The Tragedy of the Commons The market figures prominently in two competing explanations for environmental disasters, including extinctions such as that of the passenger pigeon. According to the earlier sections of this chapter, markets pose an environmental danger. I described how market forces give people an incentive to use resources with abandon because they take little or no account of the future costs to society of wasteful practices.
A competing theory proposes that markets offer the best possible approach to providing environmental protection. Garrett Hardin, a conservative biologist, wrote the classic statement of this proposition during the salad days of the environmental movement in an article entitled, "The Tragedy of the Commons" (Hardin 1968). The "Commons" in the title referred to the land that traditional English villagers shared for grazing their animals.
With no evidence whatsoever, except for an obscure nineteenth century pamphlet, Hardin insisted that the absence of property rights in the English common lands inevitably led to an environmental disaster. Based on his limited understanding of traditional English land use patterns, Hardin declared that without private property, each individual would selfishly attempt to graze as many animals as possible on a finite area of land, putting excessive stress on the environment. Hardin's story has been so widely circulated that it has become commonly believed. Even serious environmental books frequently reprinted the article.
Experts in British rural history dismiss Hardin's account. Specialists who have done extensive research about contemporary collective ownership also dispute Hardin's contention that such an arrangement will necessarily cause excessive use of the environment. They distinguish between open access systems where anybody is free to take all that they want and a commons, in which people work out rules for sharing a resource. These scholars have found that traditional societies frequently developed effective ethical codes to ensure both sustainable aggregate harvests and a relatively equitable distribution of access to resources. They report that traditional societies have created arrangements that are "far more binding on individual conscience than any government regulations could ever be" (Sethi and Somanathan 1996, p. 766). Rather than belabor the details of this subject, I would direct the reader to Elinor Ostrum's excellent introduction to the literature that she prepared for economists (see Ostrum 2000).
Of course, the power of Hardin's article had less to do with its historical veracity than its comforting message for those who wish to nurture faith in the market. The evidence that Hardin mustered was little stronger than an urban myth. No matter that he was wrong; no matter that these villages had institutions that actually prevented the overuse of the commons Hardin's article continues to be read. The intended lesson is supposed to be that no reasonable alternatives to the market exist.
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu michaelperelman.wordpress.com