For those who might think Thomas Malthus'
An Essay on the Principle of Population irrelevant except for historical interest, I'd make the following remarks:
Although Malthus uses very little empirical evidence in his essay, it would be a mistake to view this shortcoming as an antiquation from a less "scientific" age. For example, one of the more influential essays in public policy written in the last century is Garrett Hardin's infamous
The Tragedy of the Commons, published in a 1968 in an issue of
Science. Just as Malthus' sketchy proclamations were rapidly gobbled up by the bourgeoisie of his day to justify limitations on social welfare, so too did Hardin's concept proliferate beyond the boundaries of his original article; today the "tragedy of the commons" has become a self-justifying truism used by politicians, academics, and those laboring in think-tanks to recommend the privatization of virtually everything from public utilities to the planet's atmosphere, even if people are unaware of or unwilling to defend the arguments which spawned it. It has become an ideological fixture.
And much like Malthus' 1798 essay, and spite of its venue of publication, Hardin's 1968 piece contained virtually no scientific evidence to support its sweeping claims. Indeed, the main "evidence" of the article centers on a purely hypothetical grazing arrangement which, in addition to being proven wrong by the grazing practices of actual pastoral economies, also includes a sort of puzzling scenario for political philosophies which see common rights as being rather central to any alternative to capitalism.
The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.
As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" This utility has one negative and one positive component.
1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.
2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of -1.
Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another. . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit--in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
There are two striking things about this scenario.
The first is that it assumes that use of the commons is completely unregulated. This would be fine if Hardin's essay were aimed at being meaningful only to a libertarian fantasy-world, but it's not; presumably Hardin means for it to have relevance to the actual exercising of common rights. And in this case the assumption of absolute freedom, completely unfettered by any mechanism of social organization, seems not only implausible, but is contradicted by what we know about the use of commons in historical economies.
Among the more carefully-studied common lands, for example, were those prevalent in premodern England. But rights to the English commons could not simply be exercised by anyone with a cow or sheep, but by "stints" -- grazing regulations which were designed to prevent the overuse of the pastures at village meetings. Ironically, it was only after the privatization of the commons that wealthy landowners began overstocking their lands in order to achieve higher profits. A similar situation happened in Africa: grazing rights in the Sahel where regulated by tribal leaders for until they were disrupted by the introduction of colonial European rule and its system of private property rights, a fact which is remarkable given the frailty of that ecosystem.
Which leads to the second interesting thing about "tragedy": the system assumes a pastoral commodity capitalism wherein there is an incessant pressure to convert livestock into its exchange value. Again it's worth noting that this is remarkably unlike the way all or most preindustrial, precapitalist societies actually operated, where production for exchange value was generally only a small part of the economy, which in most societies depended primarily upon subsistence production, the division of labor within the extended family, and the regulation of production by the traditional rights associated with informal communal institutions.
Hardin essentially assumes an a priori choice between absolute anarchy and modern institutions of private property ownership, and assumes conditions of commodity capitalism to be essentially ahistorical. It's difficult to imagine how an paper with such a ridiculous premise could gain such currency, at least not without interpreting its ideological utility as being the foremost factor in its rise to prominence.
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