s.artesian wrote:
This is really not an issue of free and equal access to resources becoming socially inefficient... the very posing of the issue in these terms assumes atomized private property holders competing for maximized, mutually exclusive, use of the "commons" resource-- in short the utlimate capitalist myth of entrepreneurs, only this time, entrepreneurs gone wild, where greed is good, and everyday in everyway is the war of all against all. Good morning, Mr. Hobbes.
I was responding to Jim's remarks on market failure and about how the economists (not PEN-L economists, but conventional economists) view the "tragedy of the commons." You're right about the premises involved. It's -- as Michael Lebowitz calls it -- the political economy of capital. Not the political economy of labor. It's one-sided. All that. Jim Devine wrote:
Private ownership rights can be duly stipulated -- always?
"Can" doesn't mean "will." Obviously, the notion of "failure" of a given social structure or institution must presuppose that such structure or institution is in place or, at least, possible. If markets (private ownership rights) are impossible, if they can't exist, then they can't fail. The idea of failure of a social structure or institution is that, under some conditions, social inefficiency (waste -- ultimate waste of human life) flows as a necessary consequence of such structure or institution. And we cannot say that just because a perfectly healthy human being is an abstraction, the medical concept of illness is nonsensical or useless or arbitrary...
this is merely a matter of definition of the term "market failure." Definitions are, by their very nature, conventional.
Conventional doesn't mean arbitrary. There are degrees of social objectivity. You didn't say you were proposing a better (personal) definition of market failure. You said that the tragedy of the commons was a well-known market failure among "neoclassicals," that they should respond to it, that it was in their official list, etc. All I'm saying is that you have it wrong. For the economists, the tragedy of the commons is not a market failure. So they don't see the need to respond to it. Social conventions (definitions, concepts, etc.) have some semantic plasticity, but I just can't see how you can turn the tragedy of the commons into a "neoclassical" market failure. The other remarks I made weren't meant as imputations. I was just trying to clarify things.
