“The Tragedy

of the
Commons”
Presented By:
Nur ‘Izzati Azhari
WHO IS GARRETT
HARDIN??
Click icon to add
Garrett James Hardin
picture was a leading ecologist and
biologist from Dallas, Texas.

A major focus of his career

was the issue of human
overpopulation.

He was most well known for

his elaboration of this
theme in his 1968 paper,
The Tragedy of the
Commons.
 What is
‘The Tragedy of the
Commons’?
 The Tragedy of the Commons is a 1968 paper
by biologist Garrett Hardin.

To focus attention on the lack of technical

solutions to arrest overpopulation.

 Reprinted in over 100 anthologies.

 Its explanation for why commonly-held resources
such as groundwater, grazing land, and fisheries
are prone to inevitably degrade has influenced the
development of environmental and economic
policies for resource management.

 widely accepted as a fundamental contribution to

ecology, population theory, economics and political
science.
 Hardin used the word "tragedy" as the philosopher
Whitehead used it:

"The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It

resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of
things." He [Whitehead] then goes on to say, "This
inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of
human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness.
For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made
evident in the drama."
Hardin (1968)

Once the stage is set in a dramatic tragedy, there is no

escape from the unhappy ending.
 
 Focuson one such problem—that of over-
population

 Problem is to avoid overpopulation without

relinquishing current privileges—there is no
technological solution to this problem.
 Hardin points out that the Tragedy of the
Commons is an example of the class of problems
with no technical solution, where:

 “A technical solution may be defined as one that

requires a change only in the techniques of the
natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in
the way of change in human values or ideas of
morality” Hardin (1968).

 Thus, we can avoid tragedy only by altering our

values, by changing the way we live.
 The Basic ideas
 The tragedy of the commons is a metaphor used to illustrate
the conflict between individual interests and the common good.

 If a resource is held in common for use by all, then ultimately

that resource will be destroyed.

 "Held in common" means the resource is owned by no one, or

owned by a group, all of whom have access to the resource.

 "Ultimately" means after many years, maybe centuries. The

time interval is closely tied to population increase of those who
have access to the resource. The greater the number of people
using a resource, the faster it is destroyed. Thus the Tragedy of
the Commons is directly tied to over population.
 What Shall
We Maximize?
 Thomas Malthus : Population, naturally
tends to grow “geometrically,” or, as we would
now say exponentially.
Jeremy Bentham: “Greatest Good for the Greatest
Number”

 Itis not mathematically possible to maximize two

variables at the same time

 In terms of population, the greatest number is

incompatible with the greatest good

 Maximum population implies misery— minimum

calories for survival for each person
Adam Smith: The Invisible Hand

 Hecontributed to a dominant tendency of

thought that has ever since interfered with
positive action based on rational analysis,
namely, the tendency to assume that decisions
reached individually will, in fact, be the best
decisions for an entire society

 The
“invisible hand” approach will not work - too
many externalities.
Tragedy of Freedoms
in a Commons
Pasture (Grassland)
Because each cattleman
benefits from increasing
the size of his herd on the
lot, and he feels only a
fraction of the negative
effects of overgrazing, any
rational cattleman would
increase the size of his
herd. Hence, overgrazing
is inevitable, and freedom
of the commons in a world
that is limited "brings ruin
to all”.
 Air and Water

No one owns the air and water.

It is available for all to use and
when a person, company or
factory receives benefits of easy
disposal of waste into air or
bodies of water, its unlimited
use eventually leads to air and
water pollution.
 Fisheries

Due to mismanagement and overfishing,

now the once unlimited resources of
marine fishes have become scarce and
nations are coming to limit the freedom
of their fishers in the commons.
 National Parks

The parks are open to everyone without limits on

visitation, but the parks themselves are a limited
common resource. As the number of visits
increases, degradation of the parks becomes
more probable. The finite number of parks,
coupled with increasing visitation and population
growth, makes conservation efforts difficult.
Solution:
 Sell the parks as private property
- By making resources private property, owners will
have an incentive to keep others off their property,
which would limit the number of users, and to use
the property sustainably so they can benefit from it in
the future.
 Keep the parks as public property but allocate use:
• By auction system
• By merit
• By lottery
• By first-come, first-served
How to Legislate Temperance?

 The laws of our society follow the pattern of ancient

ethics, and therefore are poorly suited to governing
a complex, crowded, changeable world.

 Thus, the solution is to augment statutory law with

administrative law.

 But, bureau administrators who are trying to

evaluate the morality of acts in the total system, are
singularly liable to corruption, producing a
government by men, not laws.
 Freedom To Breed is Intolerable
 Overpopulation harms the world as a whole. The more people
there are, the fewer resources there are available to each person.

 As long as we have a welfare state, people will continue to have

more children than is good for society. Rational agents maximize
their own good (more children), when the cost to them is relatively
low because the cost is shared in common with society as a
whole.

 Assumption: each child is a net good to its parents but a net bad
to society.

 “Has any cultural group solved this practical problem at the

present time, even on an intuitive level? One simple fact proves
that none has: there is no prosperous population in the world
today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero.”
New Developments in World Population
Hardin’s work written in 1968. Since then:

 China’s one-child policy

 Nearly one hundred countries now have a fertility

rate below replacement level, including the United
Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Vietnam, Brazil,,
Cuba, Kazakhstan, Brunei, Russia, Japan, China,
Thailand, Macao and Hong Kong.

 Hong Kong is the lowest at .98 children per woman.

 “… the most rapidly growing populations on earth
today are (in general) the most miserable.”- Still true.

 Countries with the highest fertility rates: Mali, Niger,

Uganda, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Burundi,
Burkina Faso, the Congo, Angola, Sierra Leone (all
over 6 children per woman)

 The demographic economic paradox.

 Conscience is Self-Eliminating and
pathogenic
 Hardin: appeals to individual conscience are bad
because:
 1) It discriminates against people of good
conscience, and tends to eliminate them from the
population.
 2) It won’t work in the long run. Nature’s revenge.
People without conscience will outbreed the others,
and population will increase again eventually.
 3) It is not psychologically healthy to force people
to act against their own interests on the basis of
conscience.
 Mutual Coercion
Mutually Agreed Upon
 Hardin’sfavoured solution—create temperance by
mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the
majority of the people affected.

 Example: Government regulation on number of

offspring allowed

 Taxing is a good coercive device.

 Recognition of Necessity
 The commons is justifiable only under conditions of low
population density. As the human population has increased, the
commons has had to be abandoned in one aspect after another.

 “Freedom is the recognition of necessity”

 Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all

 The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more
precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed

 It is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of

abandoning the freedom to breed.
Conclusion

 The population problem cannot be solved in a

technical way.

 “The only way we can preserve and nurture

other and more precious freedoms is by
relinquishing a freedom.”

 Freedom must be limited.

Thank you for
listening =)