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Comment by rv-de | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those examples where the cake is shrinking so everybody will get a smaller piece. Now if all participants would cooperate the cake could be made to grow. But this will afford people to not take as big of a piece as possible for a while. And because nobody trusts each other, every participant instead focuses instead on keeping the future pieces at least as large as they used to be which means taking relatively speaking an increasingly large chunk. And that's not sustainable so everything breaks down at some point and wars start over getting something from the cake.

Same shit with carbon emissions, now fishing and soon water.

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Absolutely. This could be fixed with the teachings from the 'Prisoners dilemma'.

I am starting to think that there are big decisions, that have a worldwide impact, that cannot be left just to the local government of turn.

Take for example Bolsonaro's approach to the Amazon. Those are decisions that impact the whole world, possibly for generations to come. We cannot allow a local government to do what they want just because they happen to have this piece of land in their own country. We need a global system to enforce measures to protect the planet.

Is this the role of the UN, EU, etc.? In Brazil's specific case, concerted sanctions were proposed to convince Brazil to behave a certain way [0]. If this doesn't work, maybe the carrot is better than the stick. I know this case is a little unique because the Brazillian government appears to be acting against the will of its people with regards to conserving the rainforest.

0 - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-politics/as-eu-thr...

This is called the tragedy of the commons.

Economists have many choices when their models break: they can go poetic "tragedy of the commons", technical "externalities", John Nash "prisoner's dilemma", or even sort of nonsensical "internalizing externalities".

Skience is like that, we should stick with science.

Nope. Tragedy of commons means that everybody share a legit right over resources but management fails. This is invasion, burn and plunder by a third part (one that does not necessarily has a legit right over the resource) while the commons are sleeping.

Totally different situation.

I've never heard that definition of "tragedy of the commons." Rather, I've always seen it used to describe a situation where everyone would benefit if everyone took one action, but individually the incentive structure is to do the opposite -- effectively you're able to get the things you want for minimal personal cost and with large external costs.

It very explicitly applies to shared resources like fisheries, and it crops up in much more mundane scenarios too. E.g., when water costs are split between multiple apartments you can pay peanuts for nearly unrestricted personal water use by offloading most of the costs to everyone else.

> I've never heard that definition of "tragedy of the commons."

Is a simplification, but the idea that I wanted to stress is that everybody in a "tragedy of the commons" case has some kind of legal rights to exploit the shared resource.

Pirate fishing doesn't has rights over the resource. Is an illegal activity, parallel to the legal quotes, that boycotts any measures taken for a sustainable management.

I definitely misread your comment as saying that it's only tragedy of the commons if piracy and whatnot are involved; sorry about that.

Property rights are the answer.

And not property rights the way water rights sometimes works, where a group of people all have the right to take all they can.

If the same people owned an aquifer but all had to pay for what they used, the water would be more properly priced.

With water, as with fish, people often pay the cost of taking the resource and not a price that reflects the value of the resource.

The value is actually more like the future cost of replacing the resource. Once your aquifer is empty, you must ship water in. Or desalinate. That's more like the real cost.

With a species of fish, the replacement is incalculable. But one thing is clear. The price should increase rapidly as it becomes scarcer, preserving the incentive to keep the population viable.

That can't happen if people just pay the cost of going out there and getting the fish. The price has to reflect the value of the fish too.

If the right too harvest a population were a piece of property that could be bought and sold, the incentive to preserve the population would be stronger.

You might even see technologies that avoid taken pregnant females and that count how many males there are so you have enough of those too.

This is almost word for word the economic advice given by Larry Summers to Russia when Yeltsin (an American puppet) was figuring out what to do with Russian industries after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

He told them to put it in private hands. He told them it didn't really matter whose hands it ended up in. He told them that provided it was in private hands with property rights well respected then the economy would thrive throughout the 90s.

It ultimately ended up mostly in the hands of the oligarchs or abandoned while the rest of Russia starved. A lot of it got clawed back in the early 2000s and has been better managed since.

What article or speech or book are you referring to?

I'd love to see how closely I channeled it, especially given my low opinion of that guy.

I would add that property rights don't work as well when rule of law is weak. That doesn't mean they're a bad thing.

Counterpoint, intensive farming

companies, with full ownership of the land, are ruining the topsoil of their land because the cost of farming sustainably is greater than the cost of acquiring new land

Which companies?

Property rights don't work that way, unfortunately we can't price everything correctly because too many special interests are out there and people are easily fooled.

This. It’s a shame a magazine called “Economist” eschews the simple answer any economist would provide and instead advocates a complicated regulatory scheme like this.

The article explains why bans may be preferable to market-based solutions in this case. The gist is that it's easier to enforce a ban ("nobody is allowed to fish here until 2022! get out!") than any kind of pricing mechanism ("let's see, yesterday a random Chinese trawler came in and picked up, I guess, 4 tons of mackerel, so add that to the week's total and..."), and many of the relevant countries with depleted fisheries may not even have the regulatory capacity for the latter.

I think it's easier to spend money protecting a resource when money is being earned from that resource.

And it's also easier for those who want to use a resource to respect the law if there's still a legal way to access the resource.

No one is motivated to stop poaching as much as the person whose property is being stolen.

A ban works if it's enforced. But who's going to call the enforcers when there's a violation?

This is the reason the tragedy of the commons exists.

The problem with that simple answer, is that fish move. If you don't catch them on your patch, you don't get to reap the benefits next year - the person with the patch north of yours gets to catch them next month.

This is kind of like saying that, because farmers must occasionally let their field lie fallow, government must ban farming in some areas. Fish migratory patterns would naturally be priced into the fishing rights market.

No, it's not. If a farmer leaves a field fallow they will benefit from it later because the field does not move. If you do not fish an area you will not benefit from it later because the fish do move.

This is not a hypothetical; it's the reality fishermen have been dealing with for decades.

There's a story. An isolated native from a South American jungle met a researcher and was taken to the city for the first time. He saw a traffic policeman on the street and asked who is that, why is he dressed like that, why are people following his direction etc.

When explained, he thought immediately the idea sounded great. In their tribe, they got locked into spirals of revenge. He said he wished they could have police in the jungle as well.

Many societies have decided to respect some common rules. Sometimes it means that someone as a person can't quite do what they would like to do. That is the price.

The societies not being able to organize well were overrun by others, more organized ones. Sometimes the rules were changed.

I remember being told socialism doesnt work because of tragedy of the commons

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