Why Does Everyone Take Too Much? Costs Shared, Benefits Kept

Consider a pasture open to any herder. Adding one more animal gives that herder the full value of the animal, while the cost, which is slightly worse grazing for everyone, is divided among all users. The arithmetic therefore favours adding animals for every individual, and it does so no matter how many are already there, so the pasture is overgrazed and everyone ends up worse off than if all had restrained themselves. The essential feature is a split between who receives the benefit of an action and who bears its cost, and that split appears wherever a resource is depletable, valuable and not effectively controlled by anybody.

The same arrangement recurs across problems that look unrelated:

• •Fisheries, where each boat gains its catch and all share the depletion
• •Groundwater, where each pump gains water and all share the falling level
• •Atmospheric emissions, the largest example there is
• •Antibiotic effectiveness, depleted by each individual use
• •Traffic congestion, where each vehicle gains passage and adds delay for everyone
• •Shared office kitchens, which is the domestic version everybody recognises

Garrett Hardin's article of 1968 gave the idea its name and popularity, and what it argued is worth stating accurately because it is frequently misrepresented in both directions. He argued that such situations have no technical solution, meaning no improvement in technique avoids the underlying arithmetic, and that the remedy must be what he called mutual coercion mutually agreed upon, meaning enforced rules that everybody accepts because everybody benefits from the enforcement. He therefore did not conclude that the resource must be privatised, though that is one available form of control, and much of the essay concerned population control in terms that are now widely and correctly criticised.

The pasture in the argument is a device rather than a description, and the real English commons it borrows its name from worked nothing like it. Rights to graze on common land were not open to anybody, being attached to particular holdings and limited in number, so a commoner could put a specified quantity of stock on the land and no more. Manorial courts enforced those limits, fined people who exceeded them and impounded surplus animals. Stinting, meaning the setting of those limits, is recorded across centuries of court rolls. Those arrangements sustained the land for hundreds of years and were ended by enclosure, which was a transfer of the resource to private owners rather than a rescue of a failing system.

The standard reading holds that only private ownership or state control can prevent the outcome, and Elinor Ostrom demonstrated over three decades of fieldwork that this is false. She documented communities managing irrigation systems, forests, fisheries and grazing land sustainably for centuries under locally devised rules that were neither private property nor state administration, and she identified the conditions under which such arrangements work, including clear boundaries, rules matched to local conditions, participation by users in making them, monitoring by the users themselves, graduated penalties, accessible dispute resolution and recognition by outside authorities. She received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for this work, and it reframes the problem as one of institutions rather than of ownership.

Where a user receives the full benefit of taking more and shares the cost with everybody, the arithmetic favours taking more regardless of how depleted the resource already is. Hardin argued for enforced rules mutually agreed rather than for privatisation specifically. Ostrom documented communities managing shared resources sustainably for centuries under locally made rules, and identified the conditions that make such arrangements hold.