In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin explored this social dilemma in his article "The Tragedy of the Commons", published in the journal Science. Garrett Hardin's article The Tragedy of the Commons If all herders made this individually rational economic decision, the common could be depleted or even destroyed, to the detriment of all. For each additional animal, a herder could receive additional benefits, while the whole group shared the resulting damage to the commons.
He postulated that if a herder put more than his allotted number of cattle on the common, overgrazing could result. This was the situation of cattle herders sharing a common parcel of land on which they were each entitled to let their cows graze, as was the custom in English villages. In 1833, the English economist William Forster Lloyd published a pamphlet which included a hypothetical example of over-use of a common resource. Lloyd used shared grazing of common land as an illustration of where abuse of rights could occur. From an ecological point of view, the tragedy of the commons is typically applied to discussions of sustainable economic development that preserves and protects the environment. Specifically in Anglo-Saxon legal contexts, it refers to assets that are jointly held and access to which is regulated by formal rules or social structures. In modern contexts such as economics, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, game theory, politics, taxation and sociology, "commons" are considered any common-access resource to which access is unregulated, such as natural assets or property shared by a group/organisation. In response to such discussions, Hardin revised his thesis in 1991 to the "tragedy of the (unmanaged) commons". Elinor Ostrom (2009 Nobel Prize in Economics Science winner) shared examples of small communities coordinating to share common resources without expending them without falling back on the rule of law to enforce these arrangements, while economist and academic Dieter Helm commented that these examples were unrepresentative of broader societal tendencies, stating that if such covenants were typical, " destruction of nature would have not occurred". Whilst cited extensively, the paper also continues to attract criticism from anthropologists and historians. In 1968 ecologist Garrett Hardin published in Science the essay "tragedy of the commons", in which he stated that commonly used land is destined for ruin unless its capacity is well above its number of users.
Provided as a hypothetical example, some have claimed that real-world common pastureland did not befall this fate. While it may appear economically rational to an individual to over-consume in this context as doing so bears no immediate personal cost, such common land became barren and even permanently ruined where sufficient numbers of herders engaged in such activity. Lloyd supposed that, should common land parcels shared between cattle herders in Great Britain and Ireland (known as " the commons" in Anglo-Saxon Law) come to ruin, this should be attributed to those herders that allowed more than their allocated quota of cattle to graze on them. Men pay most attention to what is their own: they care less for what is common." The foundation for scholarly discussion of the topic however came in an 1833 essay by British economist William Forster Lloyd. Aristotle wrote that "That which is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care. The concept of unrestricted-access resources becoming spent, where personal use does not incur personal expense, has been discussed for millennia. If users of such resources act to maximise their self-interest and do not coordinate with others to maximise the overall common good, exhaustion and even permanent destruction of the resource may result, if the number of the users and the amount they demand exceeds what is available. The tragedy of the commons is a phenomenon described in economics and ecology in which common resources, to which access is not regulated by formal rules or fees /taxes levied based on individual use, tend to become depleted.
0 kommentar(er)
