Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

So I have to wonder if this article written about clogging up employment courts with AI-generated cases is itself generated because the premise (in the title and the article) refers to the "tragedy of the commons", which was debunked almost 20 years ago.

For a bit of history, the term was the title of a 1968 essay [1] based in part on ideas that originated earlier. It becamse popular as a driver for privatization of government services in many Western nations based on the (flawed) idea that privatization would increase "efficiency". All it did was transfer wealth from customers with inelastic demand to newly-minted private owners.

But it never seemed to match reality. The opposite seemed to be true: private resources became over-exploited whereas shared or public resources were successfully managed and shared by communities across the world in some cases going back centuries. This culminated in Elinor Ostrom [2] winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for officially debunking the idea.

Now I understand how ordinary people still quote this debunked idea. It did become popular. But journalists, particularly those for a publication called The Economist, should know better.

[1]: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/TragedyoftheCommons.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom

It's the first time I hear something like this; if that's true, then this must be one major case of meaning shift, because since forever I've known and used and seen used this term to refer to the flaws of privatization. The solution to tragedy of the commons is literally a central authority. It's, like, the opposite of "driver of privatization".

Tragedy of the Commons was specifically the idea that cooperation would fail due to selfish competition, so some force was needed to administer it.

Economists used it to argue both for privatization and against, but always for top-down, authoritative control.

In the US, it was almost always used as an anti-"socialist" argument for privatization, by arguing that the free market would in fact be an analogue for the "natural" competition, because as we all know the Free Market always finds the most equitable and consumer-desired outcome.

I'd imagine in Europe it was more common to argue for government management.

Is the argument that "natural" competition is different from selfish competition? And people said that with a straight face?

Tragedies of the commons are often aimed to be 'resolved' through central authority, but another way of stating what's happening there is that they are being resolved by someone being granted the ownership right over the commons (in the cases you're mentioning, government). Therefor, it hasn't exactly meaning-shifted, but 'contextual' implications of the term for the reader are definitely bimodal with respect to privatization.

You can have a tragedy or not, Ostrom didn’t show it’s always well managed by the public. One can say ‘tragedy of the commons’ while still knowing about solutions where it’s not a tragedy anymore

Almost nothing you said is true. The point of tragedy of the commons is that regulation is necessary, as opposed to the libertarian "self-regulating market". It's very real, and not in any way "debunked". Many fish species are close to extinction because of it.

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