Question

Consider the article Tragedy of the Commons. Professor Hardin argues in favor of mutally agreed upon mutual coercion to avoid a tragedy of the commons. Americans are notoriously resistant to being coerced to do anything. Why does he think coercion is the way forward with respect to the commons? What does it have to do with bank robbers and taxes? How does it relate to private property and our inheritance laws?

Answer 1

Writing in 1968 to a highly educated scientific audience, Garrett Hardin presented a compelling formulation of the population problem. He posed the population problem in stark terms. First, he examined the relation of population to resources, and concluded population must be brought under control. He then analyzed the dynamics that have caused population to swell. From this analysis, he proposed solutions. Certain aspects of his problem formulation still deserve careful consideration, but today, richer ideas for solutions complement those he proposed.

            Hardin rejected the wild hope that improved food production technology will allow an indefinite increase in population: "a finite world can support only a finite population." More specifically, we cannot hope to provide growth in both the material quality of life and population. Mathematically, both factors cannot be maximized at once; and biophysically, the calories available per person must decrease as population increases. Thus he invalidated Jeremy Bentham's goal of "the greatest good for the greatest number," and concluded "the optimum population is, then, less than the maximum." (Notably, also according to this logic, the strategy of decreasing population by increasing the "standard of living" (consumption), as predicted by the demographic transition model, might be reexamined.)

            But we have difficulty choosing to limit population, and choosing between which goods to pursue in a world that cannot provide for every different good because we have left the choice of "the good" entirely to individuals in our capitalistic society. We act as if individual choices will somehow solve collective problems such as population. Adam Smith's laissez-faire doctrine of the invisible hand tempts us to think that a system of individuals pursuing their private interests will automatically serve the collective interest. But applying this would be disastrous. Hardin employed a key metaphor, the Tragedy of the Commons (ToC) to show why. When a resource is held "in common," with many people having "ownership" and access to it, Hardin reasoned, a self-interested "rational" actor will decide to increase his or her exploitation of the resource since he or she receives the full benefit of the increase, but the costs are spread among all users. The remorseless and tragic result of each person thinking this way, however, is ruin of the commons, and thus of everyone using it. The straightforward application of the "herdsman" analogy to world population is that each couple expects to experience a large benefit from having another child, but only a little of the full social and ecological cost.

            Both Hardin's solutions, and their weaknesses, stem from things assumed in this model. His basic solution is that we must abandon the commons system in breeding (as we have already in food production and pollution - instances where we have used privatization and laws to achieve this). People must no longer be free to add unlimited numbers of offspring to the total load on the earth's ecosystems. This sounds simple enough, but the key question is how this restriction is to be achieved.

            Hardin's rejection of some solutions stems from the individualistic assumptions of his metaphor. Particularly, he rejects appeals to conscience, because they would "select for" those without scruples over having more children. It is doubtful however that conscience is entirely genetic, nor perfectly transmitted by learning in families. Further, his assumption that were it not for "welfare," over-breeders would have to pay for their profligacy, runs in the face of evidence that parents whose infants die are paradoxically both more inclined to get pregnant again, and less likely to emotionally invest in their young. Welfare may indeed be part of solving the population problem. This is just one example where Hardin fails to differentiate reproductive behavior according to socio-economic conditions.

HARDIN'S KEY ASSUMPTIONS AND PROBLEM FORMULATION:

1. The world is biophysically finite.

• The more people there are, the less each person's share must be.
• Technology (ie, agricultural) cannot fundamentally alter this.
• We can't both maximize the number of people and satisfy every desire or "good" of everyone.
• Practically, biophysical limits dictate we must both stabilize population, and make hard choices about which "goods" are to be sought.
• Both steps will generate opposition, since many people will have to relinquish something.

2. Over-population is an example of the tragedy of the commons (ToC).

• Commons are un-owned or commonly-held "pool" resources that are "free," or not allocated by markets.
• Hardin's ToC model assumes that individuals are short-term, self-interested "rational" actors, seeking to maximize their own gains.
• Such actors will exploit commons (have more babies, add more cattle to pastures, pollute the air) as long as they believe the costs to them individually are less than the benefits.
• The system of welfare insulates individuals from bearing the full costs of over-reproducing.
• When every individual believes and behaves in this manner, commons are quickly filled, degraded, and ruined along with their erst-while exploiters.
• A laissez-faire system (letting individuals choose as they like) will not "as if by an invisible hand" solve over-population.

3. The "commons" system for breeding must be abandoned (as it has been for other resources).

• In other words, something must restrain individual reproduction. . .
• but it must not be individual conscience; appealing to conscience will only result in fewer people with conscience in the population (assuming here that it is genetic, or perfectly transmitted by learning).
• It should be accomplished by "mutual coercion mutually agreed upon."
• Sacrificing freedom to breed will obtain for us other more important freedoms which will otherwise be lost.
• "Coercive" restrictions on breeding could take a number of forms.
• The "right" to determine the size of one's family must be rescinded.
• This will protect the conscientious traits in the population.

4. The problem is then to gain peoples' consent to a system of coercion.

• People will consent if they understand the dire consequences of letting the population growth rate be set only by individuals' choices.
• Educating all people about the ToC, its consequences, and the alternatives to it, is necessary.
• Then various restraints and incentives for low reproduction can and must be instituted.

EVALUATION

While extremely clean & efficient technology might allow more people and material consumption than Hardin imagined, ultimately the trade-off between human numbers and quality of life would remain.

The model of the ToC, while compelling, generalizes from a faulty historical case study. In fact communities managed their commons; real humans are not so exclusively self-interested as to not care what their fellows think of them, and not be able to manage common concerns. It is possible that communities do observe and regulate members' fertility, rather than leaving it up to individual choice. This might be coercion on a small scale, but it could accommodate much individual need also.

The assumption that were it not for "welfare," over-breeders would have to pay for their profligacy runs in the face of evidence that parents whose infants die are paradoxically both more inclined to get pregnant again, and less likely to emotionally invest in their young. Child survival and welfare enable parents to stop at fewer children, and provide security in old age, independent from offspring's or husband's income.

People's motivations to have babies are not the same everywhere and at every time. They vary depending on economic circumstances, culture, and gender. Understanding and altering these conditions is another route to changing fertility decisions. The cost/benefit conditions of childbearing decisions can be altered in many ways. But some such strategies may require an unrealistic degree of material economic development. Ones which do not include wealth redistribution, meeting unmet need, improving the economic and educational options for girls and women, and increasing accountability of fathers.

Blunt forms or coersion such as China's one-child policy are likely to have negative unintended consequences.

Mutual Coercion Mutually Agreed Upon ( Bank Robbers and Taxes ):

The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort. Consider bank-robbing. The man who takes money from a bank acts as if the bank were a commons. How do we prevent such action? Certainly not by trying to control his behavior solely by a verbal appeal to his sense of responsibility. Rather than rely on propaganda we follow Frankel's lead and insist that a bank is not a commons; we seek the definite social arrangements that will keep it from becoming a commons. That we thereby infringe on the freedom of would-be robbers we neither deny nor regret.

The morality of bank-robbing is particularly easy to understand because we accept complete prohibition of this activity. We are willing to say "Thou shalt not rob banks," without providing for exceptions. But temperance also can be created by coercion. Taxing is a good coercive device. To keep downtown shoppers temperate in their use of parking space we introduce parking meters for short periods, and traffic fines for longer ones. We need not actually forbid a citizen to park as long as he wants to; we need merely make it increasingly expensive for him to do so. Not prohibition, but carefully biased options are what we offer him. A Madison Avenue man might call this persuasion; I prefer the greater candor of the word coercion.

Coercion is a dirty word to most liberals now, but it need not forever be so. As with the four-letter words, its dirtiness can be cleansed away by exposure to the light, by saying it over and over without apology or embarrassment. To many, the word coercion implies arbitrary decisions of distant and irresponsible bureaucrats; but this is not a necessary part of its meaning. The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.

To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it. Who enjoys taxes? We all grumble about them. But we accept compulsory taxes because we recognize that voluntary taxes would favor the conscienceless. We institute and (grumblingly) support taxes and other coercive devices to escape the horror of the commons.

An alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable. With real estate and other material goods, the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance. Is this system perfectly just? As a genetically trained biologist I deny that it is. It seems to me that, if there are to be differences in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance--that those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more. But genetic recombination continually makes a mockery of the doctrine of "like father, like son" implicit in our laws of legal inheritance. An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund can keep his estate intact. We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust--but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.

It is one of the peculiarities of the warfare between reform and the status quo that it is thoughtlessly governed by a double standard. Whenever a reform measure is proposed it is often defeated when its opponents triumphantly discover a flaw in it. As Kingsley Davis has pointed out (21), worshippers of the status quo sometimes imply that no reform is possible without unanimous agreement, an implication contrary to historical fact. As nearly as I can make out, automatic rejection of proposed reforms is based on one of two unconscious assumptions: (i) that the status quo is perfect; or (ii) that the choice we face is between reform and no action; if the proposed reform is imperfect, we presumably should take no action at all, while we wait for a perfect proposal.

But we can never do nothing. That which we have done for thousands of years is also action. It also produce evils. Once we are aware that status quo is action, we can then compare its discoverable advantages and disadvantages with the predicted advantages and disadvantages of the proposed reform, discounting as best we can for our lack of experience. On the basis of such a comparison, we can make a rational decision which will not involve the unworkable assumption that only perfect systems are tolerable.

Private Property and Inheritance Laws:

Hardin's diagnosis is often identified as a rationale for prescriptive regulation Hardin famously termed "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon." This was his way of describing those regulations we adopt to keep a common resource of any sort from befalling the fate of an open-access commons, and it's largely the path we've followed in environmental policy for the past fifty years.

Administrative regulations have produced some gains, but also many failings. Our air and water are cleaner today than forty years ago -- and substantially so -- but many ecological resources are as threatened now as they ever were. Federal environmental regulation was not the savior many think, and many environmental regulations actually get in the way of further progress. The imposition of land-use controls under the Endangered Species Act, for example, discourages effective conservation on private land.

One thing that Hardin overlooked is that the political process often replicates the same economic dynamic that encourages the tragedy of the commons -- a dynamic fostered by the ability to capture concentrated benefits while dispersing the costs. Like the herder who has an incentive to put out yet one more animal to graze, each interest group has every incentive to seek special benefits through the political process, while dispersing the costs of providing those benefits to the public at large. Just as no herder has adequate incentive to withhold from grazing one more animal, no interest group has adequate incentive to forego its turn to obtain concentrated benefits at public expense. No interest group has adequate incentive to put the interests of the whole ahead of the interests of the few. The logic of collective action discourages investments in sound public policy just as it discourages investments in sound ecological stewardship. This, in addition to the pervasiveness of special-interest rent seeking, explains many of the failings of centralized regulation. So despite the environmental gains of the past half-century, real challenges remain, and the tragedy of the commons is still with us.

Administrative regulation has been the dominant tool in environmental policy over the past half-century, but it was not the only prescription Hardin offered. What many forget is Hardin actually offered two prescriptions for preventing the tragedy of the commons. "Mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" was one approach; but Hardin had another. In the alternative, Hardin suggested that greater reliance on property rights was a proven way to prevent the tragedy of the commons. As he explained, the tragedy of the commons "is averted by private property or something formally like it." Indeed, Hardin suggested this was one of the primary functions of property in land.

As Hardin recognized, where property rights are well-defined and secure, the tragedy of the commons is less likely for each owner has ample incentive to act as a steward, caring for the underlying resource and preventing its overuse, both for themselves, and others who may value the underlying resource. In this way, the institution of property rights "deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth."

Hardin was not altogether sanguine about the potential for property rights to avert the tragedy of the commons in many areas because he feared it would be too difficult to define and defend property rights in threatened ecological resources, particularly against the threat of pollution. It's one thing to post and fence private land. Quite another to demarcate property rights in air or water. Yet there is far greater potential here than is commonly realized. Enhanced technologies and greater understanding of ecological conditions make it possible to conceive or property rights today where once they were the stuff of ecological fantasy.   

Pursuing the identification and expansion of property rights in ecological resources will be difficult, but the potential benefits are large. We understand the importance of property rights for economic prosperity, but we are also beginning to understand the importance of property rights for ecological sustainability. What we're learning is that where property-based institutions can be adapted to ecological resources more sustainable practices tend to result (and in my next post I'll provide a concrete example).

The importance of property rights for environmental conservation is not a new idea. It lay at the core of the early American conservation movement. After all, it was the institution of property rights that enabled the first Audubon Societies to post private reserves to protect birds from hunters who sought to collect their feathers for women's hats. It was the institution of property rights that enabled Rosalie Edge to turn Hawk Mountain from a hunting ground into a bird sanctuary. It is the institution of property rights that allows land trusts large and small, from the American Prairie Foundation to the Western Reserve Land Conservancy to protect precious places. The need to day is to keep moving beyond property in land and adopt property institutions to a wider array of ecological resources so that property institutions can have the chance to succeed in those areas where mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon has failed.