Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The pseudo-academic style of the article is awful. All abstractions and buzzwords, no examples. Also, the tragedy of the commons concept is far older than 1968. The term "common" refers to common grazing land upon which anyone could graze animals. That's an English term. The American equivalent is "open range".

Getting past that, the author has a point. There's a loss of shared expertise when there aren't people around learning and doing something. In the US, we've seen this in manufacturing. The number of Americans who know how to set up a good production plant is much lower than it was in the 1980s. That's the consequence of the hollowing out of American manufacturing. The author talks about AI vs. white collar work, but fails to make the connection with outsourcing vs. blue collar work.

The loss of this expertise has recently been made very clear in the US as attempts are made to scale up weapons production for the US's various wars. Progress is very slow, as has been seen with both artillery ammo and air-defense missiles.

> Also, the tragedy of the commons concept is far older than 1968. The term "common" refers to common grazing land upon which anyone could graze animals. That's an English term. The American equivalent is "open range".

The term is not "common" or "commons" but "tragedy of the commons" which dates back to a book in 1968 by Garrett Hardin. Elinor Ostrom subsequently showed that most or all of Hardin's assumptions and claims were wrong, or at the very least, far from universal, and that the process he describes elides what actually drives the destructions of resources held in common: greed and power.

I think you might be thinking about Elinor Ostrom and she didn't show that his assumptions and claims were wrong exactly. She expanded on the work to clarify the difference between managed vs unmanaged commons. Showing that successful commons are managed in some way with established rules and limits around the usage. The term still has use especially if it is used to clarify the need for management of common resources to avoid the tragedy.

which is also basically the same point made by Hobbes about the state of nature

Hobbes, Rousseau were effectively both trying to solve the "tragedy of the commons" problem with political collaboration. Hobbes is widely misunderstood by (romantic, naive, libertarian) fools to have said that absent a powerful soverign, life is "nasty brutish and short". What he more accurately said is that, "an unmanaged commons is nasty bruitsh and short" -- to use that kind of language

Rousseau, to the same romantic strain is widely misunderstood to have said that 'the unmanaged commons' is a delight. Instead, he basically said politically community isnt that required anyway, and if you're in trouble, just run away.

In either case, the tragedy of the commons issue is well known in other guises throughout the history of philosophy

These are both ways of saying that the problem isn't the commons (shared ownership), it's an issue of accountability (where "abandon something broken and find another" is a way of exercising accountability).

> In either case, the tragedy of the commons issue is well known in other guises throughout the history of philosophy

It really isn't. There are lots of anecdotes that appear to illustrate the tragedy, throughout history. But what they lack is what Ostrom added: the historical account of how a previously managed commons had its management structures dismantled by greed and power and only then was in a position to become a "tragedy". The result is that a very significant number of people believe that resources held in common always lead to "tragedy", when in fact the lesson is "the structures used to manage resources held in common are critically important, and severe action should and must be taken against those who try to dismantle them". We can hold resources in common, but must be ever vigilant and actionful against the selfish bastards who seek to manipulate them for their own advantage.

Right, and that's pretty much exactly Hobbes analysis of the state of nature which is a hypothetical stripping away of such systems of political management.

The application of this principle to physical resources is novel, sure -- but the observation that "enforced coordination solves the rational self-interest problem" isnt novel.

Agreed that it's not novel.

But Ostrom's novel observation wasn't that. It was "all those stories of how shared ownership of resources leads to tragedies? they're wrong, and part of a mostly uncoordinated attempt to get you to abandon the idea of shared ownership of resources. It is, as ever, greed and power that lead to those tragedies".

My understanding of Ostrom's work was to show that basically almost all commons were managed, and that when they were not, that was the result of selfish actors deliberately seeking to dismantle the management structures to further their own individual interests.

That was not my understanding at all. She seemed to be making a much more nuanced point than the simplistic: "selfish actors deliberately dismantle..". I was more responding to the idea that she refuted hardin though which is very much not the case. She built on and expanded his thesis.

.. presumably hyper-inequality also erodes the use of common resources, or resources available to commoners ?

eg. large companies ( 'hyperscalars' ) pre-ordering RAM and GPUs driving up the prices to the point where PC gamers and AI enthusiasts cant upgrade.

RAM doesn't really fall under the concept of "commons" as outlined by Hardin (or Ostrom).

Hyper-inequality makes it more likely that greed and selfishness will succeed at dismantling whatever management structures exist for a given commons.

Must be a glitch in the matrix or I got kicked into an alternate timeline, because until yesterday I never saw anyone here question the general meaning of "tragedy of the commons" and its stated implications, and suddenly it's the second time I see some 1968 book reference brought up and implications that "tragedy of the commons" is debunked, and that it's saying basically the opposite of what I know it to be saying...

I question it every time I see it on HN. Every time. Same on mastodon. Same on Lawyers, Gun, Money. One of my own personal quests. So many people know about "the tragedy of the commons", an idea that really does only go back to Hardin's book, but hardly anyone knows about Ostrom's work which IMO is vastly more important (and also more correct).

Us manufacturing is larger than ever and still growing. It is mostly automated though so Tht number of people who work in manufacturing is shrinking. Still the expertise is still there and they do hire people all the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com