Hardly. When I taught the course I never taught the case at all.

One party obtained title from an indigenous tribe then in possession of the land, the other party via Congress. Marshall selected the party with title from Congress, explaining that indigenous tribes lacked the power to convey title because of both their diminished sovereignty and the impossibility of owning property in the collective, thus placing individual ownership at the forefront of American legal thought. Long heralded as a panacea for poverty and inefficiency, privatization has been our maxim. As deeply as this obsession for privatization runs, persists the ingrained skepticism of collective ownership. This essay dares to question: Will shared resources always be misused and overused? Is privatization the only way to protect the environment and end poverty? Most economists will answer “yes” — and for proof they, like my professor, point to the most influential article ever written on those important questions.

I don't think I understand the treatment of Garrett Hardin, who seems to wind up representing pretty much the opposite of what I think he thought.

But in any event it seems to me that on the central issue identified by this draft, we can take the conversation much further along. Ellie Ostrom did win the Nobel Prize; my clients and comrades and I did make the free software commons the center of how the world produces software; Wikipedia did change the life of every literate person; several trillions of global commerce in free software products alone happens every year. Just the tiny sliver of materials I've happened to assign so far shows the extent to which commons understandings have become fundamental to contemporary political economy. The best route to this draft's improvement seems to me to be to put itself in touch with at least what we've done already, if not the dotCommunist Manifesto itself.

Paper Title

-- By AyaHashem - 16 Feb 2023

On the first day of Property this semester, my Professor traced American property law back to the first and most seminal case: Johnson v. M’Intosh wherein Justice Marshall considered who the rightful titleholder was between two parties. One party obtained title from an indigenous tribe then in possession of the land, the other party via Congress. Marshall selected the party with title from Congress, explaining that indigenous tribes lacked the power to convey title because of both their diminished sovereignty and the impossibility of owning property in the collective, thus placing individual ownership at the forefront of American legal thought. Long heralded as a panacea for poverty and inefficiency, privatization has been our maxim. As deeply as this obsession for privatization runs, persists the ingrained skepticism of collective ownership. This essay dares to question: Will shared resources always be misused and overused? Is privatization the only way to protect the environment and end poverty? Most economists will answer “yes” — and for proof they, like my professor, point to the most influential article ever written on those important questions.

Since its publication in 1968, “The Tragedy of the Commons” has been a dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues. Garrett Hardin illustrated his “tragedy” by describing a pasture open to a large group of cattle herders. Each herder, in deciding whether to add additional cattle to her herd, seeks to maximize her gain. But the open pasture presents a classic externality problem. While each cattle herder bears the full benefit of adding an additional cow to her herd, she bears only a small fraction of the cost. Accordingly, each herder continues adding cattle to her herd until they exceed the carrying capacity of the pasture. In this way, said Hardin, "freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” It is a powerful parable, because this particular iteration of the externality problem can purport to form the root of virtually all environmental problems, from the overexploitation of fisheries and forests to the pollution of water and air.

However, Hardin’s single pasture is perhaps not the perfect metaphor to describe our world and ecosystems. Hardin assumed that each cattle herder would bear the full benefits and the full costs of her decisions, that all externalities would be internalized and the tragedy of the commons would be solved. Hardin’s argument started with the unproven assertion “it is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons… each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain.” Evidence and common sense show that this is absurd: people are social beings, and society is much more than the arithmetic sum of its members. Even if the herdsman wanted to behave as Hardin described, she couldn’t do so unless certain conditions existed. There would have to be a market for the cattle, and she would have to be focused on producing for that market, not for local consumption. She would have to have enough capital to buy the additional cattle and the food they would need, be able to hire workers to care for the larger herd, build bigger barns, etc. And her desire for profit would have to outweigh her interest in the long-term survival of her community. In short, Hardin’s conclusion was predetermined by his assumptions. Hardin didn’t describe the behavior of herdsmen in pre-capitalist farming communities — he described the behavior of capitalists operating in an already capitalist economy. Contrary to Hardin’s claims, a community that shares forests and fields has a strong incentive to protect them, even if that means not maximizing current production, because those resources will be essential to the community’s survival for the long term. As Karl Marx articulated, nature requires long cycles of birth, development and regeneration, whereas capitalism requires short-term returns. Where land use affects an ecosystem, internalization of the relevant externality is likely to require consolidation of the entire ecosystem in a single owner. But, ecosystems are not easily defined or delineated. They consist of vast networks of connections and dependencies between species, habitats, and geological formations. Imagine that one particular species of grass provided the most efficient food for cattle on the pasture, so that planting one's entire plot with that grass would support the biggest herd. If the entire commons is planted with this one species, the result will be an ecologically fragile monoculture, more susceptible to diseases than the ecosystem would be if one-tenth of the pasture were planted with a mix of native grasses. Under these circumstances, simply dividing the commons into private property wouldn’t solve the tragedy. All would be better off if each herder planted one-tenth of her plot in native plants, but without assurance that others will do the same, no one herder will have an incentive to sacrifice her overall yield. Here the commons has been privatized, but tragedy persists. A crucial component of the market solution to the tragedy of the commons is that all those affected by the externality be involved in the Coasian negotiation, which outside a single pasture, simply doesn’t happen.

Stripped of excess verbiage, Hardin’s essay asserts that human beings are helpless prisoners of biology and the market and that unless restrained, we will inevitably destroy our communities and environment for profit. I sincerely believe that we are neither trapped in inexorable tragedies nor free of moral responsibility. What Hardin had portrayed as a tragedy was, in fact, more like a comedy. While its human participants might be foolish or mistaken, they are rarely evil. Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real commons: self-regulation by the communities involved. Despite evidence that in the real world, small farmers, fishers and others have created their own institutions for preserving resources and ensuring that the commons community survived through good years and bad, many are still all too willing to believe the worst of their fellow humans – to the detriment of conservation efforts worldwide. Those assumptions, whether conscious or unconscious, close off an entire universe of alternatives.

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