The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons | Hacker News Reader

The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons

blogs.scientificamerican.com

33 pointsheadalgorithm46 comments

>But here are some inconvenient truths: Hardin was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamophobe. He is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a known white nationalist. His writings and political activism helped inspire the anti-immigrant hatred spilling across America today.

There's a difference between being anti-immigrant and being anti-illegal-immigrant. The media seems to be desperately trying to merge the two together, with calling illegal immigrants undocumented immigrants, or themselves piling the two together, but there is a major difference.

I don't doubt people are against immigration entirely, but the way this is phrased seems to playing up to today's immigration talks, which are almost entirely having to do with illegal immigration.

The policies are targeting illegal immigrants. The hatred on the other hand targets immigrants in general. Remember the comments about mexicans?

The policies also target legal immigrants. It is legal to come to the US seeking asylum from the wars in your home country, but the president spins this as people crossing the border illegally because they aren't going through the immigration process (which isn't open to them).

Are you referring to the president's comments about MS-13 that have been widely and happily taken out of context? Or the president's comments on the DHS stats for criminals illegally crossing the border, also widely and happily taken out of context?

"There's a difference between being anti-immigrant and being anti-illegal-immigrant."

The administration is aggressively fighting both [1]. The media is simply covering in kind. There aren't a nameless "people" who are against legal immigration, its the President's right-hand man.

[1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/08/stephen-miller-w...

Not exclusively. There has been a lot of conversation about ending “chain migration”, which is legal migration based on family connections, as well as eliminating the diversity visa.

Today’s immigration talks do center around illegal immigration, but it’s wrong to say that occupies it “almost entirely”.

Southern Poverty Law Center exposed:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-reckoning-of-mo...

I guess we're not seeing the same memes on Facebook. There actually are difficult decisions to be made about immigration, but this overshadowed by seeing the worst simplistic arguments.

I’d hope nobody thinks Facebook memes are in any way representative of real life. They’re made by people on political extremes. Almost nobody anywhere near the middle is going to air out their political beliefs to the world.

They are reshared by perfectly ordinary people, I'm afraid. Former schoolmates and relatives. Though, I expect most wouldn't actually act in it.

> I don't doubt people are against immigration entirely

People like Garret Hardin.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...

"My position is that this idea of a multiethnic society is a disaster. That's what we've got in Central Europe, and in Central Africa. A multiethnic society is insanity. I think we should restrict immigration for that reason."

— Interview with The Social Contract, 1997

Funny that there isn't much vitriol directed at Canadians who overstay their visas, despite the fact that they represented the top slot in DHS's own data.[1][2]

[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...

[2] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/08/07/dhs-releases-fiscal-year...

That's for overstaying a visa. A large number of illegal immigrants simply arrive illegally.

Page 5 in this document shows numbers, with Mexico at the top. [1]

And here is another source showing almost the same numbers (i.e, Canada nowhere in site). [2]

[1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/18_1214...

[2] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...

>There's a difference between being anti-immigrant and being anti-illegal-immigrant.

I used to think that too. I don't anymore. People are anti-immigrant. The law determines whether the immigrant is legal or not, but that does not matter to the anti-immigrant. Let us be generous and say the anti-immigrant is so because of economic reasons, depression of wages and what not. Then does it matter that the immigrant is here legally? No. He is nonetheless contributing to the depression of wages (ex. H1-b). And then maybe if the economy is super healthy and there is labour shortage, would it then matter if the now desired immigrant is legal or not? No.

People are anti-immigrant because they see immigrants are others, as competition who has no right to compete with them, or similarly, they seem them as another people encroaching on their territory. Issues of legality concern the state but they do not concern the individual anti-immigrant.

Some people are anti-immigrant. Many others are anti-illegal immigrant, including myself.

I favor very liberal immigration laws since immigrants have immeasurably bolstered American culture and society. Asylum seekers should be welcomed with open arms, and their claims should be verified to preserve the integrity of the asylum system. We as a nation have the inherent right to control our borders as a matter of democratic policy (as all other nations do). There are legitimate national security (and economic) concerns with small numbers of those who would do harm to our country.

The alternative to reasonable restrictions on immigration is open borders, which I think would lead to poor outcomes.

...No?

Everything you said remains accurate even if you replace immigrants with illegal immigrants.

Particularly your entire last paragraph is what people have an issue with illegal immigrants for, and why a large number of legal immigrants/H1-bs have issues with illegal immigrants. Did you know it can take as long as 15 years for an H1-b to get a green card? Did you know an H1-b can have their application rejected and then have to return home?

>People are anti-immigrant because they see immigrants are others, as competition who has no right to compete with them, or similarly, they seem them as another people encroaching on their territory. Issues of legality concern the state but they do not concern the individual anti-immigrant.

you're not limited to a binary choice between "no immigration" and "let literally everyone come in". it could be that there's a certain net immigration than a country can sustain per year. perhaps it's also a relatively enlightened country with a legal structure that allows roughly that number of people to enter. in this case, the legal immigrants are doing no harm, but the illegal immigrants are straining the system past its capacity.

There may be a difference between anti-Zionists and anti-Semites, but almost always they're the same people.

There may be a difference between nationalists and white nationalists, but almost always they're the same people.

There may be a difference between being anti-immigrant and being anti-illegal-immigrant, but almost always they're the same people.

How does an obviously ad hominem attack get into Scientific American, of all places?

Also, I would urge you to weigh SPLC's hit list with a grain of salt. SPLC does great work, but its hit list is poorly researched and ignorant. SPLC has repeatedly crossed the line from calling out hate, into trying to impose the views of liberal Americans (and overwhelmingly white ones at that--SPLC's board has just one person of color) onto people of color criticizing the parts of the world they themselves come from.

Do you believe that Garret Hardin specifically is being unjustly characterized by the SPLC?

I'm not very educated on this subject; could you point me to some groups the SPLC has labeled as hate groups but are not? (i.e. an analysis of the evaluation by the SPLC and why the SPLC's judgement is wrong)

E.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maajid-...

In case you haven't seen it, this read on the SPLC was eye opening:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-reckoning-of-mo...

From a recent issue of The New Yorker.

I hadn’t seen that, thanks.

This piece doesn't really rely on the SPLC; it mentions the list (which, I agree, is poorly managed) in passing, but spends most of its time in substantive, direct criticism of Hardin. It could have gone even further; Hardin gets worse as you dig.

> But the facts are not on Hardin’s side. For one, he got the history of the commons wrong. As Susan Cox pointed out, early pastures were well regulated by local institutions. They were not free-for-all grazing sites where people took and took at the expense of everyone else.

This only goes to further the value of the metaphor! The hypothetical problem of the pasture being overgrazed has a well-documented solution, and intuition is that similarly-shaped solutions (regulation) would help solve metaphorical "overgrazing" in other areas.

An observation remains true independent of the moral virtueous or villaneous the obsever is. This article is just an ad hominem.

This article really does seem to exemplify what's wrong with modern journalism. It pretends to be attacking the idea, but spends a large portion of the article attacking the man behind it instead.

I disagree. The article acknowledged that point and criticized the idea itself. It still talked about the man first because this is essential to understand the context and the ideology behind the idea. The tragedy of the commons leads very quickly to some elitism and hatred of the masses and the other, and that is easy to understand once you know the origin of the concept.

On the other hand those comments are pretty typical for HN, where people like to criticize journalists and think they would do so much better about basically everything.

>It still talked about the man first because this is essential to understand the context and the ideology behind the idea.

The idea however has been around for ages. Wikipedia points out a source from 1833 [1], but the idea that people act in their own best interest (greed) has been known for thousands of years. Hence why Christianity considers it a sin.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

I think your comment misrepresents the article. A quote: "That Hardin’s tragedy was advanced as part of a white nationalist project should not automatically condemn its merits. But the facts are not on Hardin’s side. [...] [E]arly pastures were well regulated by local institutions. They were not free-for-all grazing sites where people took and took at the expense of everyone else."

This makes it misleading as history. But the concept might apply in other situations. Should we instead be talking about the tragedy of overfishing?

In case you'd like to read a counterbalance to "Tragedy of the Commons", I highly recommend Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom's works which describe how commons actually work and regulate themselves in the real world, and how they avoid tragedies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom

I remain optimistic about our future.

Is there a short overview version of that explanation that includes, for example, the "self-regulation" of the fishing industry?

I'd check out her book:

Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

It provides specific examples (in fact a number of them are of fisheries) which could be read without necessarily needing to read the whole thing.

Thank you, I will. The title sounds like regulation (instead of self-regulation), that sounds much more plausible.

> describe how commons actually work and regulate themselves in the real world

There's an important point there — the Tragedy models the outcome of selfishness, short term thinking, and deregulation governing the usage of the commons. Ostrom's work provides a model for what regulation can achieve.

Putting the two together, whenever you see somebody somebody pushes for deregulation at the government level and little to no effort towards self-regulation at the industry level, you can conclude following that course of action will lead to the Tragedy scenario.

> Putting the two together

That's the key. Treating these as contradictory, as though Ostrom's work refutes the very possibility of TotC, is just weird. It's like saying that the existence of a measles vaccine means that measles can't exist. Solutions don't apply themselves, even when well known and once ubiquitous. Hardin's idea and Ostrom's seem strongly complementary to me.

"Of course, plenty of flawed people have left behind noble ideas. That Hardin’s tragedy was advanced as part of a white nationalist project should not automatically condemn its merits.

But the facts are not on Hardin’s side. For one, he got the history of the commons wrong. As Susan Cox pointed out, early pastures were well regulated by local institutions. They were not free-for-all grazing sites where people took and took at the expense of everyone else"

Tragedy of the Commons is a good first order heuristic, but like all first order heuristics it is incomplete. (See also yesterday's discussion of the 5 Whys tool - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19625754 )

I'm scratching my head a bit about this. The allegory of "the Tragedy of the Commons" makes a strong case for regulation. This article says that the allegory is wrong, and the actual solution we need is regulation?

If the Tragedy of the Commons is incorrect, then self-regulation is a viable option?

It may be ad-hominem but its also worth knowing. I know Shockley was a eugenics nut, it doesn't diminish his work on the transistor with the others at Bell Labs. For Hardin, his racism informed his field of study. I find it hard to go past the impact of decisions about aid and welfare he made, based on his views because the commons metaphor went to the same place.

So yes, it has aspects of Ad Hominem but not solely. You can't divorce this from his work, the way you might for e.g. Shockley.

Maybe so. So let's forego his metaphor, and say instead that climate change puts us in a prisoner's dilemma. Maybe it's the same 90 companies polluting, and clearly they've contributed to the structural choices in our lives to be theirs, but what's the way out?

Barring further structural changes, one will gain little and just lose by giving up their car, their electricity utility, the chemicals they use for cleaning, the metals and plastics and synthetics they use for durability and convenience. Some people do this for a moral boost, but usually because they can afford to do so. Movements of people will have to band together to bring about change through one of the usual methods: innovation (by making additional choices available), regulation (by restricting certain choices), or revolution (by throwing out the existing playbook, and assuming all the risks of doing so).

Yet despite international coordination about climate change, the some of the largest contributing countries are refusing to participate to protect their own interests. The US, which hasn't ratified the Kyoto treaty, ostensibly because they feel it gives certain other large developing, high-polluting countries a pass, but perhaps to protect its energy industry. Canada, a very advanced country built on an extraction economy, withdrew from the Kyoto treaty, citing economic reasons. Australia, another extraction economy, ratified the Kyoto treaty but made little progress on their mandatory commitments.

In this world, if you're not the US, Canada, Australia, and neither are you India, China, Indonesia, etc. what should you do? Curb your own contributions to harmful externalities because it's the right thing to do, even though people in countries who may live better than you do don't have to, and people in very large developing countries won't out-pollute your per capita, but by virtue of their population will out-pollute you in absolute numbers eight, ten times over? It's a very hard sell.

The innovation of the international cooperation about climate change is emissions trading: allowing the offsetting of pollution to be an economic good, and fit neatly into the global economic system. This creates new opportunities and incentives where there weren't many good ones before. But even so, it's discouraging that so many people (represented by their countries) have chosen to go their own way, and leave the rest of the world having to deal with their waste.

The article isn't great but this paper it links, on applying "catalytic cooperation" to climate change, looks kinda interesting:

https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-09/BSG-WP-...

Basically what the article is getting at, is that climate change is not really a tragedy of the commons, because we already had/have institutions meant to regulate the commons and avoid the tragedy. The real tragedy is that these institutions were corrupted and rendered ineffective.

> He is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a known white nationalist.

The SPLC has no credibility. They throw around this type of defamation constantly. Maajid Nawaz sued them and won $3.5 million in a settlement.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-southern-poverty...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com