Tragedy of the Commons

I heard today of an interpretation of Tragedy of the Commons which made out that the tragedy lay in the idea of Commons themselves. That is to say when things are in shared ownership then no-one feels responsible for them and no-one takes care of them. The obvious conclusion from this interpretation is that Commons should be owned. Now I wonder who came up with the interpretation, given that only a certain class of people are in a position to buy and own Commons, and who will benefit there after from renting the land out. Capitalists?

An alternative interpretation is less ideological. It's the problem captured by the Prisoners Dilemma well studied in game theory. Even when everyone does best from co-operating, often there is an immediate benefit from cheating. Catalytic Converters is a real example, and Network Effect is a another modern example. The cost of a catalytic converter is quite high, and the benefit for the first person who buys one is zero - they are not going to purify the air they breath so it is money wasted. However when everyone is using catalytic converters there is a benefit from the money spent.

This is a demonstration of the problem with the concept of discrete existence typical caused by adopting a belief in dualistic existence, upon which ownership and Capitalism is based. I have some money, and I am at liberty to spend it how I like as I am the benefitter of what I do. However in the case of catalytic converters everyone must benefit before I benefit. So how I spend my money is not about me, but about us. It is how we spend our money. This is the deeper problem of the Tragedy of the Commons. It is not a problem with shared ownership: catalytic converters are something that only gains its benefit when everyone owns one just like rent free Commons. But rather the problem lies in individuals appreciating that the benefit only arrives if they co-operate like the Prisoners Dilemma.

People are easily dispirited and a small amount of propaganda can easily lead people into private ownership and away from the Commons. But the tragedy then is that they miss out on a rent free existence and fall foul of Capitalism and a life lived paying for things that could have been free like common land.

Irrelevant to this blog, but the chief argument against shared ownership is corruption. Commons can never work it is said because to keep them Common you need to elect a Marshal to manage them. And once you give up your individual freedom to a central committee, the Common ceases to be a common and starts to be exploited by the member of the central committee or party. We have Wells and Animal Farm to thank for its brutal illustration of this. But perhaps this is just dispiriting propaganda by the Capitalists, because what happens instead of the Committee taking the Shared Property in Capitalism? Of course its just Capitalists who take over the shared property. So in either scenario the Ruling Class takes over. It is this assumption, and acceptance of the Ruling Class taking over in every situation which is the real message here. Animal Farm is as much a parable of the History of the United States as it is the Russia Revolution. The States began as a land of freedom where people were given land to farm without strings attached (well apart from the genocide of the people who lived there before). But even within the lifetime of George Washington it fell to cliques, secret societies and a ruling class. How many Americans now own any of that land first dished out to settlers? It has all fallen into the hands of the Ruling Elites. Now had USA been setup as a Common where people shared the land (more like the some of the tribes that inhabited before them) I have no doubt exactly the same fate would have awaited them.

The problem, the real Tragedy at the heart of the Commons is actually property by a select few, and this is the inevitable ratchet of any system that promotes individual ownership. Once individuals are given sole unlimited ownership of the state, then fish in a pond eating each other eventually you have just one big fish. Now laws exist to stop aggressive take overs, but people naturally die without descendants and suffer misfortunes and the path is always toward bigger and bigger individuals. At first the Laws are set up to protect individual property and keep property evenly distributed between people. But as the rachet cliks and property is lost by some and absorbed by others those laws quickly become a barrier to the disenfranchised and a protection for the wealthy. Property is theft is the slogan that captures the effect of property law in an unequal society. This is until revolutions come along and the balance is partly restored.

So sadky for proponents of the curret status quo, no property does nothing to solve the Tragedy of the Commons.

Update==9/12/2018
So there is work to be done on this. A paper questioning thelink between Prisoners Dilemma and Tragedy of Commons . Not read in depth but I think the problem is only being extressed in terms of optimal resource management. What is always forgotten is that once Capitalism is adopted then rents begin and on average about 50% of the productivity of the resource ends up in the pocket of the owner. This is finger print of Capitalism. So avoiding Capitalism doesn't change the total productivity, indeed it may make things less efficient, but it avoids the population being exploited by an elite. Indeed much more work to do.

Rabbit Flagging revisited...
This will link up with the rabbit flagging work done a few years ago on this blog, which identified gene mobility as a critical parameters. If populations are patchy (Tribes) and genes do not spread much, then the chance of genes meeting each other increases hugely which heavily influences the fitness of co-operative and non-coperative genes. It was found that while globally non-cooperative genes have higher fitness (reproductive success) than co-operative genes the actual population growth of co-operative genes was greater than non-coperative. Which sounds like a contradiction until it is realised that in tribes that are co-operative the fitness is much greater than tribes that are non-cooperative. So while non-coperative do best in all situations, there are not many non-coperative in a co-operative tribe so the non-coperative have little stake in all this success. While in non-coperative tribes no-one does every well and the co-operative do worst. So the co-operative have little stake in this failure. While non-coperative it is the other way around, they have little stake in successful tribes and majority stake in unsuccessful tribes. Left to its own devices gradually cheaters will come to dominante successful tribes and drag them down, and co-operative genes will never get a foothold unco-operative tribes so things look doomed. But a second linked gene that punishes cheating with ostracism will operate to stop non-coperative genes spreading. Now evolution of a counter gene that finds cheating sexy doesn't help if it will only lead to ostracism by association also.The only way to get cheating established would be to subvert the ostracising "moral" gene.