Reading for my economics coursework and exam, I have found a couple of texts making interesting points:
Much of the economic debate around public goods assumes there is a “tragedy of the commons”: If there is some resource everybody can use, nobody will have an incentive to preserve it, it will invariably be overexploited and collapse. Such situations do certainly occur unsurprisingly in a profit-driven economy – but they do not always occur when they could. Standard theory fails to explain or even admit this, Elinor Ostrom makes an attempt to explore it:
Some scholarly articles about the “tradegy of the commons” recommend that “the state” control most natural resources to prevent their destruction, others recommend that privatizing those resources will solve the problem. What one can observe in the world, however, is that neither the state nor the market is uniformly successful in enabling individuals to sustain long-term, productive use of natural resource systems. Futher, communities of individuals have relied on institutions resembling neither the state nor the market to govern some resource systems with reasonable degrees of success over long periods of time.
Last year’s noble laureate Ostrom has researched those institutions for decades and presents some of the results in her book “Governing the Commons”. She sharply criticises the widespread application of the “tragedy of the commons” and “prisoners dilemma”-idea as “use of models as metaphors”. That is, some apparent similarities between those models and natural settings are used to convey the idea that the models are accurate representations of those settings – an assumption that is hardly ever critically investigated. Where this happens, it is often found to be wrong.
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