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Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

> Because of deforestation and rapid erosion, the lake has been filling with silt and is no longer able to hold as much water as it used to. This is a problem that has been known for the last few decades, but very little has been done to address it.

So that lake is like the small open source project that supports the weight of all internet: critical for everybody, yet neglected.

The Canal moves such amounts of money every year, not to say over decades, that preserving the lake in better conditions ought to have been easy. Now the ball of mud is exploding in their faces. It's like if "we" (collectively) never learned.

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The canal authority doesn't control the watershed land so it would have been up to the Panamanian government to enact the relevant legislation in the 90s or prior.

That doesn't sound easy at all, even getting better resourced governments to care about things that will directly affect their voters in 30 years in big ways is already very difficult.

Let alone when it's multiple steps removed and the costs are so diffusely spread out across billions of consumers.

Maybe this sounds stupid as I don't know about Panamanian politics, but I would have expected that this is their most important source of income?

I don't think Panama owns the Panama Canal. I believe it's entirely run and governed by the US.

> The Panama Canal Authority (Spanish: Autoridad del Canal de Panamá (ACP)) is the agency of the government of Panama responsible for the operation and management of the Panama Canal. The ACP took over the administration of the canal from the Panama Canal Commission, the joint US–Panama agency that managed the canal, on December 31, 1999, when the canal was handed over from the United States to Panama as per the Torrijos–Carter Treaties.

> The Panama Canal Authority is established under Title XIV of the National Constitution, and has exclusive responsibility for the operation, administration, management, preservation, maintenance, and modernization of the canal. It is responsible for the operation of the canal in a safe, continuous, efficient, and profitable manner.[1]

Emphasis mine

I am not sure if (or how) the ownership question would change that the country definitely profits from it's canal.

If you disagree, please explain. My understanding was that Panama profits in direkt and indirect ways from the canal, and did so even at a time when the channel wasn't owned by them.

If that is wrong, naive or stupid I'd like to know.

Your info is about... 20 years out of date?

The Inter-American Development Bank loaned Panama the money for the Panama canal expansion, so, my thought is that the money that they're making might be tied up covering the notes for the expansion.

Sounds like a riff on The Tragedy of The Commons. Everyone is so busy so successful using the resource no one wants to pause to consider saving the resource.

always has been .jpg

coordination dilemmas, particularly resource allocation, are The Problem

Misaligned incentives too

It's not Tragedy of the Commons because it's not a commons: there's a single controlling entity that should be interested in managing the resource. It's closer to a discounting problem, because future benefits from investment made today are discounted because it's the future's problem.

(And it's a great service to society that people have been debunking the myth of the Tragedy of the Commons which was an armchair moralist article in scientific clothing that had no empirical basis when it was published and yet got widely cited for a while because it was emotionally appealing.)

Can you tell me more about how the tragedy of the commons is a myth? I am no economist, but I thought it was a straightforward and well understood outcome.

PDF warning: https://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/3113...

The commons were well managed by local people and enclosure was a land grab by the rich.

I see. Thank you for the interesting article.

The Tragedy of the Commons as a historical event in Medieval England has been criticized (hard to say debunked from this one article, but perhaps there are more).

The Tragedy of the Commons as an economical/social phenomena has not been debunked.

Since 99.9% of the uses of the phrase Tragedy of the Commons are referring to the second case, I'm not sure it is helpful to say that it has been debunked.

>The Tragedy of the Commons as an economical/social phenomena has not been debunked.

This was what I came here for too. I'm sure someone out there is more interested in the history of the phrase than the economics phenomenon it points to, but it sure isn't me. You could rename it the Doohickey, drop any historical precedent, and I'd still be very interested if someone said the Doohickey was debunked.

I suppose it is also worth asking the opposite: is there any reason to believe in the tragedy of the commons as an economic or social phenomenon? There must be anecdotes in favor or against, but so we have any reason to believe it is a generally applicable rule?

Well it's not just historically debunked. There's plenty of modern examples of common resources being well-managed. Take free public transit in some european cities, for example: they're not the trashy full-of-grafiti hellscape capitalists will have you believe.

You should take it the other way around: the tragedy of the commons is a myth. Of course you could cherry pick some story of bad actors misbehaving. But that's not a general rule, it's not bound by fate, and you just have to shove your foot up their face to prevent it. But in the absence of egotistic capitalist pigs, most people are reasonable in managing shared resources and that's how humanity survived for so long before inventing private property. Anedotally, that's also my experience living in collectives for a few decades: there may be abusive situations dealing with shared resources (who ate all the tomatoes?!) but that's only mildly annoying because it's the exception rather than the norm.

You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood the tragedy of the commons. Yes, public transit is well managed in certain places, so there is no tragedy. That's the point. Public or common resources must be well-managed and regulated or they're exploited without regard for consequences.

There are plenty of examples of said exploitation, just look at water rights in the US. Your anecdotal and biased experience doesn't disprove it.

A lot of these concepts lack specification on the requirements that must be met for them to occur. If people feel a common responsibility for something, the concept does not apply at all or only to a lesser degree. Our fundamental economic beliefs about growth still reflect this, even with rescue arguments about growth in productivity and efficiency (which rarely apply to any natural resource). In essence the peasants of yesterday are the B.A. of today.

However, there is also the comedy of the commons and the tragedy of the anticommons for that matter. Open source for example doesn't suffer from the tragedy of the commons as much as it is suffering from the tragedy of the anticommons.

When you say anticommons, do you mean commercial entities abusing open source or just like rich folks in general?

More in a sense that knowledge is kept behind closed doors and is not shared, when it isn't made a public good. Data from OpenAI for example.

Zing! That name is def the dark-pattern naming equivalent of a problem

Check out Ostrom's work and the long line of work following it. Not just Ostrom though.

To clarify, I did not say it was ToTC. I said riff on, and then I clarified.

The controlling entity clearly is failing, sans charging a cutting in line fee. It's in the best interest of the rest to do something. Yet nothing. Perhaps not a ToTC but it's nonetheless a tragedy, or soon to be. And The Commons elsewhere are sure to be the ones to bear the brunt of the blow.

This is a natural monopoly, the tragedy of the commons is something else.

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