Quick note: It wasn't accurate for me to characterize the Tragedy of the Commons (proposed by Garrett Hardin 1968, Science 162: 1243-1248) as an economic theory, though it is, in part. It is every bit as much an ecological theory to explain why over-population is a serious problem and why people should not be free to breed as much as they please. This origin in the overpopulation debate would explain why this theory is apparently so much better-known in ecology and in economics.
The theory has been used to argue for government regulation of open-access resources, like fish and herps, and also for privatization of property owned by the government (national parks, rangelands, etc.) and property owned by nobody (open ocean). Both applications of the theory have their failings. As Beryl Crowe (1969, Science166, 1103-1107) argued in a response to the original paper, government regulation tends to break down because the broad coalition that inspires the creation of the regulatory agency is less interested and less determined than the people the agency is meant to regulate. Through relentless pressure, the regulated parties eventually take over the regulating agency, making it an expensive Potemkin regulator. Privatization has numerous problems with which most of us are probably familiar. To name a few: (1) People don't necessarily manage resources more sustainably on their own property than they do on communal property. (2) Privatization, when it works, works on economically valuable resources, and only when the value of those resources accrue to the owners of the resource disproportionately. The wetland adjacent to the river filters the water for people downstream, but not so much for the person who owns the wetland. The view from your ranchette house is worth more to you than it costs anyone else to have your house mar the beauty of the natural landscape. (3) Privatizing a resource by dividing up the land or water in which it's found doesn't work so well if that resource is highly mobile, like wild fish and birds or clean water.. (4) Private property is the heart of capitalism, and, for all its virtues, one of the main things capitalism rewards is the prior possession of wealth. Privatized resources accrue disproportionately to the wealthy. Privatizing public or open-access resources, like fisheries, national parks, and public schools, ultimately amounts to handing the best of these resources over to the wealthy and reducing or eliminating whatever access everyone else once had. Anyway, I mostly wanted to correct my assertion that the Tragedy of the Commons was primarily an economic theory. Someone told me that in my early training, and it didn't occur to me to question it until I had echoed that error to the forum. Jim Crants
