The current human population is about 7.5 billion (when I was a kid, it was more like 5 billion). Right now, the population is doubling about once every 64 years. If it continues to double at that rate, and humans don’t colonize other worlds, then you can calculate that, less than 3000 years from now, the entire earth, all the way down to the core, will be made of human flesh.
I still think the notion has merit.
I, too, can get persnickety about misconceptions. The slow-heated boiled frogs experiment dealt with frogs with their brains removed. Live frogs are difficult to keep in the pot in the first place, leaping out at whim unless trapped in the pot. If trapped, they get more active as the heat rises, so the metaphor doesn’t reflect reality.
An ostrich was observed hiding its head in a bush and acting as if it believed it was fully concealed. Ostriches do stick their heads into the ground anyway, to forage for food like worms and burrowing bugs.
William Forster Lloyd may have had some misconceptions regarding the causes of and mitigations for the tragedy of the commons, but it remains a valid concept, as there are many limited resources that are over-exploited by human society, some of which present a great filter we will have to navigate. (That is to say, if they don’t drive us to outright extinction they will certainly cripple the sustainability of civilization enough to hobble our future potential, say for space exploration and colonization.)
While we can debate the consistency with which common resources are tragedized, it remains a useful metaphor, and there are plenty of cases in which a common shared resource gets depleted due to bad-faith in sharing negotiations and over exploitation. The depletion of wild cod in the Atlantic, for example, came due to overfishing by large industrial fishing interests and poaching within wildlife reserves in which no fishing was supposed to be allowed.
The classic range wars on the US plains came from a conflict between cattle ranchers and sheep ranchers (sheep eat the whole plant, including the root, so vert has to be replanted) When sheep didn’t keep to designated territories due to failure of planting, the cattle rangers determined the sheep ranchers couldn’t be trusted with their word, and violence prevailed.
Then there’s the US economy, in which the ownership class captured the government (intended to serve the public) so they could strip away social safety nets, education and eventually, sustenance wages, because companies who make profits in the short term can overwhelm, close-out and buy-out competing businesses who try to preserve profits in the long term. Curiously, Marx gets into this in Das Kapital and we’re seeing it play out before our very eyes. Also precarity is driving our lumpenproletariat to look for a Mussolini-wannabe strongman to sort all this out (Trump, or whoever, won’t but will capitalize on such promises).
And of course, there’s the rising pollution of the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses that is raising the average temperature of the earth. In the 1970s, meteorologists and climatologists suggested a +2℃ could be globally catastrophic, and risk extinction. Then in the aughts and 2010s, politicians suggested we could survive +3℃ or +4℃ and now it seems that +1.5℃ is driving depletion of the food machine that keeps us fed and supplies of safe drinking water, and if we don’t stop our emissions, we’re headed right into a food crisis. However we’re churning out more pollution than ever.
So you can wish the phenomenon away, but given this is also how cartels break (price-fixing rackets eventually collapse, as bad-faith players arrange for secret deals to undersell their rivals), we know it is often a functional phenomenon that isn’t being adequately mitigated by Ostrom’s (or whoever’s) suggestions.
I believe you in that there are methods to assure common resources can be preserved. But there are critical situations in which we will have to do something we’re not doing (whether those methods or not) or we’ll suffer the consequences of depleting those resources, and that is going to suck for all of us.
In the meantime, I’m still going to use tragedy of the commons as a metaphor, at least so long as I continue to survive those tragedies, which I expect will not be for too long.
The tragedy of the Commons though is not the idea that sometimes Commons are mismanaged. It is an economic theory that says Commons inevitably are mismanaged as simple self interest causes people to “rationally” renege on any collective agreements. Therefore, so it goes, we need to sell everything for only by appealing to base, short-term, greed will things flourish as private property encourages people to make their land more productive.
This is deeply flawed, as Elenore demonstrated time and time again. By repeating this notion you spread the sort of flawed thinking uses to justify the neoliberal ideology that has so poisoned the world.
There is no such rule of Commons mismanagement, like all things systems can break but it is not inevitable or even particularly likely except under other pressures. Indeed commons are often extremely resilient, and so we should not overemphasise times when they fail.
The tragedy of the commons is a metaphoric label for a concept that is widely discussed, and criticised, in economics, ecology and other sciences. According to the concept, should many people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource such as a pasture, they will tend to overuse it and may end up destroying its value altogether. Even if some users exercised voluntary restraint, the other users would merely supplant them, the predictable result a tragedy for all. – Wikipedia
So no, it TotC is the concept of a descriptive problem, for which many people (all the way back to Aristotle) might have suggested prescriptions, but TotC does not include those prescriptions, rather a recurring pattern of negative consequences due to natural human behavior.
In classical capitalist economics, the common solution is strictly-enforced regulation by a public serving government (which itself is susceptible to regulatory capture, a particular irony since I was in Economics 101 when Reagan was in office stripping away the government power to regulate). And this phenomenon is highlighted by Karl Marx in Das Kapital so even when we can poke at a given attempt to fix the TotC problem, the solution fails and the problem persists, and may well be humanity’s last great filter.