5.1 - The Tragedy of the Commons
Learning Objectives
The main objective is to explain the concept of the tragedy of the commons. The essential knowledge is that individuals tend to use public or shared resources in their own self-interest, which eventually depletes those resources. The associated skill is concept explanation.
Introduction and Definition
The tragedy of the commons is the idea that people tend to overuse public or shared resources because they don’t personally experience the negative consequences of doing so.
- This concept helps explain things as complex as air and water pollution, or as simple as why public restrooms are often dirty.
- The idea was first described in 1833 by British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used the example of herders overgrazing their animals on shared public pastures.
- It became part of mainstream environmentalist theory in 1968, when American ecologist Garrett Hardin wrote an essay called The Tragedy of the Commons, drawing heavily from Lloyd’s work.
Key Conditions for a Tragedy of the Commons
For the tragedy to apply, two conditions have to be met:
- The resources have to be public or shared, not private. If they were private, users would feel the negative consequences of overuse.
- The resource has to be capable of being depleted by overuse.
Examples of the Commons
- Overgrazing: Too many animals on one patch of land.
- Overfishing: Catching so many fish that populations get depleted, leaving none for future generations.
- Pollution: Water and air pollution of all sorts.
- Overuse of Groundwater: Groundwater is a public shared resource. For example, a private company (Nestle in Michigan) requested to increase its pumping rate from a shared well, since they don’t suffer the negative consequences of overusing or depleting that source. If the water runs out, they can just move and find another site.
Why the Tragedy Occurs
- Lack of Ownership: When nobody owns a resource, nobody directly suffers the consequences of depleting or overusing it.
- Analogy: People treat public restrooms badly, leaving paper towels around and water splashed everywhere, because they don’t feel responsible and they can just leave. They’d never do that in their own house.
- “Someone Else Will” Mentality: There’s a common thought process of “if I don’t overuse the resource, someone else will.” That pushes individuals to profit from what’s left before others get to it.
- Lack of Consequences: Often there are no direct consequences, like laws, fines, or the threat of lawsuits, for depleting or polluting a shared resource, especially in developing nations.
Example with numbers: Ten ranchers share a pasture that can feed 100 cows without being damaged. Rancher A adds one extra cow and keeps all of the profit from it. The damage that extra cow does to the grass is shared by all ten ranchers, so Rancher A only pays about 1/10 of the cost. Every rancher does the same math and adds cows, and the pasture ends up overgrazed for everyone.
The Problem: Negative Externalities
The result of the tragedy of the commons is the creation of negative externalities.
- Definition: A negative externality is a cost that comes with a human activity but isn’t experienced by the person doing the activity. The cost gets externalized.
Activity | Negative Externality (Cost Pushed onto Others) |
Overfishing | Leads to total depletion of resources, like the Atlantic cod crash, causing loss of income for fishermen and potential starvation in parts of the world. |
Air Pollution (Coal Power Plants) | Sulfur dioxide from coal-fired power plants harms people’s lungs, damages the respiratory tract, and worsens asthma or bronchitis. The power plants themselves never pay the increased healthcare costs of the affected people. |
Pesticide Use | Farmers use pesticides to increase crop yield and profit. Those pesticides wash away, contaminating groundwater and damaging fish populations in streams, which costs downstream communities recreational dollars. |
Solutions to the Tragedy of the Commons
Solutions aim to hold individuals or entities accountable for the resources they use or pollute.
- Privatization or Government Ownership: Make the shared resource private, either by selling it to individuals or through government ownership. That way somebody is responsible for maintaining it.
- Impose Fees or Taxes: Make users pay for using the resource.
- Examples include a permit system for grazing, or requiring logging companies to pay a permit fee. The idea is that the more people have to pay per unit of resource, the more likely they are to use it sustainably and consider using less.
- Punitive Measures (Fines and Laws): Impose taxes, fines, or criminal charges on groups or individuals that pollute shared air, soil, and water.
- Examples: The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act give the EPA the power to impose fines and penalties on polluters.
- The Bureau of Land Management collects grazing fees from ranchers and conducts studies to help restore public rangelands in the western United States so they don’t fall victim to the tragedy of the commons.
Big picture
The tragedy of the commons describes a collective action problem where a shared resource, like a communal water well, gets destroyed by individual greed. Each person, acting rationally in their own self-interest, takes too much water because they get all the immediate benefit while the small cost of depletion gets spread across the entire community. Eventually everyone suffers when the well runs dry.