Property Rights and the Tragedy of the Commons

[Valin]

The Atlantic:

 

 

Jonathan H. Adler

5/22/12

 

Guest post by Jonathan H. Adler, a professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law and regular contributor to the Volokh Conspiracy.

 

(Snip)Much of my environmental work cuts against the traditional pro-regulatory grain of contemporary environmental law and policy. There have been significant environmental gains in many areas over the past fifty years, and traditional regulatory strategies deserve some of the credit, but modern environmental regulation is hardly a model of efficient governmental intervention. What, then, should we do differently? To answer this question it's important to think first about the nature of environmental problems, as our diagnosis of the problems will influence our choice of remedy.

 

The way we think about environmental concerns was heavily influenced by Garrett Hardin's seminal 1968 essay on "The Tragedy of the Commons." In this essay, Hardin described the fate of a common pasture, unowned and available to all. As Hardin explained, in such a situation it is in each herder's self-interest to maximize his use of the commons at the expense of the community at large. Each herder captures all of the benefit from adding one more animal to his herd. Yet the costs of overgrazing the pasture are distributed among every user of the pasture. And when all of the herders respond to these incentives, the pasture is overgrazed -- hence the tragedy. As Hardin explained it, the pursuit of self-interest in an open-access commons leads to ruin. Without controls on access and use of the underlying resource, the tragedy of the commons is inevitable.

 

Hardin's essay is tremendously important, not so much because he discovered the commons problem -- others had documented this dynamic before -- but because he popularized a useful way of thinking about many environmental problems. As Hardin explained, the metaphor of the commons can be applied to virtually any environmental resource. Instead of a pasture we could talk of a herd of animals, a fishery, a lake or even an airshed. In each case, the underlying economic dynamic is the same, and if access and use are not limited in some fashion, over-use is inevitable as demand grows. [A quick caveat: What Hardin called the "commons," is more properly described as an open-access commons, as there are some resources that are owned or managed in common that do not suffer the tragedy because they are subject to community management of some form or other, but the central point stands.]

 

(Snip)

 

 

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