Tragedy of the Commons
Recently, a story has been making the rounds about a college professor, Dr. Dylan Selterman, who teaches in the Johns Hopkins University Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. In a recent class, he used a technique previously used by one of his instructors, Steve Drigotas.
It was time for the final exam, and everyone in the Intro to Psychology class was stressed. All 250 of them. Dr. Selterman offered the students a way to skip the final exam and still receive a 95% grade in the class, but only if the entire class voted unanimously to accept the offer.
You’d think that everyone would want the easy A for a grade, but 20 people out of the 250 voted against this. When asked why they voted against this, all 20 people indicated they didn’t want someone else to get the same grade as them. This is also likely why there is so much pushback against forgiving student loans or giving students free college tuition in the U.S., even though it would cause more students to attend college and raise the collective level of intelligence in our country.
Thus is born the tragedy of the commons. First proposed in a pamphlet in 1833 by a mathematical amateur named William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852), the tragedy of the commons can best be understood by considering the world as finite, and yet we still act as a species to obtain the maximum good for each person. Imagine a pasture (the commons) where cattle may graze. Each owner will seek to maximize their gain, ignoring the compounding of this mindset on the commons. Eventually, there will be no food for the cattle and all will suffer. Because the optimal situation is less than the maximum capacity, it stands to reason that humans must initiate a process to reduce the maximum or suffer the consequences.
“[The tragedy of the commons is] basically a dilemma between doing what’s good for you as an individual versus doing what’s best for the group.” - Dr. Dylan Selterman
This concept also raises again when dealing with pollution and climate change. The cost of treating something upstream is greater than the cost of ignoring it and letting it flow downstream. This concept applies to everyone universally if we behave as rational individuals in a free enterprise, but the outcome is necessary dire.
The solution appears to be simply one of conscience. However, people vary. What is objectionable to one is not to another. And to legislate that everyone must demonstrate considerate behavior means we must prescribe the morality of all acts in advance - an impossible task.
The real solution is something quite different: low population density. With every new person added to the planet, someone else’s liberty is infringed. Scholars look at the capacity of the Earth to feed all of the inhabitants, but very little thought is given to the capacity of humans to act in the planet’s best interest. We now know they will not, hence the tragedy of the commons.
“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.” - Garrett Hardin, 1968
Photo provided curtesy of A.Savin, Wikipedia