Tragedy of the Commons

[grip at netcom.com]

On Thu, 12 Dec 1996, Steelhead wrote :

> 
> Garrett Hardin, like his intellectual compatriots Edward Teller, Paul
> Ehrlich and Freeman Dyson, haunts the SF Bay Area like some kind of mutant
> laboratory rat...well a lab rat hobbling along on that certain type of
> metallic crutches that attach themselves to the forearms. 

My, my. I don't think Steely likes him. Didn't know he'd moved up here 
from Santa Barbara. 

> He's an
> evolutionary ecologist, with a rather grim emphasis on population and
> genetics (cf., The Nazi Doctors for a sampling of some of Mr. Hardin's
> hero). Moreover, like many in this discipline, he is an unrepentant
> Malthusian 

tsk - tsk, name calling. Guilt by association. A Nazi sympathizer. Well 
you never know about population biologists, or scientists in general.
No doubt Hardin secretly admired Hitler...
(Thomas Malthus 1766-1834, English economist, racist, and bane
> of the Irish, who like many elites of his--and our--time was obsessed with
> the coital and reproductive practices of the lower classes, fearing, quite
> rightly, that their growing masses might one day wake up and topple the
> landed gentry and aristocracy. The solution: population control through
> forced starvation.), who believes we ought to be offering, for example,
> Haitian women a trade of food and clothing in exchange for Norplant
> implants or tubal ligations. He has also sidled forth his opinion that
> retroactive abortions (ie., infanticide) might not be inhumane in certain
> "overpopulated" regions of the world, such as Ghana or Zaire
> or--presumably--South Central LA. A shot of sodium pen or brick to the
> infant skull might be much more humane, Hardin argues, than a life of
> starvation or the new roster of diseases, such as AIDS or the ebola and
> Marburg viruses. 

> In reality, of course, Hardin hardly gives a hoot whether
> these unfortunate people die of state-sanctioned murder, starvation, or
> bloody virsuses...as long as they die young, before they consume too many
> resources that would be more profitably used by western elites.

Ahhh, Steely the Shadow who knows what evil lurks in the heart of at 
least one man...

> Herr Doktor Hardin made his mark on humanity back in 1968 with an article
> in Science magazine titled the Tragedy of the Commons. It was fairly dense,
> loaded with dozens of equations, and synapse-numbing prose, but the article
> set the scientific world a-twitter as no piece had since CP Snow's essay on
> Two Cultures. 

Now I see part of the problem. Steely thinks zero is the same as dozens. 
Looking carefully at the 13 pages of the essay, I could find no equations 
whatsoever. But then maybe my synapses were so numbed I just missed them.
 
> Finally, after a thirty year hiatus it was safe to talk about
> eugenics again--though in a highly coded language. 

Steely the cryptologist to the rescue...

> Hardin's thesis was
> quite simple, really. It goes like this. Any commonly-held resource, such
> as a pasture, a forest, or a water supply, will eventually be exhausted
> because all of the users of the resource have an incentive to maximum their
> use. Since none of the users are immediately threatened by the degradation
> of the resource, there is no incentive to restrain consumption. Factor in
> spiralling populations and the natural resources of the planet are doomed.
> This is the tragedy of the commons.

This was coded???? I thought he spelled it out in plain English.
> 
> As his metaphor for explicating this theory, Hardin choose to examine the
> enclosure movement in England that accompanied the breakdown of the
> manorial system and the dislocation of the serfs and tenanted peasants who
> had grazed livestock on common lands. The formerly fuedal lands were
> privatized and fenced. The processed reached its peak in the late 17th
> century. Hardin argues that the enclosure movement saved English grazing
> lands from ultimate overuse. But then he turns his argument to look at the
> fate of the few enclosed common grazing lands, where the huddled peasants
> tried to graze their sheep and cattle, which of course ended up being
> rapidly depleted. 

Must have been another book. Couldn't find any reference to "the 
enclosure movement" although he does argue thusly about a 
hypothetical common pasture. A herdsman (A sexist to boot!!!) looks 
at the value of adding another animal to the pasture. A plus for him. 
(Harden used the + sign, perhaps this is the source of one of the dozens 
of equations in Steely's mind.) The plus is only for him and his family. 
There is a minus, each animal does use up part of the resource. But that 
part is spread out over all the herdsmen using the pasture so his part of 
the minus is fractional. Clearly it's to his advantage to add another cow.
Thus the pasture becomes grazed out and will support only a fraction of 
the animals it would before.

> Another tragedy of the commons. Then Hardin suggests that
> the entire planet is a commons that is being destroyed by "the freedom to
> breed." Hardin says: "Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush,
> each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in freedom
> of the commons. Freedom of the commons brings ruin to all." 

Good job, Steely. You got that one right.

> Hardin's
> solutions: enforced sterilization, mandatory abortions, and infanticide.

I've not read all that Hardin has written, but the above is not in his essay.
But there is no doubt that he would seriously consider such things. One 
needs to read the essay to see why.


> The modern environmental movement and leading feminists (ie, the
> single-issue, abortion obsessed wing) made Hardin a hero. Ironically,
> Hardin also became a shining star of the right wing free market types. The
> marketeers argue--with Hardin's endorsement--

I doubt this. The idea of the commons extends much further than 
resources. And Hardin is not so stupid or naive to believe that a young 
CEO, out to make big bucks for himself, (that old + again) regardless of 
the minuses spread out all over the world, would behave any differently 
from the herdsman. 

> that one solution to the
> problem of the commons is to abolish all commonly held resources through
> privitization. Private property rights, people like FV Hayek and John Baden
> argue, create an incentive for owners not to irreparably destroy their own
> resources. This argument has been advanced to rationalize privatized
> ownership of the national parks, rivers, and, oddly enough, even the air.


Guilt by association again. Someone misuses Hardin's carefully argued 
points in an essay and now it becomes Hardin's fault. Nonsense.

> Hardin turned this chilling nonsense into a weird SF book called, I think,
> Spaceship Earth: New Ethics for Survival. 

Close. Exploring New Ethics for Survival/The Voyage of the Spaceship 
Beagle. (Viking Press, 1972) 

> His spaceship--not dramatically
> different from some of Blicero's more morbid fantasies--was named the
> Beagle. It was assigned to many biology classes back in the mid-70s.
> 
> Pynchon must have read this and must he have read it with revulsion. The
> dangers of Hardin's theories pervade both GR and VL. Two years ago, Ken
> Silverstein and I reported that in the course of his nefarious research
> Hardin had accepted large grants from two unsavory foundations: the Laurel
> Fund and the Pioneer Fund. These foundations are loaded with millions
> courtesey of the wacko branch of the Mellon Family. These two foundations,
> however, had also funded eugenics research projects in the past and had
> actually employed former Nazi scientists brought to the US on the so-called
> "rat-line."  Hardin was later forced to renounce the founding.

Interesting. News to me. I wonder who "forced" him to renounce the 
funding?

> What does all this have to do with the VV, which has recently been handed
> out for free in the NYC area? Simple. Since the paper is now free, it has
> became a kind of literary commons that will--if you follow Hardinian
> logic--ultimately degenerate into a smear of meaningless utterances.

Hmmm. Isn't that exactly what people were saying????

grip