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There is just one significant flaw in the tragedy [of the commons] parable. It does not accurately describe a commons. Hardin's fictional scenario sets forth a system that has no boundaries around the pasture, no rules for managing it, no punishments for overuse and no distinct community of users. But that is not a commons. ... A commons requires that there be a community willing to act as a conscientious steward of a resource
His point was not that commons don't work, but that they need effective regulation to avoid the titular problem. These days, following Ostrom, we fold that regulation into what a commons *is*, but this definition wasn't in widespread use when Hardin wrote the essay in the 1960s.
Hardin may not have been describing a historically-accurate Commons. What he was describing though was a view towards (usually corporate / commercial) exploitation of common resources, without adequate regulation. Privatised profits, socialised costs. That is what he opposed.
Virtually all the present-day rewriting of his TotC essay is actually arguing for precisely what he was calling for, whilst trying to throw up a disagreement-which-doesn't-actually-exist based on semantics and misrepresentations.
I read much of Hardin's works, saw him lecture a few times, and even met with him once. I'm not entirely certain of the present take on his immigration stance --- much of that seem either based on 1) associations with others, 2) his later writings (post 1990 or so), and a pretty revisionist take on his earlier (1960s -- 1990) writings. That critique does not seem to have appeared at any point up to the 1990s, or even during his life so far as I'm aware, though I'll grant that views, perspectives, and sensibilities have changed tremendously, my own included.
I do believe that there are people and organisations Hardin was affiliated with which did eventually emerge as racist and anti-immigrant. Again. there were strong shifts in viewpoints and specific statements over time.
But as of the 1968 essay itself ... I think you'd be hard-pressed to make the case.
He writes that "the world's resources are inequitably distributed" and hints at the fact that developed nations stole a lot of them, but insists that "We cannot remake the past", his excuse being that poor people reproduce too quickly.
But we know that fertility reduces as income increases, both at individual levels and national levels. US fertility decreased as wealth increased.
So if we want to encourage India and China to reduce population growth, the logical way to do it is to raise their standard of living. But his solution is to hoard the resources, keep 'em poor, and watch 'em die.
He concludes that we need to control immigration "if we wish to save at least some parts of the world from environmental ruin." But this ignores that it's the rich nations driving our environmental crisis, not the poor ones.
Resources and carrying capacity are ultimately finite.
That to me is his core and foundational premise.
I'm revisiting his essays (I've not read them since the late 1980s / early 1990s for the most part). There are a few further assumptions which may well be questionable:
Resource distribution is inequitable: valid
We can't rewrite the past: arguable, though from a pragmatic basis ... there's some truth to this. Look at the rather simpler question of, say, progressive and equitable taxation.
That population is not a global problem, but on of local ecosystems and support. This is another key point on which much of his arguments hinge, and it may well be incorrect, as humans overloading carrying capacity does not contain itself in many regards: CO2 emissions, regional unrest, disease, financial dislocations, disrupting globalised trade and commerce (on which many livelihoods, and …
Resources and carrying capacity are ultimately finite.
That to me is his core and foundational premise.
I'm revisiting his essays (I've not read them since the late 1980s / early 1990s for the most part). There are a few further assumptions which may well be questionable:
Resource distribution is inequitable: valid
We can't rewrite the past: arguable, though from a pragmatic basis ... there's some truth to this. Look at the rather simpler question of, say, progressive and equitable taxation.
That population is not a global problem, but on of local ecosystems and support. This is another key point on which much of his arguments hinge, and it may well be incorrect, as humans overloading carrying capacity does not contain itself in many regards: CO2 emissions, regional unrest, disease, financial dislocations, disrupting globalised trade and commerce (on which many livelihoods, and lives, depend), etc.
That permitting emigration as an escape valve doesn't address the more core problems. You could argue that this, like the premise of rewriting history, doesn't pass the pragmatics test. Where pushed to their limits, humans have throughout all our anthropological history migrated to greener pastures and greater opportunities. That this doesn't solve the underlying problems is secondary to the fact that preventing emigration is itself infeasible on any number of grounds from practical to military to political to moral.
That the demographic transition doesn't work. I'm concerned myself that it's wishful thinking, but it does seem to have at least some legs.
@mathew There's another buried assumption in his argument as well, and it's one I don't think he explicitly states.
It's the question of exponential growth --- growth at some constant percentage rate. That will result in tremendous growth over time, and you can approximate the doubling time with 70/r, where r is the periodic percentage growth. So 2% growth rate -> doubling in 35 periods, 10% -> doubling in 7 periods, 35% -> 2 periods. Roughly.
Population growth is expressed as an annual percentage rate. It's expoential.
Wealth differentials are a constant. So if the wealthy countries of the world are on balance 10x richer than the poorest, that's about 3.3 doubling periods. If they're 100x richer, it's about 6.6 periods. A small difference in relative population growth makes up for a huge difference in relative wealth.
But we also live in a world in which net GDP is …
@mathew There's another buried assumption in his argument as well, and it's one I don't think he explicitly states.
It's the question of exponential growth --- growth at some constant percentage rate. That will result in tremendous growth over time, and you can approximate the doubling time with 70/r, where r is the periodic percentage growth. So 2% growth rate -> doubling in 35 periods, 10% -> doubling in 7 periods, 35% -> 2 periods. Roughly.
Population growth is expressed as an annual percentage rate. It's expoential.
Wealth differentials are a constant. So if the wealthy countries of the world are on balance 10x richer than the poorest, that's about 3.3 doubling periods. If they're 100x richer, it's about 6.6 periods. A small difference in relative population growth makes up for a huge difference in relative wealth.
But we also live in a world in which net GDP is increasing, and is based on natural resource consumption. So we're not trading off an exponential increase against a constant difference, but two different exponential curves.
Again, that's not a factor I've seen Hardin include in his arguments, and it would seem to be a key weakness.
That said ...
Hardin's core argument is based on biological and ecological carrying capacity, and the premise of limits. That's a worldview which puts him at odds with the most ideological partisans on both sides of the political spectrum. Look up his entry at Conservopedia, for example, and his advocacy of birth control and abortion are given primacy. It seems to me largely that his views aren't ideologically driven, that his scientific approach is falsifiable and may be wrong, and that there are elements of his argument which can be picked out by either side of the political spectrum to either support or villanize him. More often the latter.
Again: I could be wrong, but this remains my overall perception.
