[PEN-L:3508] Re: Tragedy of the Commons

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

Brad,
    True enough.  But Michael P. is on to something that 
Hardin and most commentators regarding the "tragedy of the 
medieval grazing commons" case that Hardin was talking 
about rarely recognize.  The "tragedy" not only coincided 
with the emergence of privatization, but that privatization 
in fact actively aggravated the problem as the commons 
grazing areas were reduced in size due to the enclosures.  
All these people who claim that the enclosures were a 
"rational response to the tragedy" have things backwards.
     More generally, as has been mentioned, it is possible 
for "common property" to be managed in ways that control or 
limit access.  The original economics literature on this 
from Gordon's 1954 JPE paper on fisheries totally confused 
"common property" with "open access," a confusion that 
Hardin picked up on and amplified with his 
much-cited _Science_ article.
     The realization that these are distinct issues and 
that it is open access that is the source of the problem 
came later.  I would date it to the 1975 paper in the 
_Natural Resources Journal_ by S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup and 
Richard C. Bishop, "'Common Property' as a Concept in 
Natural Resources Policy."  Since then we have had a huge 
literature on this by people like Elinor Ostrom and Daniel 
Bromley on how to manage access in commonly owned 
properties, with a classic example of a successful system 
being the Swiss alpine grazing commons that are owned by 
Swiss villages and have been well managed since the 1200s.
     Certainly, the bigger the thing to be managed and the 
more people involved in it, the harder it is to set up a 
system of access control.  These are the problems with 
the very large Ogallala aquifer.  And this applies to 
privately owned property as well, which most of the 
Ogallala aquifer is, although by many different parties.
     I have a paper on this that emphasizes that the nature 
and scale of the ecosystem being managed is crucial, 
"Systemic Crises in Hierarchical Ecological Economies," 
_Land Economics_, May 1995, vol. 71, no. 2, pp. 163-172.
Barkley Rosser 
On Wed, 17 Feb 1999 10:03:38 -0800 Brad De Long 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> >Hardin's story is a myth.  In truth, the communities that he describes had
> >customs and institutions that kept the amount of livestock in check.
> 
> As long as population densities are low, and social pressures are strong...
> 

-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]