posters up.

[Cara Price]

I went through a James Dean phase. That was similar.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly. But yeah, it was my room. I took a lot of pride in decorating it and doing my thing. And my parents. My father literally did not come upstairs. That's a whole other story. And my mom did for a while, but basically, I mean, that was our zone for the most part.

[Cara Price]

That's awesome. I remember there not being anything more satisfying than undertaking a total remodeling of your room.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, moving stuff around, furniture.

[Cara Price]

All of a sudden, the bed's over here. And like, I used to love doing that. It was so. It just changed everything. I love that so much. I have so many great memories of my room.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, me too. And I used to do that to apartments I lived in. And I had a. Ironically, recently had a thought about how much I used to enjoy that and how like our house there, you can't really do that. Like, it's set up in a. In a way that I can't be like, hey, let's rearrange our living room. It's like, well, you can't because let's.

[Cara Price]

Move the built ins outside.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly. So those. Those days are over for me, unfortunately.

[Cara Price]

Yeah, same here. That's just how it goes as you get older. It's one more thing that brings you joy or brought you joy that's now dead and shrivelled up like an old leaf.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 correct course on their own.

[Cara Price]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 gonna all continue this to sustain our living doing this, we gotta work together. So they form harbor gangs to start self policing, basically.

[Cara Price]

So main 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 Bryant]

Don't go over there. That's where the harbor gangs are.

[Cara Price]

Very nice. Boy, you just took me to Cabot Coat.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. Right. 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.

[Cara Price]

So. Yeah, I guess Tragedy of the Commons has been largely debunked, even though it completely altered the world for decades and decades and still does. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, either blamed or credited with the birth of capitalism, that's no small thing.

[Cara Price]

It's pretty big. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're going to do one on fencing of the commons one day, and then we're also going to do one on neoliberalism someday.

[Chuck Bryant]

And the Cod Wars.

[Cara Price]

Yeah, and the Cod Wars. There you go. Well, since Chuck corrected me and added cod wars, of course, that means it's time, everybody, for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

First of all, quick correction to a correction. When we got written in about the hodge podge, I kept saying modge podge.

[Cara Price]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is mod podge. And the corrector got it right. I just kept saying it wrong.

[Cara Price]

Wow.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I played it off to myself as a joke, but it was not.

[Cara Price]

Modge Podge is better. I think the Inventor of Mod Podge is just like, oh, why didn't I call it modge podge Mr. Boat.

[Chuck Bryant]

It rhymes even.

[Cara Price]

I wonder if it was from the time when Mod Squad was. Was out, because it does have kind of like a hippie dippy flower look to it, doesn't it?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, decoupage is a very old thing, and I suppose that meant a modern decoupage is my guess.

[Cara Price]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Don't you think?

[Cara Price]

I don't know. I didn't ever think about it more than I have in the last couple weeks.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know, right?

[Cara Price]

I wish you'd never brought it up.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, man. How did it go? Oh, I remember now. We mentioned Martha Stewart and I said, there's the hodgepodge everywhere.

[Cara Price]

Mm.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so this is from a friend in the Netherlands who said, good luck pronouncing the name, but I think I've nailed it. So we're gonna see. Okay, stay tuned for the end. Hey, guys. Just finished the episode on Automats and I felt I needed to write in. I'm from the Netherlands and believe it or not, automats are still a big thing there. And I remember now after I got a couple of emails about these, of being in Amsterdam and seeing these fibos F E B O places.

[Cara Price]

I've not heard of that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, it's an automat, basically, except instead of a huge restaurant, it's just like a, you know, a smallish room. We refer to it as eating out of the wall. These places mostly just serve deep fried food, but in general is quite fresh. Not sure why they're still so popular though. Maybe it's because the Dutch aren't really known for their fine dining, as we just want our meals to be efficient and cheap. Nevertheless, if you're ever around, I invite you to take one of our famous croquettes or bitter balls out of the wall, which are especially good after a night of heavy drinking. Love the show. Best regards. And that is from GS Nice.

[Cara Price]

Will you spell that for us non Dutch speakers?

[Chuck Bryant]

At least that's how I was told to say it. It is pronounced, or, I'm sorry, spelled G I J, S and said Jez.

[Cara Price]

That is fantastic. That looks like I just, like, brushed up against the keyboard.

[Chuck Bryant]

It really does.

[Cara Price]

Can you pronounce it one more time?

[Chuck Bryant]

What I've got and what I'm sticking with is hez.

[Cara Price]

That is great. I hope you nailed it, Chuck.

[Chuck Bryant]

I hope so too.

[Cara Price]

You deserve to. Well, thanks a lot, Hez.

[Chuck Bryant]

The name you're trying to pronounce is.

[Cara Price]

We appreciate the email. Thanks for filling us in. I had no idea about bitter balls and eating from the wall out of the wall in Amsterdam, so thank you. And if you want to be like the name is Haze and you can send us an email too, send it off to stuffpodcastheartradio.com.

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

[Josh Clark]

For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Do you want to see into the future? Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? Do you want to experience the frontiers of what makes us human? On tech stuff we travel from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars, from conversations with Nobel Prize winners to the depths of TikTok to ask burning questions about technology. From high tech to low culture and everywhere in between. Join us Listen to tech stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.