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Course: Wireless Philosophy > Unit 3
Lesson 2: Political- Political: Original Position
- Political: Race and the Carceral State
- Political: Race and Racist Institutions
- Political: Government and Marriage (Government's Role)
- Political: The Prisoner's Dilemma
- Political: Tragedy of the Commons
- Political: Collective Action Problems
- Political: What are Public Goods?
- Political: Government and Marriage (Minimal Marriage)
- Political: Government and Marriage (Friends with Legal Benefits)
- Political: Government and Marriage (Polyamory)
- Political: Government and Marriage (Just Care)
- Political: Why Vote? Reasons to Vote
- Political: Should We Have Children?
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Political: Tragedy of the Commons
In this video, Professor Jonathan Anomaly discusses commons tragedies, which are defined as a situation in which the benefits of an action are borne by the individual while the costs are shared by all members of a group.
Speaker: Dr. Jonathan Anomaly, Lecturer/Research Assistant Professor, Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Speaker: Dr. Jonathan Anomaly, Lecturer/Research Assistant Professor, Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Want to join the conversation?
- How do some commons still be able to solve community problems(2 votes)
- If we agree that driving the bird to extinction is not beneficial to anyone, then it is not rational for any single person to overhunt, and their cost is not really less than gain. It is perhaps the problem of time-scale - the shorter one gives misleading incentives, and it might still be longer than one human lifetime, so the right incentives are ignored by individual generations.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(intro music) Hi! My name is Jonny Anomaly, and I teach
at Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill. Today, I'm gonna talk about the
Tragedy of the Commons. Let's start with an example. When Polynesians arrived in Hawaii over a thousand years ago, they
encountered a flightless bird which archaeologists now call "moa-nalo," the Hawaiian words for "lost bird." Because the birds had no natural
predators, they lost the capacity to fly and were easy prey for hungry Hawaiians. All Hawaiians would be better off preserving enough birds to replenish
the natural stock of food, but since the birds were an unowned
resource, each Hawaiian had a strong incentive to eat the
bird into extinction, and that's exactly what they did. Commons tragedies occur when resources
are either unowned or commonly owned, and when the benefits of
use go to each person while the costs are shared
by everyone in a group. To make the previous example precise, suppose there are twenty Hawaiians. Each Hawaiian gains five utility points
from killing and eating a bird, while all Hawaiians as a
group lose ten utility points every time another bird bites the dust. Since my fraction of the collective
loss to twenty people is only half a utility point,
but I gain five points, I get four and a half points, on
net, by killing endangered bird that I would prefer to preserve. The most interesting thing about commons tragedies is that, like the
prisoner's dilemmas, they show that it can be fully rational
for each member of a group to act in a way that leaves everyone in the group worse off than they
would be if they could cooperate. Notice that common strategies,
like prisoner's dilemmas don't necessarily arise
because of self-interest. I may hunt an endangered species so that I can feed my family and friends
or donate the meat to some other cause that I consider worth promoting. So, how do we avoid commons strategies? The most common solution is property
rights, which lead individual owners to internalize both the
benefits and the costs of their use a scarce resource. John Locke and David Hume saw this is a crucial function of property rights. Property rights can be used to preserve
scarce resources, like endangered species. But they can also be a tool for
increasing social welfare by incentivizing the production
of new and better resources. Since most productivity gains come
from ideas for transforming existing resources into new products, intellectual property is an especially important form of
private property rights. It is easy to see how ownership over
external objects would induce owners to preserve and
improve natural resources. But intellectual property, ownership
over ideas, is a bit more subtle. While there's quite a bit a controversy about how efficient particular systems
of intellectual property are, many economists believe that without
allowing people to own ideas, they would have less incentive to conduct
costly research and development campaigns to create new medicines, new kinds of
computers, or new genres of music. All of these ideas create social value. But without the right to take exclusive ownership over the ideas,
at least for a while inventors would not be able
to recoup the time and money they spent coming up with them. Still, private property is not a panacea. Property rights are costly to enforce, and they
may stymie innovation in certain domains. Consider the problem of patent trolls, people
who make their living buying patents with no intention of using them. Patent trolls sue companies that use technologies which resemble
the patents they've purchased. In many cases, companies find it cheaper
to pay off the patent trolls than to wage a costly court battle against them. This leads to a misallocation of resources
and rewards people who make money without producing any real value. Property rights have to be
enforceable to work well. Enforcement is costly, since it requires
monitoring violations, prosecuting violators, and settling disputes. Some countries are too poor to be able to monitor property rights effectively,
and others are too corrupt. In these cases, Elinor Ostrom has shown that local commons tragedies, like
overfishing a lake or overgrazing cows on a common pasture, can sometimes
still be solved by communities. In place of formal property
rights and court adjudication, members of small communities often rely
on social norms that determine how property can be acquired,
used, and traded. People who violate local property norms
are ostracized, or excluded from enjoying important social benefits. In these cases, our concern
for a good reputation and for the benefits of living in a community can solve commons tragedies, but only when monitoring
social norms is cheap and group cohesion is strong. I'd like to end with a challenge for you. Think about a commons trategy witnessed in the last month, and try to
figure out why it hasn't already been solved through social norms
or through legal sanctions. Subtitles by the Amara.org community