The Tragedy of the Commons

James Fallows of The Atlantic is a favorite writer of mine.  I first noticed him when he came out with his book More Like Us in the 80's regarding the Japan Inc. competitive scare.  Fallows' argument was that to compete with the Japanese globally America should act more like America and not try to be like Japan.  He was spot on and caught my eye as an up and coming public intellectual and superb big picture guy.

So I was a little surprised to see in a recent blog of his that he seemed to not quite understand his own argument about the workings of carbon credits -- until I realized Fallows is on book leave and hosting guest bloggers on his site.  Even though the guest blog, The Howling Wilderness of Carbon Credits, is slightly off tilt in its conclusion, I enjoyed running into the seminal essay there on The Tragedy of the Commons by environmentalist Garrett Hardin from Science in 1968.

As an investment manager in the 80's and 90's, I enjoyed the resurgence of free market policies and the enormous bull market they helped create.  I became a big fan of Adam Smith's "invisible hand," the idea, as Hardin explains, "that an individual who "intends only his own gain," is, as it were, "led by an invisible hand to promote…the public interest." It's a complex concept stemming from Smith's 1759 work TheTheory of Moral Sentiments.  I was pretty sure back then that the invisible hand could do just about anything better than government could.  But, as Hardin explains, that hand reaches a door it cannot open by itself when it comes to "the tragedy of the commons."

The concept of the "The Tragedy of the Commons" underlies most of the economic and environmental policy regarding public land management.   I'm working on a longer piece for torreyhouse.com  on the subject but wanted to get it introduced in this blog.  Hardin's essay was the intellectual stimulus behind much of the productive work of the early environmental movement and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.  There is still more room for implementation of those ideas today on the Colorado Plateau. More coming up . . .