Like Jon Mandle, I was repulsed by Garrett Hardin’s 1974 article Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor The idea that large sections of humanity were doomed and should be abandoned forthwith was quite popular at the time. The Paddock brothers prominently advocated a policy of “triage”, cutting off aid immediately to countries like India which were, they argued, doomed to starvation in any case. Judging by this 1996 interview, Hardin (who died last year) didn’t change his views much over time.
Having reacted against this piece by Hardin, I was glad to discover that his more famous contribution to the environment debate, the Tragedy of the Commons was, in historical terms, a load of tripe.
The most famous paragraph in Hardin’s piece is his summary of an 1833 article by a British clergyman, William Lloyd
Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability be comes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.
I vividly remember Partha Dasgupta saying (I quote from memory),
There can be few passages in the literature on the environment so brief and well-known that contain as many errors as this one
. He has a more measured statement of the case here.
Prior to hearing this, I’d written a Masters thesis in which, among other things, I’d trawled through the historical literature on how common property systems actually worked, showing that they were never “open to all”, and that all members of the group of common owners had tightly-specifed (and, in a feudal system, highly unequal) rights[1]. As soon as grazing pressure built up, common grazing land was “stinted” (numbers of cattle were limited) a practice that was almost universal by the late Middle Ages. Common property systems were neither the anarchy pictured by Hardin nor the utopia imagined by some romantic socialists (the Diggers were a rare example of a group who tried to put a utopian vision of common property into practice).
One point I was particularly pleased with in my thesis was that the observation that Lloyd could only write what he did in 1833 because, by that time, nearly all actual commons had been destroyed by enclosure. On the other hand, of course, the events were too recent for Lloyd to have access to the kind of historical work I found in my own research. No such excuse can be made for Hardin.
fn1. I wasn’t, of course, the first to do this. A good analysis, from a Chicago-school viewpoint, is Carl J. Dahlman, The Open Field System and Beyond: A Property Rights Analysis of an Economic Institution (Cambridge, 1980)
John Quiggin 
Isn’t the distinction (dating to Ciriacy-Wantrup?) between ‘open access’ which is a free-for-all (as in a claiming rush onto land without property rights) and ‘common property’ where land is shared and subject to community usage norms — in some cases exploitative as you mention and in other cases more benign.
Until recently the forests of Nepal were used as a fuel resource in a sustainable way as common property. Then the state moved to ‘protect’ these lands by assigning ‘public ownership’ to them and the forests disappeared — users became uncertain about their continued shared access rights and exploited them as open access resources and, zip, they disappeared.
Of course it is not inevitable that exhausting all rents from a resource will drive it to extinction but ‘tragedies’ are more likely with open access than common property.
John,
Whereas I agree that Hardin was something of an oddball, I don’t necessarily think the premise of TOTC – that individuals will practice selfish behaviors that are not in the common good – is necessarily incorrect (whereas the details may, however, be way too simplistic). Simon Levin discusses this within an ecological framework in “Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons”.
This discussion seems to be converging rapidly on three pretty straighforward observations: (1) in the absence of some institutional arrangement limiting the use of a resource, private rationality can create collective madness; (2) private title of the modern western variety is not the only institution conducive to rational resource management; and (3) wars, political upheavals and rapid technical change, being disruptive of traditional institutions, tend to lead to abuse and degradation of environmental resources.
Since you didn’t like Hardin’s Lifeboat Ethics, John, I presume you’ll also be not too keen on my GenX solution to the aging of the population – “mandatory euthanasia”!
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surely Hardin’s point was that in a mythical commons with no rules the use of resources becomes unsustainable by simplying allowing for self-interest to reign. Your references to rules operating in historical commons merely reinforces Hardin’s contention!
Harry, you’re exactly right on Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop who, I think, were the ones who got me started on this back in the 70s.
As you say, the big problem with Hardin’s historical errors came when they were applied to existing common property institutions in developing countries, leading either to nationalisation or to wholesale privatisation, often with very bad consequences.
John, I assume you are referring to privatisations which stuff-up (no secure property rights), some ‘second-best’ issue or some adverse distributional change.
Privatisations do redistribute income towards new property owners and this redistribution more than exceeds the extra output society receives as efficiency gains — so a ‘rent-collector is not worthy of his full hire’ (to paraphrase Samuelson). But still the resource generates more output as a whole so there is less ‘excessive use’. It’s that original users are worse-off unless ownership is vested in them isn’t it?
Re: James Farrell’s third point
James C Scott makes a case against applying abstract theoretical models (such as Hardin’s) to real-world situations.
Take a look at his ‘Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed’
John,
I think you have missed Harden’s point (as have most other people). The commons was just the example. The real commons was the whole planet, and the growth he was worried about was the growth of the human population.
i was interested to see what you would have to say on this topic, because i like hardin’s articles.
it seems you have only scored a historical error, and done nothing to address the thesis. in fact, since hardin never claims (in the paragraph you quoted) that this commons ever existed, you havent even exposed a historical error.
foreign aid usually does make the situation worse, and the green revolution did nothing except create a bigger population to use up the next scarce resource (for example clean drinking water)
as a bit of a greenie yourself, you would think hardin’s idea of longages of demand would be enlightening.
There is no need to make excuses for Lloyd. As near as I can tell from secondary sources, he wasn’t trying to use the historical pattern in his argument, he was analysing what he saw around him, i.e. the behaviour of the (few) remaining commons in a situation of breakdown.
It’s a little more complicated with Hardin. To the extent he was only using the history for purposes of illustration of a perfectly sound description of the same sort of thing, he was correct. However, to the extent he was lending it a spurious credibility, that was wrong, and many of his readers may have taken it that way even if he only meant to illustrate.
A while back there was a discussion of all this on news:sci.econ and one regular, Jim Blair, thought it worth archiving on a page of his at http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/4834/common.txt. I think it’s worth pasting in what he has from my own contributions:-
.
.
.
AND on March 2, 2002 (and with some additional comments from September
2003 edited in) Peter Lawrence wrote:
BTW, many discussions of the Tragedy of the (plural) Commons don’t merely
treat it as a generic singular, they misstate a lot of the historical
background. For instance, by conflating all commons, they then suppose
that anyone could use a “commons” arbitrarily. Not so: only a commoner could
use a common – and his customary rights didn’t extend to the next common and
were also restricted in just how he could use it, which reduced the tendency
to overuse. And yes, it was generally “he”.
First, and not as a quibble, “commons” is plural. This matters; there were
comons all over England, but they didn’t form one vast common resource. This
or that common (singular) had its own commoners with rights, e.g. Wimbledon
Common, but outsiders coming in plain did NOT have access to unregulated
rights. Sometimes cattle drovers paid for access; sometimes local commoners
overused their rights and were had up before the magistrates for it (I came
across an example in a biography of Oliver Cromwell, describing what happened
to a collateral ancestor of his who did that in Putney).
Second, “common” v “commons” is also a non-quibble because the valid
theoretical mechanism works precisely because of the subtle distinction
between singular and plural, so that “each” and “all” cannot be lumped
together as plural forms – so that where, say, the Americanism “woods” for
“wood” is merely a clumsy confusion of singular and plural, the singular and
plural thing is actually part of the mechanism of the tragedy of the commons.
Third, the historical commons of England did begin to break down – but it was
more a case of the conditions changing and the old customary regulation
becoming inadequate. There were even intermediate forms, like Lammas Lands
(common for pasture in some seasons, private for crops in other seasons).
There never was a tragedy of the commons, except as a consequence of this or
that common previously breaking down. (It must have been that situation that
came to the attention of the early 19th century economists and got written up
for Hardin to find – part and parcel of the same incipient breakdowns that
came to their attention and were written up by Malthus and Nassau Senior,
which statesmen and good luck headed off.) PML.
jeb:
> I didn’t realize that only
> a commoner could use the common, and I like that idea. I mean so many
> places were restricted to the elite, it is interesting to think that at
> least SOME places were restricted to the commoners. Is that why they were
> called “commoners”??
Yes. But there is a frequent misunderstanding about privilege, from people in
this more egalitarian age. Privilege was NOT reserved for an elite few,
rather everyone had some privileges and missed out on others, a
self-reinforcing social structure. Sure, only peers of the realm could get
into the House of Lords – but then, they couldn’t stand for the House of
Commons either. That was just for commoners. (Recent constitutional
developments ignored.)
> You think Hardin had it wrong?
No – he did his homework. But many of his readers and followers took a
simplified picture as an actual description of what had been happening, when
what happened was in fact kept within certain bounds by customary
restrictions. For instance, fuel could be gathered by commoners but there
were analogues to game laws that restricted how much and how often it could
be gathered so the supply stayed up; “by hook or by crook” referred to
legitimate means of gathering fuel wood – axes weren’t allowed.
Oh, a reference: the opening chapters of Buchan’s life of Cromwell go into
some of his ancestors. One was a low life in a village near London, now a
suburb, who got into the records for going too far and abusing his commoner’s
rights in various ways. But with enough commoners and even customary
restrictions couldn’t preserve the functioning of the economy from a Tragedy
of the Commons. Enclosure did that with a Coasian solution, privatisation
before that term was invented, but as so often the Coasian solution neglected
to make any compensation for the wealth transfer that it also involved. PML.
http://users.netlink.com.au/~peterl/publicns.html#AFRLET2
It is by no means clear whether Hardin intended to support his Tragedy-thesis with an historical example.
In the 1968 Science article, Hardin’s makes no reference – even by way of an aside – to merry old England. In fact, the famous passage from the ’68 article obviously abstracts from any historical context; it is nothing more than a thought-experiment: “Picture a pasture open to all. …” One might say that the historical reference is implicit – he draws upon William Forster Lloyd’s Two Lectures on the Checks to Population. Surely Lloyd (at least) is referring to medieval England. But even in Lloyd’s own text, the example given is a thought experiment, a la Ricardo: “Again, suppose two persons to have a common purse….” Lloyd couches his whole illustration in countfactual language (although one imagines the reader is supposed to join the dots to reality, again a la Ricardo).
Now, these observations have to be balanced against a follow-up paper by Hardin (in Managing the Commons, 1977), in which he does allude to the Enclosure movement. In this 1977 book he also includes sympathetic writers who make explicit links between the Tragedy thesis and merry old England. This would seem to leave open the possibility that Hardin at least thought the Tragedy thesis was historically accurate to some degree.
While I have found Hardin’s stuff on the internet, I haven’t yet found any of Lloyd’s so I have had to work with what I could infer about it from secondary sources. Can anyone refer me to stuff that is directly his?
In all this, it should be clear that Lloyd — a professor of economics at Oxford with previous mathematical training — was not even writing primarily about agriculture. He used the “commons” primarily as a parable for the problem he really wanted to deal with — namely, Malthus’s thesis of human overpopulation.
It is somewhat futile and unfair to fault Lloyd for showing less than thorough scholarship on the historical commons, when this was for him no more than an incidental illustration that appealed to what he thought was contemporary opinion on the matter.
Hardin’s 1968 essay disingenuously portrayed Lloyd as originally writing about cows and land, when in fact the latter dealt with exactly the same topic of population Hardin was interested in. It is not the case that Lloyd invented the commons example and Hardin applied it to population. It is more correct to say that Lloyd wrote on population and used the commons as one example (among several) to illustrate his point.
And this is my website.
Ernest Garcia o
The history of the Oglalla Aquifer, which underlies
many Western plains states in the USA, is a perfect
and important example of the “Tragedy of the
Commons” phenomenon in real life.
Regardless of whether or not Garrett Hardin’s
original explication is historic or metaphoric
or mythical, the phenomenon exists, and explains
much.
sinking lifeboats
quiggin gets repulsed by hardin’s lifeboat ethics, but doesn’t actually address any of its points. the link he gives to dasgupta is more informative: “The answer depends on how contained the commons happen to be geographically. Hardin’s parable is apt…
sinking lifeboats
quiggin gets repulsed by hardin’s lifeboat ethics, but doesn’t actually address any of its points. the link he gives to dasgupta is more informative: “The answer depends on how contained the commons happen to be geographically. Hardin’s parable is apt…
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