Tragedy of the commons: Socialsm vs Capitalism

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Could the problem of the government be that it is a collection of shared resources and money.
Wouldn't trying to share resources and money be like having a joint bank account. Imagine it.
Lets say a bank account has 10k in it and it earns 30% interest yearly and that bank account is shared
amongst 30 people in a small town.

1. How do you think it effects incentives to save.
2. How do you think it effects incentives to withdraw money.
3. Would it work if we had a banker who forces us to put money by fear of violence. He would get paid an admin fee from the some of the interest.


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RE9PMwwaFc[/youtube]

Get your fish from the state, no time for politeness.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tc6ywqoL6o[/youtube]

State ownership isn't common ownership, and common ownership dosen't necessarily mean a free for all commons.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0BXCiKOsKY[/youtube]

The person who invented "tragedy of the commons" is the person who advocated mass genocide in the name of stopping overpopulation and yet he sired six children, was it? By the way, ever heard of "negative externalities"? Corporation X owns some land and essentially destroys the area around it in order to get some mineral or fuel or something... this idea that common ownership means destroying everything and private ownership causes preservation is false.

The Tragedy of the Commons can simply be described as the free-rider problem extended to a unregulated common pool resource (a non-exclusive rival good).

Since the free-rider problem introduces a massive incentive not to cooperate, it is only reasonable to expect that a unregulated common pool resource will be depleted without some external influence.

Relevant current examples are overfishing, overpopulation and anthropogenic climate change.

In general, three different mechanisms have been established to deal with the tragedy of the commons:

1. State Control
2. Assignment of Property Rights
3. Self-Governing Systems

(2) and (3) have been the subject of Nobel prize works by Ronald H. Coase (The Problem of Social Cost) end Elinor Ostrom (Governing The Commons), respectively, while (1) can probably be attributed to a multitude of authors, including Arthur Pigou and Garrett Hardin (the latter being the author of The Tragedy of The Commons in 1968).

The problem with self-governing systems is that transaction costs become prohibitively high as the common pool resource increases in size. In fact, the successful self-governed systems identified by Ostrom were mostly very small scale, so option (3) isn't really all that viable when dealing with common pool resources that transcend national borders, for instance. This effectively rules out self-governing systems as a solution to some of the most severe environmental problems the world is currently facing.

State control is theoretically a viable solution (and the one most resembling "socialism"), but it faces several obstacles: One is the political process: Environmental agencies can be subject to regulatory capture (the EPA in the US has a notorious reputation for this) by those that are being regulated. Furthermore, efficient regulation of a common pool resource is always a problem for a government, as it lacks information about differences in marginal costs between companies, for instance. As a result, both command-and-control and tax approaches are unlikely to arrive at efficient outcomes.

Option (2) - and more specifically, the assignment and trading of property rights (cap-and-trade) - is generally considered the most efficient method of protecting common pool resources. Since economic agents are capable of trading with each other, this will tend to produce the most efficient use of a common pool resource. Even radical left-wing environmental economists like Herman Daly favour cap-and-trade property rights because they are viewed as more efficient and transparent.

However, the success of cap-and-trade systems depends on a sustainable level of total property rights. If the rights exceed the capacity of the common pool resource, the resource will still be depleted.

This has been a continuing headache with regards to European fishing quotas, for instance, and the carbon quotas from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol suffer from the same problem, as the total emission quotas allowed will not result in a stabilization of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, neither of the two really exist in the world as it is today.
Both are polluted by corporate influence, corruption & the power hungry.
Proponents of both sides speak of idealized versions, and criticize what is actually the existing distorted versions.
Bureaucracy, I think is the problem with both.
Bureaucracy applied to capitalism turns it into corporatism.
Bureaucracy applied to socialism turns it into totalitarianism.
Both corporatism and totalitarianism are fascist in nature.

Given the REALITY of how both systems actually work, I'd take my chances with Capitalism. A morality-focused society can make Capitalism work better, but the forced equality of Socialism denies a fundamental human drive...the lust for things.

Some social conditioning to be more generous will go far to make Capitalism more sensitive to those in need, but it takes a lot of social conditioning to overcome the fundamental drive to acquire what we most desire. I don't see it being realistically possible for the idealized version of Socialism ever coming about, and absent that, I don't see the "commoner" doing better under Socialism than under a more socially-compassionate version of Capitalism.

Capitalism by far is a better system, but only when it is applied correctly. We've let business and government get in bed with each other, we've created excessive and unnecessary beaucrocacy and it's created this mess.

An argumentum ad homonim. Garret Hardin correctly identified the tragedy of the commons as the -logical outcome- of the n party prisoner's dilemma game. It cannot be avoided. What Hardin said about the commons was true, regardless of how many children he had. The only genocide he managed was his own. He died by his own hand.

ruveyn

I need to watch the rest of the video but it appear that the guy believes libertarian sociality would be communities shared ownerships of various resources and services such as schools, parks, roads and allotments. In a libertarian or anarchist society these things would be privatised. Parks, schools, libraries would be privatised thus have a single owner. The apartments block gated community that I live in have a single owner. I pay ground rent to them to provide lighting, roads, parking and security. It is no more a commons then Apple computers though I own an Iphone and some apple shares. One would vote with their feet by purchasing products they want and need. No other voting would be necessary.

If that pond in Africa was privatised the owner would have incentive to limit fishing so fish can repopulate in a sustainable way.

We have become a scarcity society:

http://www.ianwelsh.net/living-in-a-rich-society/

I am more sympathetic to the concerns of socialism but ultimately any system which advocates the continuation of price system based economics is doomed to failure, capitalism included. The price system (any system using currency in lieu of a tangible trading standard) only works when production is equal to less than consumption. It isn't that capitalism is somehow better or more sustainable than socialism, its just enduring a more prolonged fall.

Last edited by thomas81 on 23 Dec 2013, 4:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The person who invented "tragedy of the commons" my have been as mad as a hatter but the logic of "tragedy of the commons" is sound.

Well, its actually a society of artificial scarcity.

That is to say a society where abundancy is hoarded or purposefully destroyed where there would otherwise not be scarcity.

Examples-

Perfectly good food excess being burnt or dumped in the ocean rather than dropped over hungry people

Supermarkets (Target and Wal Mart in the USA) putting unsold consumables into dumpsters rather than dispersing it among homeless people.

I do wonder though if maybe the video in the OP is presenting a false dichotomy.

It assumes that the existance of overgrazing is an inevitability, rather than a result of private landlords who own excessive amounts of land thus reducing the carrying capacity for everyone else.

Perhaps rather than talking about the tragedy of the commons, we ought to be talking about the tragedy of private estates. The tragedy of the commons is only applicable to the paradigm of the free market.

I we don't have capitalism in America. The average man is taxed 70% if you include sales tax, property tax, income tax, and inflation tax, and increased price of goods because business have to pay the taxes mentioned above including the higheer wages of the employees who have to pay the taxes mentioned above and the extra price of goods because of t............................

This gets recursive in a way my head I cant get my head around. Trust me, there is a lot of tax.

Communal ownership + communal co-operation would solve all of the problems presented in the video and more.