Being common is tragic, but the tragedy of the commons is still true

Ostrom's work more than simply disproving Hardin

A matter of scale

Her other great empirical finding was that scale matters here. These systems can work up to 2,000, perhaps 3,000 people. But once you start to get to groups of 10,000, 100,000, people the free rider temptation becomes too great and the social pressures that hold such voluntary schemes together become too weak. All of which has great practical world meaning.

For example, inshore fishing rights, where there might be some 20-50 people attempting to exploit the stock, might well be left to that voluntary cooperation for their management. But the open oceans, the High Seas, where tens of thousands from right around the world can just hoover the stuff up, needs one of the other two solutions, private property or government regulation.

I would prefer the private property solution and not just because I'm like that. One fascinating little finding is that the most profitable stock levels for a fishery are well in excess of the lower limits to sustainable populations. We would thus expect profit motivated owners to allow populations to rise considerably above what setting sustainable limits to catches would produce.

Similarly, we can look at various political problems about access to resources: say, the argument over charity or government benefits as a method of solving some problem or other. Something that needs the coordination of a few hundred people, a couple of thousand tops, might well be best addressed by charity.

Say, just as a trivial example, training guide dogs for the blind. Voluntary cooperation could well manage that just fine. Running the lifeboats is similarly (and to the mystification of other nations) in the UK left to charity. But while the fundraising is national that also really works because the crews are coming from small communities and are welded together socially.

On the other hand, paying for two million unemployed people just isn't something that can be done on a national level by those voluntary means. And private ownership of people is rather frowned upon these days so it's going to be the government route.

Ostrom didn't prove that the Tragedy of the Commons isn't a real problem. And neither she nor Hardin were originally addressing common farming grounds, rather than using them as an example of the larger underlying point.

As a purely personal opinion I think that Ostrom's great insight was to see that, if the Tragedy really was inevitable as Hardin said, absent his two solutions, then how come there were commons that didn't have either but still survived, still worked? If, say, Mongolian shepherds manage not to denude the steppes, and they haven't for 5,000 years or so now, then what management system are they using then? The answer being that voluntary cooperation that she pointed to.

That is, there's a third viable solution. Or, more accurately, there are three potentially viable solutions to commons problems, which one we use depending upon the specifics of the case before us. Small problems might be solved by voluntary cooperation, problems in small groups of people that is.

As Ronald Coase pointed out about pollution, sometimes that private property, contractual relationship stuff can work (his example was the dumping of mining spoils out West I think). But equally there are other problems, say CO2 emissions, where neither of those two solutions will work: thus government is needed to solve it.

Or, the TL:DR version: Ostrom didn't disprove the Tragedy of the Commons: she refined our understanding of it and added another potential solution to our armoury. ®