FT.com
August 30, 2013 2:15 pm
By Tim Harford
How do people work together at all? A story of two
researchers who attacked the question in very different ways – and with very
different results
While delivering his Nobel lecture in 2007, Al Gore
declared: “Today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution
into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open
sewer.”
It’s a powerful example of the way we tend to argue about
the impact of the human race on the planet that supports us: statistical or
scientific claims combined with a call to action. But the argument misses
something important: if we are to act, then how? Who must do what, who will
benefit and how will all this be agreed and policed?
To ask how people work together to deal with environmental
problems is to ask one of the fundamental questions in social science: how do
people work together at all? This is the story of two researchers who attacked
the question in very different ways – and with very different results.
“The Tragedy of the Commons” is a seminal article about why
some environmental problems are so hard to solve. It was published in the
journal Science in 1968 and its influence was huge. Partly this was the
zeitgeist: the late 1960s and early 1970s was an era of big environmental
legislation and regulation in the US. Yet that cannot be the only reason that
the “tragedy of the commons” has joined a very small group of concepts – such
as the “prisoner’s dilemma” or the “selfish gene” – to have escaped from
academia to take on a life of their own.
The credit must go to Garrett Hardin, the man who coined the
phrase and wrote the article. Hardin was a respected ecologist but “The Tragedy
of the Commons” wasn’t an ecological study. It wasn’t really a piece of
original research at all.
“Nothing he wrote in there had not been said by fisheries
economists,” says Daniel Cole, a professor at Indiana University and a scholar
of Hardin’s research. The key idea, indeed, goes back to Aristotle. Hardin’s
genius was in developing a powerful, succinct story with a memorable name.
The story goes as follows: imagine common pasture, land
owned by everyone and no one, “open to all” for grazing livestock. Now consider
the incentives faced by people bringing animals to feed. Each new cow brought
to the pasture represents pure private profit for the individual herdsman in
question. But the commons cannot sustain an infinite number of cows. At some
stage it will be overgrazed and the ecosystem may fail. That risk is not borne
by any individual, however, but by society as a whole.
With a little mathematical elaboration Hardin showed that
these incentives led inescapably to ecological disaster and the collapse of the
commons. The idea of a communally owned resource might be appealing but it was
ultimately self-defeating.
It was in this context that Hardin deployed the word
“tragedy”. He didn’t use it to suggest that this was sad. He meant that this
was inevitable. Hardin, who argued that much of the natural sciences was
grounded by limits – such as the speed of light or the force of gravity –
quoted the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who wrote that tragedy “resides
in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things”.
. . .
Lin Ostrom never believed in “the remorseless working of
things”. Born Elinor Awan in Los Angeles in 1933, by the time she first saw
Garrett Hardin present his ideas she had already beaten the odds.
Lin was brought up in Depression-era poverty after her
Jewish father left her Protestant mother. She was bullied at school – Beverly
Hills High, of all places – because she was half-Jewish. She divorced her first
husband, Charles Scott, after he discouraged her from pursuing an academic
career, where she suffered discrimination for years. Initially steered away
from mathematics at school, Lin was rejected by the economics programme at
UCLA. She was only – finally – accepted on a PhD in political science after
observing that UCLA’s political science department hadn’t admitted a woman for
40 years.
She persevered and secured her PhD after studying the
management of fresh water in Los Angeles. In the first half of the 20th
century, the city’s water supply had been blighted by competing demands to pump
fresh water for drinking and farming. By the 1940s, however, the conflicting
parties had begun to resolve their differences. In both her PhD, which she
completed in 1965, and subsequent research, Lin showed that such outcomes often
came from private individuals or local associations, who came up with their own
rules and then lobbied the state to enforce them. In the case of the Los
Angeles water producers, they drew up contracts to share their resources and
the city’s water supply stabilised.
It was only when Lin saw Hardin lecture that she realised
that she had been studying the tragedy of the commons all along. It was 1968,
the year that the famous article was published. Garrett Hardin was 53, in the
early stages of a career as a campaigning public intellectual that would last
the rest of his life. Lin was 35, now Ostrom: she had married Vincent Ostrom, a
respected political scientist closer to Hardin’s age, and together they had
moved to Indiana University. Watching Hardin lecture galvanised her. But that
wasn’t because she was convinced he was right. It was because she was convinced
that he was wrong.
In his essay, Hardin explained that there was no way to
manage communal property sustainably. The only solution was to obliterate the
communal aspect. Either the commons could be nationalised and managed by the
state – a Leviathan for the age of environmentalism – or the commons could be
privatised, divided up into little parcels and handed out to individual
farmers, who would then look after their own land responsibly. The theory
behind all this is impeccable and, despite coming from a biologist, highly
appealing to anyone with an economics training.
But Lin Ostrom could see that there must be something wrong
with the logic. Her research on managing water in Los Angeles, watching
hundreds of different actors hammer out their messy yet functional agreements,
provided a powerful counter-example to Hardin. She knew of other examples, too,
in which common resources had been managed sustainably without Hardin’s
black-or-white solutions.
The problem with Hardin’s logic was the very first step: the
assumption that communally owned land was a free-for-all. It wasn’t. The
commons were owned by a community. They were managed by a community. These
people were neighbours. They lived next door to each other. In many cases, they
set their own rules and policed those rules.
This is not to deny the existence of the tragedy of the
commons altogether. Hardin’s analysis looks prescient when applied to our habit
of pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or overfishing the oceans. But
the existence of clear counter-examples should make us hesitate before
accepting Hardin’s argument that tragedy is unstoppable. Lin Ostrom knew that
there was nothing inevitable about the self-destruction of “common pool
resources”, as economists call them. The tragedy of the commons wasn’t a
tragedy at all. It was a problem – and problems have solutions.
If Garrett Hardin and Lin Ostrom had reached different
conclusions about the commons, perhaps that was because their entire approaches
to academic research were different. Hardin wanted to change the world; Ostrom
merely wanted to describe it.
That goal of description, though, was a vast project. Common
pool resources could be found all over the planet, from the high meadows of
Switzerland to the lobster fisheries of Maine, from forests in Sri Lanka to
water in Nepal. Hardin’s article had sliced through the complexity with his
assumption that all commons were in some sense the same. But they aren’t.
To describe even a single case study of governing a common
resource is a challenge (Lin’s PhD was devoted to the West Basin water district
of Los Angeles). Vincent Ostrom, Lin’s husband, had developed the idea of
“polycentricity” in political science: polycentric systems have multiple,
independent and overlapping sources of power and authority.
By their very nature, they are messy to describe and hard to
compare with each other. Unfortunately for any tidy-minded social scientist,
they are also everywhere.
Complicating the problem further was the narrow focus of
academic specialities. Lin was encouraged that many people had been drawn, like
her, to the study of common pool resources. But they were divided by
discipline, by region and by subject: the sociologists didn’t talk to the
economists; the India specialists didn’t talk to the Africanists; and the
fishery experts didn’t know anything about forestry. As Ostrom and her
colleagues at the University of Indiana looked into the problem they discovered
more than a thousand separate case studies, each sitting in isolation.
Undeterred, they began to catalogue them, seeking to explain
the difference between the successful attempts to manage environmental
resources and the failures. There were the Swiss farmers of the village of
Törbel, who had a system of rules, fines and local associations that dated from
the 13th century to govern the use of scarce Alpine pastures and firewood.
There were the fishermen of Alanya, in Turkey, who took part in a lottery each
September to allocate fishing rights for the year ahead.
Over time, Ostrom developed a set of what she called “design
principles” for managing common resources, drawn from what worked in the real
world. She used the phrase hesitantly since, she argued, these arrangements
were rarely designed or imposed from the top down; they usually evolved from
the bottom up.
These principles included effective monitoring; graduated
sanctions for those who break rules; and cheap access to conflict-resolution
mechanisms (the fishermen of Alanya resolved their disputes in the local coffee
house). There are several others. Ostrom wanted to be as precise as she could,
to move away from the hand-waving of some social scientists. But there were
limits to how reductive it was possible to be about such varied institutions.
Lin’s only golden rule about common pool resources was that there are no
panaceas.
Her work required a new set of intellectual tools. But for
Ostrom, this effort was central to her academic life because knowledge itself –
when you thought about it – was a kind of common pool resource as well. It
could be squandered or it could be harvested for the public good. And it would
only be harvested with the right set of rules.
Ostrom’s research project came to resemble one of the local,
community-led institutions that she sought to explain. In 1973, the Ostroms
established something called the “Workshop in Political Theory and Policy
Analysis”. Why not a school or a centre or a department? It was partly to
sidestep bureaucracy. “The university didn’t know what a workshop was,” says
Michael McGinnis, a professor of political science at Indiana University and a
colleague of the Ostroms. “They didn’t have rules for a workshop.”
But there was more behind the name than administrative guile.
Vincent and Lin believed that the work they did was a kind of craft. (The
couple had built their own home and made much of their own furniture, under the
guidance of a local craftsman – the experience made an impression.) The
students who attended didn’t call themselves students or researchers. They
called themselves “workshoppers”.
The workshop under the Ostroms seems to have been a
remarkable place, brightened up by Lin’s sparkling laugh and garish tops. (The
laugh was a reliable sign that she was in the building, available to be
buttonholed by students.) At reunions, Ostrom would lead the singing of folk
songs; it was that kind of place. The Ostroms never had children but the
workshoppers did – and those children called Lin “Grandma”.
. . .
The logic of Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay is seductive but to
read the text itself is a shock. Hardin’s policy proposals are extreme. He
believed that the ultimate tragedy of the commons was overpopulation – and the
central policy conclusion of the article was, to quote Hardin, that “freedom to
breed is intolerable”.
In a 1974 essay, “Living on a Lifeboat”, he argued that it
was pointless sending aid to starving people in Ethiopia. That would only make
the real problem worse – the real problem being, of course, overpopulation.
Hardin robustly defended his views. In a 1987 interview with
The New York Times, he opined, “There’s nothing more dangerous than a
shallow-thinking compassionate person.
God, he can cause a lot of trouble.” But perhaps it was
Hardin who was the one failing to think deeply enough. The logic of “The
Tragedy of the Commons” worked well to frame a class of environmental problems.
The danger was when Hardin leapt to drastic conclusions without looking at how
other, similar-looking problems were being solved, again and again, by
communities all over the world.
Nor has Hardin’s needle-sharp focus on overpopulation stood
the test of time. When he published “The Tragedy of the Commons” in 1968, the
growth rate of world population was higher than it had ever been – a rate at
which population would double every 30 years. No wonder Hardin was alarmed. But
birth rates have fallen dramatically. The world continues to face some severe
environmental problems. However, it’s far from clear that “freedom to breed” is
one of them.
There was no great public showdown between Lin Ostrom and
Garrett Hardin, but Hardin did return to speak at Indiana University in 1976.
The Ostroms invited him and some graduate students to dinner. Barbara Allen,
now a professor at Carleton College, was one of them. She recalls that “the
conversation was vigorous” as Hardin laid out his ideas for government-led
initiatives to reduce the birth rate in the US, while Lin and Vincent worried
about the unintended consequences of such top-down panaceas.
Allen recalls two other details: the way that Lin made space
for her students to enter the argument and her joy in a new kitchen gadget she
was using to make hamburgers for everyone. She loved “the odd delights of
everyday life”, Allen later wrote, and loved to celebrate what worked.
The December 1968 issue of Science in which Hardin’s 'The
Tragedy of the Commons' appeared
The December 1968 issue of Science in which Hardin’s 'The
Tragedy of the Commons' appeared
Hardin, by contrast, seems to have been more of a pessimist
about technology. “Technology does solve problems,” he told an interviewer in
1990, “but always at a cost.”
Lin Ostrom was a more optimistic character altogether. When
she won the Nobel memorial prize for economics in 2009, she was the first woman
to do so. She was quick to comment: “I won’t be the last.”
Some of her most recent research addressed the problem of
climate change. Scientifically speaking, greenhouse gas emissions are a global
pollutant, and so efforts have focused on establishing global agreements. That,
said Ostrom, is a mistake. Common pool problems were usually too complex to
solve from the top down; a polycentric approach was necessary, with people
developing ideas and enforcing behaviour at a community, city, national and
regional level.
Ostrom barely slowed down when she was diagnosed with
pancreatic cancer in 2011. She kept going until the final days, leaving
voicemail messages for Vincent who, at the age of 90, was deaf and beginning to
become confused. (Her students would type them up and print them out in large
fonts for him to read.) When Lin died last June, at the age of 78, she was
reviewing a student’s PhD thesis. She’d been annotating the text, which lay on
the table beside her hospital bed. Vincent died two weeks later. The couple
left almost everything to the workshop.
Garrett Hardin and his wife Jane also died together, in
September 2003. After 62 years of marriage, and both suffering from very poor
health, they killed themselves. Perhaps strangely for a man who thought
overpopulation was the world’s ultimate problem, Garrett Hardin had four
children. But there may be a certain kind of logic in that. Hardin always felt
that overpopulation was inevitable. He died the way he lived – a resolute
believer in the remorseless working of things.
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