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The “Tragedy of the Commons” Is a Dubious Concept
(jacobin.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Environment
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I think it's important to note the author's biases. While much of what they state is important history to state - they are a bit reductionist and throw out the entire concept of the common resource management because of its tainted association with Hardin. In the article they link another article, which felt a bit less biased and more nuanced and goes into the details of the work of Ostrom, namely that of collaborative management, or healthy systems for managing the commons so as to avoid the 'tragedy'. Her work was proof that it is not an inevitable outcome, and while the author correctly recognizes that capitalistic societies heavily weigh the scale to result in tragedy, it overlooks the situations in which it is not - examples such as community fiber internet, groundwater usage in los angeles, national parks and other environmental protection agencies, and more.
This is interesting, since my perspective on be tragedy has always been from the perspective of game theory. Often the optimal outcome isn't a stable one because in many circumstances a totally altruistic system can be taken advantage of.
Humans of course beat the game theory predicted stability points quite often, because humans are not rational actors and that is an adaptive advantage that lets us beat gave theory often unintentionally, compared to most other animals which do behave rationally.
So the important takeaway I think is that models don't describe everything, all perspectives have limitations. Humans beat the tragedy of the Commons regularly and often there are ways to. But it is a genuine problem that exists in many situations and does need to be solved.
Game theory is deeply flawed because it plays out on too small of a scale. Both in scope (individual games between too few actors) and in measure (doesn't play out over tens or hundreds of thousands of repetitions in a system which can adapt/evolve). It has always stuck me as people who think they're smart measuring what they think being smart should be.
A recent study on large scale cooperation shows that the creation of societal norms which help to promote cooperation naturally occurs and that working for the benefit of many is actually more advantageous.
The critique of simple games in game theory comes from game theory. It’s usually just people who don’t know game theory that think it’s bad or something. I think game theory pretty concretely leads us to some pretty based conclusions.
Years ago I read of a couple of game theorists who were attending a conference in .. perhaps Egypt .. and they decided to wait until at the destination ( taxi ) before declaring that they would only pay part of the fare, & the driver would just have to accept it...
What the driver did was drive them back to their origin, at his expense, & told them to get out.
Game theory didn't allow that.
Therefore they invented Drama Theory, which takes into account emotion/politics, because the evidence that human behaviour contradicts Game Theory had finally got noticed by them.
No idea who they were, nor have I noticed anything obvious published as Drama Theory, since.
It may have been in Scientific American, or some similar thing, it was years ago, possibly last century.