Comment by hnbad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnbad | Hacker News Reader

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Your last sentence is worth emphasizing. Many people misunderstand the tragedy of the commons as an argument why a commons can't work, but the only possible conclusion is that the commons can't work under the current economic system (and specifically the dominant school of economic thought of the past half century).

The usual example given is a pasture shared by shepherds who are each going to optimize their use of the pasture by getting more sheep even if it means exceeding the sustainable capacity of the pasture, eventually killing it for everyone. Yet the real world shows that communal pastures have existed for centuries in rural communities just fine. The difference is that these pastures aren't used "optimally" and the shepherds aren't economically "rational actors" within the current economic system, though they are increasingly being pressured into that by the dominant system surrounding them.

The tragedy of the commons is not a warning about the unsustainability of a commons, it's a warning about the logical consequence of our dominant economic system.

That's mistaken in two ways.

First, the tragedy of the commons - aka the public goods problem - is an argument why a commons can't work, full stop. It's precisely mathematically specified. If the conclusion doesn't hold, that's because the assumptions didn't hold. You can certainly argue that the assumptions don't hold in many places, e.g. among Maine lobster gangs or in the woods around Japanese villages, and indeed that's what various authors have done. They have not argued - and it would make little sense - that a different economic system would magically make public goods games have a different equilibrium.

Second, you're mistaken in assuming that actors in successfully maintained commons are economically irrational. One simple interpretation of these commons is that they are repeated games. In such games it is rational to cooperate to preserve the commons, since defection leads to others defecting in future. That is standard economic rationality. Elinor Ostrom put forward that interpretation sometimes. She also emphasized that communities used things like punishments and fines to sanction uncooperative behaviour - again, these mechanisms work for standard homo economicus reasons.

The economic system is literally part of the assumptions.

The tragedy of the commons holds up under laissez-faire capitalism. It can be somewhat mitigated under other forms of capitalism but there are examples for commons that pre-date capitalism itself and also specifically enclosure (the formal privatization of common land), which itself pre-dates capitalism.

I'm not sure why you think you need to defend the concept of homo economicus. You're literally refuting your own first point with the second: a commons can work, but where it has worked it has usually come with constraints that run contrary to laissez-faire/free-market capitalism (or the approximation thereof) and that don't necessarily translate to the dynamics between globe-spanning corporations compared to that between a much smaller set of individuals.

No, the logic of public goods does not require any assumption about the economic system. Any set of actors whose actions create a negative externality, and who cannot enforce agreements to cooperate (either through the courts or via repeated interactions) will overproduce the externality. So, you could say the assumptions include the legal system. There are numerous tragedies of the commons under socialist economic systems, including environmental degradation and the inefficiency of socialist firms. There are plenty under capitalism too. Berlin under Rhineland capitalism has plenty of litter, just as New York does under Anglo-American capitalism. Hunter-gatherering bands are also perfectly capable of overusing natural resources and failing to cooperate. When they succeed, it's because they get the incentives right - at least, there is a reasonable case for that.[1]

I defend homo economicus to dispel a false impression: that successfully sustained commons refute the idea that humans (a) are self-interested and (b) make optimal choices. You could say that laboratory public goods games do that, but even there you'd have to qualify your argument very carefully.

[1] Guala, Francesco, 2012. Reciprocity: Weak or strong? What punishment experiments do (and do not) demonstrate. Behavioral and brain sciences, 35(1), pp.1-15.

I'm not sure who you think you're arguing with but so far most of your rebuttals attack points I never made.

I never said that humans aren't "self-interested" or that humans, in the abstract, can be described as acting optimally within given constraints.

I said that the constraints influence behavior (which you agree with) and I said that the current economic system results in a tragedy of commons (which you also agree with). I also said that it is also possible to avoid the tragedy of the commons (at least locally, for a given commons), which is demonstrated by successful commons existing and having existed under different constraints.

None of that seems to be anything you disagree with, yet here we are.

Note that both examples you've given — rentier capitalism in Berlin and New York, and (presumably) Soviet-style bureaucratic socialism — suffer massively from alienation, which demonstrably leads to inefficiency and disregard (e.g. littering). This is well-understood enough that creating a feeling of "ownership" or "autonomy" (without introducing monetary benefits or democratic sharing of actual control over the company) has become a management strategy to motivate employees under capitalism.

As a counter-example to Berlin under capitalism in Germany, consider affluent rural areas where you see barely any littering. These regions however also have a high rate of home ownership and parallel social support networks, which I assume is what you're gesturing at as "repeated interactions" (but in this case often spanning literally generations). But these systems are unstable under laissez-faire capitalism as they present an inefficient resource use in the greater economic system and will over time erode as residents move away for job opportunities and properties are sold off and reused for more space-efficient apartment buildings.

To summarize, I'm not saying a tragedy of the commons can not exist under other economic systems, I'm saying there are systems under which a given tragedy of the commons can be averted and that this is not the case for the current one.

OK, fine. But this is also false. There are many tragedies of the commons that are successfully avoided under capitalism. As you point out, affluent rural areas are one, and the claim that in future these are all automatically going to die off is a post-dated cheque. (Villages in the UK stockbrocker belt have little litter, despite being composed of wealthy incomers.) Another example is cartels. In the end, what's left apart from the uninteresting claim that "constraints influence behaviour"?

> the claim that in future these are all automatically going to die off is a post-dated cheque

It's not, though. We've literally seen this development happen over and over again and it's a logical consequence of the system as is the increasing monopolization via acquisitions and buyouts.

We're not in purely laissez-faire capitalist system, certainly not globally, but trying to paint present day Berlin as an example of a social market economy in the "Rhine capitalism"[0] spirit shows a complete unfamiliarity with the practical evolution of the German economic system and welfare state during the later part of the 20th century and the early 2000s, which saw a massive shift towards free market capitalism, especially under (ironically) the SPD-led Schröder government.

> Villages in the UK stockbrocker belt have little litter, despite being composed of wealthy incomers.

This isn't a counter-example to what I said, this is an example of what I said. Income isn't the determining factor, ownership (and legacy) is. Additionally, even if they don't expect to live there forever because they're comfortable relocating to follow the money, they're surrounded by potential business partners. This again isn't about their level of income but it creates a social mechanism that incentivizes displaying "good behavior".

> Another example is cartels.

An example for something avoided under capitalism? Certainly not. This is like saying Western countries don't have corruption because money is used to exert influence by signing entirely legal backroom deals (campaign financing in the US, promises of zero-effort board positions and highly paid "speaker" engagements in Germany) instead of literally handing wads of cash to police officers.

And this isn't even to cede that cartels can't happen under capitalism, let alone under laissez-faire capitalism: they're not prohibited by the market but by regulations (i.e. laws), and even then there are always loopholes to enable corporations to engage in functionally identical behavior as long as they follow a sufficient number of layers of indirection (or are comfortable to use a pile of NDAs to hide actual illegal behavior). A recent US example widely discussed on HN was the "no poaching" agreements between large industry players to put a cap on the salaries of highly desired employees.

[0]: The term is "Rhine capitalism" not "Rhineland capitalism", btw, and it's a gross oversimplification to use it to refer to the post-WW2 German model, the economy of France in the 1990s and the economy of Germany after the Agenda 2010 reforms as part of the EU-wide Lisbon agenda -- which was one of contributing factors to the EU debt crisis, drastically raised the poverty rate in Germany, drastically cut the income tax rate and wreaked havoc in the welfare system. It was a stretch when Albert popularized the term in the 1990s (after the German reunification) and it's frankly ridiculous to still use it today.

I think you might be interested in my comment sibling to yours about the work of Elinor Ostrom. She spent her life documenting those systems.

Capitalism represents a solution to the tragedy of the commons: Privatize it. You guys are interpreting this as a takedown of capitalism when it's the exact opposite. Capitalism represents a solution to this issue. You might not like that solution, but this circumstance just goes to show that naive attempts to reinvent capitalism are unlikely to work.

But you can't privatize the air?

Also, do you think the indian company was a perfect example of why capitalism should not involve itself with common goods? Unless you think it isnt a capitalist company despite presenting all aspect of it (including regulatory capture and threats of violence against slaves/employees).

Contrarily to the common claim of capitalism, this wouldn’t be an optimal solution. Let’s say there are ten shepherds sharing the fields. You privatize it and in a short amount of time, there will be one shepherd left, ultra rich, and nine unemployed shepherds. So capitalism is a good system to optimize the value of the field, not its value for society.

If that actually happens, it will be because one of the shepherds is substantially better at flock management than the others, and their financial success allows them to buy fields from the other shepherds. The other shepherds will only sell their field if the good-flock-manager shepherd makes them an attractive offer (probably enough money such that they can live off the interest for the rest of their life). Not to mention, they very well might get a job working for the good-at-flock-management shepherd, possibly even at a raise since superior profits means there's more wealth to share. (Realistically there will probably be at least 2 sheep conglomerates competing on wages to hire the best shepherds. I'm not an ideologue, I'm cool with the government intervening in the economy a little bit to break up monopolies.)

> If that actually happens, it will be because one of the shepherds is substantially better at flock management than the others, and their financial success allows them to buy fields from the other shepherds.

IFF all the other shepherds even got a cut in the privatisation, then perhaps.

But there's no guarantee of that. That's certainly not how things went down in the last major privatisation the world has seen, that of post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s.

In some cases that applies, but I don't think a paid version of babel would be viable. Electronic goods resist commodifying. It only works sometimes (like in streaming music), but you need to put in a lot of technological and legal effort.

I believe that societies develop in lockstep with technology. The industrial revolution was only possible with the beginning civil society and capitalism; capitalism as we know it was only possible at the end of feudalism and absolutism. It is intertwined. New technologies tend to disrupt societies, you can go where the tech leads you (e.g. content can be copied without effort), or you can go the other way and adapt the tech to the society (say, not using machines in order to save jobs). That is why I think we are due for a big change in our political and economic system. What that is going to look like, and how much it will still look like capitalism, I don't know.

(Sorry for derailing the thread...)

>I don't think a paid version of babel would be viable.

It would if there were no open source alternatives. Bear in mind that most of the users are commercial organisations deriving value from it. They need something like it to solve their problems and if it isn't available for free then they will pay.

Hm, a solution. They privatize it, and then companies will say to their webdevs, we don't want to pay extra for a profit of some capitalist, write the website without it.

So each webdev will end up with their own half-baked solution. Tragedy of the lack of commons!

I hear you cry, but that's irrational! Precisely, but so is not caring about the commons and letting them die.

I am not under an illusion that under capitalism, people cannot pass the buck (responsibility for maintenance) away too.

Companies make those sort of trade offs all the time, whether to buy or build. It doesn't take many to decide to buy to fund a small project like Babel. Not only that but you are likely to see competition driving the whole thing forward.

My point was that framing this as a tragedy of the commons problem, and here's the standard solution, can itself be disputed. The hidden assumption is that the capitalist will take the responsibility to take care of the thing, and provide it for a fair price, but it is by no means given. Certainly, there are examples of economic failures of this type as well. (Even in software, Unixes/Lisps..)

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