 I'm Salvatore Bobonis, and this week's global social problem of the week is the tragedy of the Commons. The tragedy of the Commons is an old social problem that has been hijacked by contemporary economists and the economics profession. The Commons are grazing lands or other resources held in common by the people of a community and open to everyone to use. The tragedy is that although everyone benefits from the existence of common resources, everyone also has a strong incentive to exploit common resources for personal gain. The solution to the tragedy of the Commons is simple. In one word, government. The original tragedy of the Commons was the tragedy of overgrazing on shared village commons land in rural England. Now this is a photo from contemporary Kenya, not from 18th century England, but the principle is the same. When everyone has the right to graze their animals on a piece of land, that piece of land inevitably becomes degraded from overgrazing. The economist's answer to the tragedy of the Commons is simple. Fence off the Commons and turn it into private land. If everybody owns their own little piece of the Commons, then each owner will take good care of their little piece of land. While that solution may or may not make sense for very specific kinds of commons like common land, it certainly doesn't work for most of the common problems we face in the world today. Contemporary tragedies of the Commons can be found everywhere we look around us in the economy and in everyday life. I mean broadly in the world at large, there's overfishing in the oceans, pollution of waterways, the overuse of groundwater, billboards everywhere in our cities, even space junk circling the earth causing a navigation hazard for communication satellites and for astronauts on spacewalks. Well, these sort of commons can't be fenced in. There's no way that these can be turned into private spaces to be privately managed, even if it were desirable to do so. Similarly, we experience tragedies of the Commons in our daily lives. People litter. As you're walking down the street, you have to experience cigarette butts and drinks cans and bottles laying around on the street. Well, the only solution to that from the standpoint of privatization is not to have any public spaces to walk in. Well, that's not a realistic option of solving the problem of litter. Dogs peeing and pooping in parks, it's impossible to go to a city park and lie out on the grass without having to think about what has recently been on the grass, even if people pick up their dog feces, which, luckily, at least a majority of people do. Still, you are lying on grass that has recently been used as a toilet. Cigarette smokers, of course, are everywhere fouling the air outside, now that they're not allowed to smoke inside. People on buses using spare seats for bags or a pet peeve of mine charity sidewalk solicitors. On my own walk to work every day, I usually pass as many as three solicitors in a single day. And they're not simply fouling the Commons of the sidewalk, they're also fouling the Commons of general social courtesy in that they don't walk up to you and say, would you like to hear about starving children? They walk up to you and say, hi, how are you? How's your day? Violating the social expectation that when someone says, hi, how are you? We're expected to say hello back. When someone holds out a hand to shake, you're supposed to stop and shake the hand. So sidewalk solicitors intentionally use the Commons of sociability in order to draw people into conversations that might result in charity giving. This is a form of tragedy of the Commons because ultimately it degrades our willingness to be charitable. So if you notice people avoiding eye contact with sidewalk charity solicitors, that's a form of degraded Commons instead of making eye contact and saying hello to each other in public. Instead, we avoid people in public. Tragedies of the Commons are especially endemic when it comes to polluting the atmosphere. Every driver in the world contributes to a tragedy of the Commons of polluting the atmosphere in that every driver has an incentive to drive as much as sheer he wants without worrying about the pollution which is diluted and shared by everybody else in the world. The atmosphere is thus the ultimate Commons. It is a shared public space. It can't be fenced in and turned into private property. It can't be fenced out and turned into private burdens. You can't say to somebody you keep your pollution out of my atmosphere. We all share the atmosphere and everyone relies on it for life itself. It can't be privatized. It must be governed by enforceable and enforced global regulation. The solution for global warming thus requires global government. But global government may be necessary. Does that mean it's desirable? I mean just because we need global government to solve global warming, does that mean we actually want global government? Global government may be necessary. That doesn't mean it's possible. Just because global government would be needed to solve the problem of global warming, does that mean it will automatically spring into existence? Global government may be necessary. But that doesn't mean that it is sufficient. Even if we had an overarching global government making regulations for the world, maybe that government simply would not choose to solve global warming. After all, our national governments often don't solve our local pollution problems. So what makes us think that a global government would actually solve global warming? Put this all together and even if global warming is a massive tragedy of the commons, and even if global government would be required to solve it, it doesn't mean that global warming will be solved by global government. In fact, I think it's pretty clear that it won't be. Instead, there are two more likely long-term outcomes of the global warming crisis. The first is that the rich and capable will simply create private atmospheres. They won't privatize the atmosphere. They'll simply cut themselves off from the atmosphere and increasingly live indoors. They'll live without the atmosphere. We see this in places like Dubai, where despite the 45-degree Celsius temperatures outside, they have skiing slopes inside and air-conditioned facilities. Most people in western countries today spend much of their lives in climate-controlled automobiles, in climate-controlled offices and homes. Climate control is not a global solution to global warming. In fact, it makes global warming worse, but it is a personal, next-best solution. If you can't solve global warming, at least you can get out of the atmosphere. The second most likely solution to the global warming crisis will be that the rich and capable may attempt, or I would say will attempt, to take control of the atmosphere itself. People are already talking very seriously in the world's flagship publications about things like injecting sulfates into the atmosphere at a high level in order to reflect sunlight, trying to spew seawater into the air to create white clouds that will reflect sunlight. Fertilizing the ocean with iron pellets in order to make more algae in the ocean, there are these massive engineering projects that are being seriously talked about, and not just by academics, by defense strategists, and by the entire policy establishment, especially in the United States and to a lesser extent in the European Union. It is very likely that as global warming worsens, the powerful countries in the world, and most of all the United States, will simply take it upon themselves to do whatever they think is appropriate to solve the situation. As air conditioning reaches its limits, geoengineering will certainly be attempted, at which point the atmosphere will no longer be a commons. Just as there really are no more village commons, it's hard to find a village that actually has a common grazing land these days. There may be a few village parks here and there, but nowhere where you can actually take your cattle and use the land. Instead, a village commons, quote-unquote, is usually a shopping mall or a privatized space of some kind. Well, just as the village commons have disappeared, the tragedy of the commons of the village has been resolved ultimately by just not having the commons. In the same way, the tragedy of the commons of the atmosphere may be solved with the ultimate solution of simply not having a natural atmosphere, but instead having an atmosphere that is managed and controlled by people who effectively come to own it or at least come to exercise control over it. Thank you for listening. I'm Salvatore Bobonis. You can find out more about me at SalvatoreBobonis.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter.