The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.
— Whitehead (1948) via Hardin (1968)
One of the greatest challenges in designing a cooperative environment is dealing with the potential for free-riding and abuse of shared resources. When dinner needs to be made but one member of the group will not participate everyone suffers, even those who contribute fully. Often, someone else or the rest of the group will step up and do the job of the free-rider, who has then achieved their objective. But what is the appropriate consequence? The social opprobrium of their peers is enough for some, others though seem unfazed.
Overuse of resources is a similar problem, which economists refer to as the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968). When the extra-large bag of M&M’s is full, everyone can grab as many as they desire and everyone is happy. When resources are scarce, however, everyone grabbing is a recipe for disaster. Scarce resources need to be rationed in a way that everyone views as fair. Yet the rational behavior of the individual is to try to maximize their utility by taking as many as they need, regardless of the desires of everyone else, and especially if they’re first in line and no-one else is counting.
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. … The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.
— Hardin (1968)
The market solution to the commons problems is to make them not commons. This is usually done by assigning property rights to the previously common resource and allowing the owners to trade. This puts a price on what was once a “free” resource. Of course the price was always there; someone or someones had to go without when the M&M’s ran out (resource depletion). Unfortunately this is particularly difficult when you dealing with a non-currency economy, though I’m sure it could be done.
Reading through Hardin’s original Tragedy of the Commons article it seem that if the embarrassment of violating social norms is insufficient incentive for temperance then some sort of mutually agreed form of coercion is necessary. Interestingly, Hardin was arguing for population control, but the point still stands.
We’re due to have the small groups discuss how the worked together over the last cycle so we’ll see how that goes, but I think we’ll have to discuss the issue of the commons as a whole group when we next have our discussion of classroom issues. I’d like to raise the point that what happens in the classroom is a microcosm of larger society and get in a little environmental economics at the same time.
Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.
— Hardin (1968)