Tuesday, June 12, 2012

The Commons still open for Tragedy

ok, this interpretation of Ostrom's work made me somewhat mad: http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/the-non-tragedy-of-the-commons/
  1. re: overpopulation -- look at the data! nothing since Malthus has disproved his general law of geometric growth of population vs linear growth of resources -- it continues to this day! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe,
  2. is the NYT really covertly arguing against EPA regulation?  Sure, we have nothing to worry about... these things fix themselves, right?
  3. Yes, Nature *always* fixes itself in the end, so there really is no "tragedy of the commons" from this perspective... but not all of Nature's possible "solutions" need involve the human species -- so we might, just maybe, want to pay a little closer attention to engineering our management of common resources before we make such ridiculous statements.
     
  4. Ostrom was interested in why some approaches worked and others didn't in managing shared commons... centralized government is often not the answer, but neither is letting things simply "take care of themselves".