 If hip-hop artists keep stealing each other's beats instead of making new ones, some day they're going to run out of fresh stuff and we'll all be stuck listening to the same Malthusian trap. Some ideas are so intuitive and compelling that as soon as they reach prominence they become default landmarks for navigating the entire territory of thought around them. You can't talk about thinking machines without mentioning the Turing test. You can't discuss ethics without at least paying some lip service to trolley problems. You can't talk about shared resources without passing reference to the tragedy of the comments. A thought experiment that has become the presumed starting point for conversations about everything from climate change to SUVs to Wikipedia. The idea has a long legacy, but the most recent and most popular formulation is widely attributed to Garrett Hardin, an ecologist whose original paper carries the ominous abstract, the population problem has no technical solution. It requires a fundamental extension in morality. Hardin asks us to consider a shared pasture where several herdsmen gather their cattle to feed on grass. As rational beings, big ideological air quotes, each herdsman is trying to maximize their individual gain and they each make the same calculation. The upsides of adding one more cow to their herd will be theirs alone, while the downsides of exceeding the pasture's cow capacity and thus destroying it will be shared by everyone. To maximize their relative advantage, every herdsman will be forced to engage in a race to the bottom, adding more cows to their herd and burning through grass as fast as they can until the pasture collapses. As Hardin puts it, each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom of the commons brings ruin to all. Hardin goes on to call out what he sees as laughably naive policies that deny this fundamental truth of economy, including free parking on Christmas, fishing grounds, national parks, and what he calls the freedom to breed, which we're not going to get into here. Let's just say it's super gross and move on. If you recall Episode 145, this setup looks an awful lot like the prisoner's dilemma from Game Theory. Every player is aware that the worst possible result will occur if all players act selfishly. But if we presume they all subscribe to the infamous rational self-interest standard, each will be compelled to join a circular firing squad and pull the trigger. Hardin suggests that there are only two solutions to these sorts of scenarios, both of which are coercive. Either the resource is enclosed and divvied up among private owners, who will gate and meter access in order to maximize profits, or a government body of some sort can monitor, distribute, and punish overuse of the resource. Most of these options carry the implicit threat of violence if anyone tries to use the commons without transactional approval from the new authorities. But according to Hardin, the only other option is everyone clawing over each other to grab as much as they can until the formerly renewable resource is permanently depleted. This story about the helpless herders seems perfectly reasonable. Just about everyone can think of a time where a little flutter of anxiety that there might not be enough to go around has driven people into a frenzy of myopic behavior as they gorge on whatever they can get their hands on until it's gone. But quite a few people have raised their eyebrows at his assertion that this sort of thing is inevitable, that sharing resources inevitably brings ruin to all. We've talked a little about the problems inherent to mapping simplistic game theory models, like the prisoner's dilemma, onto real-life human interactions. The spiteful self-injury observed in the Ultimatum game might be hard to understand if you're just looking at the math. And when you're staring at some smug jerk who's just gotten $99 richer dangling a one condescendingly in front of your face, it shouldn't be confusing that some folks opt to flip them the bird and walk away. Many have noted that while it's easy to find shallow similarities between just about any social interaction in the prisoner's dilemma, it's only a dilemma because it's so much unlike normal interactions. The prisoners have to decide whether to cooperate or screw each other over in a straightforward flipping-a-switch kind of way. With no expectation that they'll meet again or need each other's help in the future, with an external force preventing them from talking to each other or negotiating. You might squint at any sort of human interaction and say, I guess it looks like a prisoner's dilemma. But it's unlikely the game theoretic analysis holds in any meaningful way once you add all the complexity back in. In the real world, if you set up a textbook prisoner's dilemma experiment and just let people talk to each other before deciding, they usually cooperate. That's all it takes. The tragedy of the common suffers from that same sort of oversimplification. The cattle consumption catastrophe cascade is supposed to chug along without any sort of debate, response, discussion, negotiation, sanctions, or retribution among the helpless herders, driven to its inexorable conclusion by the logic of individual self-interest and nothing else. It doesn't seem to cross Hardin's mind that if someone tried to graze too many cattle, someone else might say, hey, knock it off. Even the proposed solutions that Hardin recommends don't necessarily solve the problem. If a government body could have perfect knowledge of who was accessing the resource at all times. If they could catch and punish cheaters with 100% accuracy every time someone broke the rules, all without costing the resource users more than all that surveillance and enforcement apparatus is worth, yeah, sure, that could work. If every private owner is invested in maintaining the resource for the long haul instead of burning through their share to make a quick buck, and each has the support they need to chase off potential thieves, that could work, too. But if there's any error, uncertainty, bad actors, or unmanageable costs in either of those systems, they might not be the silver bullets Hardin thinks they are. So the tragedy of the common's framing for shared resources has some holes. That hasn't stopped it from finding its way into all sorts of explanations and theories about world events. From the organization of the Mormon Church to firewood shortages to congressional overspending. Hardin's grim warnings attracted the attention of Eleanor Ostrom, a political scientist who had spent several years studying the communal use of groundwater in Southern California when she first heard one of his lectures about the bleak necessity of population control. Surely, she reasoned, there must be other ways to solve the problems posed by shared resources. I mean, as compelling as Hardin's story sounded, she had witnessed people doing exactly what he said ought to be impossible, managing a communal asset without government oversight, private ownership, or runaway overconsumption. If maintaining a commons can work in practice, it has to be able to work in theory, right? The next several decades of Ostrom's life were dedicated to examining how various communities around the world dealt with the supposedly inexorable tragedy of the commons in real life. She collected dozens of examples from all sorts of different cultures at all sorts of different scales, from tens to tens of thousands of people, all deciding how to share the resources they needed to survive. Spanish Huerta's and Philippine Zangera irrigation systems, Turkish inshore fishing grounds. For hundreds of years, some Swiss villages shared forests for timber and fuel and meadows for grazing their cattle. Pretty much exactly the scenario Hardin claimed was doomed to failure. She approached these case studies looking for some sort of game theory shaped answer, a simple rule or strategy that all these different societies implemented in one way or another that created a new set of payoffs with non-tragic results. But contrary to Hardin's assertion that there were only two possible answers, Ostrom found that every community had their own bespoke methods to ensure cooperation and fair dealing. And that those methods changed and developed over time, evolving in response to changing circumstances and new challenges. Some societies let entire families manage access to the resource. Others assign them on an individual basis. Some pass rights down as an inheritance between generations. Some assign them to whoever happened to own or lease land that granted access while others entered into complex conditional resource allocation contracts with their fellow community members. Sometimes the rules were written down. Sometimes they were unwritten cultural norms. Sometimes there were written rules that weren't enforced or enforced in particular ways according to the situation. The examples she recorded were a massive hodgepodge of complex multi-layered strategies as varied as the cultures they came from. The societies Ostrom decided to use as case studies for her book had maintained some community resource for at least a century without either centralized governance or privatization. Sometimes changing methods when it seemed like the current way of doing things wasn't working anymore, which just added to the tally of ways to manage a commons. Faced with such a diversity of tried and true institutions and the myriad failures of governance or privatization models, she concluded that trying to solve as complex a question as how can this group of people share resources fairly with a singular top down strategy for every possible context and culture was a fool's errand saying there are no institutional panaceas. That being said, she did notice some similarities among communities that successfully manage a common resource. Not hard and fast rules for how to do things but a set of eight design principles. Fuzzy criteria, which if you were going to set up such a society from scratch, you'd probably want to think about. First on the list was well-defined boundaries. In each successfully managed commons, it was clear who had the right to use the community resource, who didn't, and where the resources borders were. Establishing who was managing what for whom. It's hard to protect a region from over fishing if it's unclear what activity is impacting it or who's contributing to the depletion or maintenance of the fish supply. And it's hard to get a community to put time and effort into keeping it sustainable if there's no way to tell where that responsibility ends. Second, whatever community rules were in place were well adapted to the specific context in which they operated. This is Ostrom's no panaceas principle at large. The rules necessary to make a particular commons work probably won't work anywhere else. They can't be composed in the first place without a deep understanding of the people who will use them, their culture, their history, the peculiarities of the resource, all sorts of factors that can't be prescribed ahead of time. If you recall episode 235, this is one of the issues with central authorities like ISO composing standards for complex systems without consulting the people who are going to be using and maintaining them. If you're counting on a community to follow some procedure and manage a resource, you're going to want a really good understanding of what they care about and how the resource has historically responded to being managed. Asking someone to keep an accurate record of their water consumption to the gallon might sound totally reasonable until you've had to manage a 20-acre farm. The third design principle contains a related observation that really challenges some key assumptions built into game theory. In successful comments, the people who are subject to the rules, wait for it, can change them if they're not working well. The idea that people might recognize that a set of rules is causing bad outcomes and respond with modifications, amendments, or totally new rules that doesn't come up a lot in game theory. Ostrom found that successful comments had some fairly easy mechanism to lobby for and implement changes to the rules, which has two obvious upsides. Firstly, it allows rapid adaptation to changing circumstances, creating that highly contextual level of detail necessary for the second principle to work. If the forest suffers some catastrophe, a handshake agreement to hold off on the normal harvesting schedule and share reserves of lumber until it recovers is quick, easy, and responsive to the situation. Second, giving the actual people who are expected to follow the rules meaningful power to change them really reduces the inclination to cheat. Even if you can't get everything exactly the way you want, if you really feel some degree of authorship, something more than symbolic contribution to a process, it's less likely that you'll break the rules you helped write, just for the hell of it. The fourth principle follows pretty closely from that premise. Successful comments were monitored and the people monitoring them were meaningfully accountable to the folks who used them, sometimes by virtue of being the same people, as in the users for the ones keeping an eye on things. Similarly, the fifth principle describes a general policy of gradually stricter sanctions for anyone who broke the rules, punishments of scaling severity chosen by other resource users, generally starting with a teensy slap on the wrist. Principles four and five both seem to contradict some widespread assumptions about the economics of monitoring and enforcement. It's usually thought to be time consuming and expensive to keep an eye on your fellow community members or punish rule breakers yourself instead of delegating those tasks to some authority figure. Also, if the punishment for cheating isn't devastating, even for the first infraction, why wouldn't everyone cheat just a little bit? Ostrom suggests that because it occurs in every case of successful comments, sharing enforcement duties must have some hidden benefits that more than make up for that supposed inefficiency. And he floats some ideas about what they might be. It reassures everyone who relies on the resource that they're not getting screwed because they're constantly watching other people follow the rules. Conversely, if someone gets caught cheating, it reassures them that cheaters will be caught, which also increases confidence that they're not getting screwed. It creates pressure to write rules that are easy to enforce. It puts the enforcers in the same boat as rule breakers, which tends to limit the usually high cost of punishment. If you know how tempting it is to grab a little more than your fair share, you probably won't throw the whole book at someone who usually follows the rules and messed up this one time because, hey, that might be you next week. Also, if you think back to principle two, it's likely that the people who rely on the resource and know the situation best are going to be better equipped to fit a proper punishment to that situation. If times are tough and someone gets desperate or if they break a rule by accident, man, I get it. Just don't do it again, yeah? OK, we're down to the last three and they're pretty quick. For principle six, Ostrom notes that trying to wheel out a game theory matrix to analyze the real life costs and benefits of following the rules or cheating assumes a perfect system of bureaucratic oversight, a completely unambiguous and all-encompassing set of algorithmic responses enforced by an omniscient machine God. In reality, people inevitably disagree about how the rules should be interpreted, what counts as violating the letter or spirit of the law, all sorts of stuff. In each functional commons, Ostrom observed some quick and easy mechanism for resolving conflicts and grievances between resource users, sometimes formal, like a court proceeding, sometimes informal, like let's just run this by old alley. She'll decide who's right. Of course, a conflict resolution mechanism doesn't mean anything if someone can go crying to some bigger authority if they don't get their way. Commons design principle seven is that the people using the commons were relatively certain that they had the right to organize themselves however they saw fit to make and enforce their own rules and standards without interference from other rule-making bodies that might roll in and append everything. That doesn't mean the force commons consortium is the only legitimate authority in the entire universe. There could be other levels of organization, nested or overlapping spheres of autonomy that enacted different scales of management and solved different problems. That's principle eight. But it seems to be important that the rulings of the conflict resolution body felt binding and final. So we've got these eight, what would you call guidelines than actual rules? You'll notice that they all leave a lot of wheel room. You could come up with hundreds of theoretical institutions that would satisfy these criteria. Again, Ostrom was deeply critical of approaches like hardens that prescribed a singular solution to solve all the problems of maintaining a commons. Trying to dictate the specifics of how everyone should go about creating their own institutions was exactly the sort of thing she was railing against. Of course, there are also communities that ticked all these boxes and still failed to manage their shared resources effectively. And there are some situations where communal ownership doesn't benefit anyone. If the resources being distributed aren't renewable or if the harms produced by overconsumption are outsourced to people who aren't using them, it's hard to see an upside. The factory pollution problem Harden highlights in his original paper is a great example of an externalized harm that calls for some other solution, like government regulation. And his warnings about infinite growth on a finite planet, while they lead him to some weird and unfounded conclusions, aren't without their merits. Unfortunately, despite Ostrom's work, the tragedy of the commons has become one of those cultural reference points that has shaped discourse and thought since its inception. It's routinely trotted out to silence anyone naive enough to imagine commonly held resources will end in anything but disaster. But as Ostrom's investigation show, Harden only describes a tiny slice of the astounding variety of solutions humans have developed and redeveloped over centuries to achieve what he ruled an impossible fantasy. If you're curious, I highly recommend going to your local library and asking for a copy of her book. Can you think of a shared resource that might benefit from Ostrom's design principles? Please, leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. And thank you for your patience. I know that this one was a long time in coming and if you look at the length, you can probably understand why. Don't forget to share and don't stop thunking.