Question

What is the tragedy of the commons? Give an example.

Answer 1

The idea of The Tragedy of commons was propounded by British economist William Forster Lloyd and later developed by noted biologist Garret Hardin who wrote a paper with the same name.

The problem is a classical problem of economics which occurs when every individual acts for his own personal interest in consuming a shared resource without thinking about the well being of the society as a whole.

For example lets consider a village forest where women are freely allowed to cut trees for use as fuelwood.Now we know that the forest has a limited number of trees with a long replinshment age.Now an individual woman thinks that she should cut more than one tree each day because she is not sure whether the other women of village will do the same or not.Therefore she cuts more than a tree and at a faster rate because she knows other women will also deplete the trees so she wants to have a greater share of trees.The same task is done by all the women in the village with the same motive.Ultimately the trees start depleting and finally the forest is left treeless.

Conditions for the problem Of the tragedy of commons. The problem is faced when the resource follows 3 conditions:-

• Scarce - The resource should be limited in quantity and not replenish too fast.In the above example the forest had limited trees.
• Rival good- the resource should be a rivalrous one which means a person consuming a unit of a good makes it unavailable for other consumers to have that unit of good to consume.
• Non-excludable - an individual consumer should not be able to exclude others from consuming the good,like in yhe above example all the women were able to consume good at same time.

​​​​​​​​​​The above conditions make the resource a common pool resource which is indecisively consumed by all individuals with the only motive of maximising there own personal gain without thinking for the society.Such a problem leads to

• Underinvestment- No individual has an incentive to invest in the resource fir its replenishment or its development because he cannot appropriate the costs from any individual in respect of the benefits the resource accrues to them.
• Depletion- the resource starts depleteing because every individual wants to have a greater share in less time.
• Extinction- ultimately the resource gets exhausted because of its scarce nature and very high demand.

We can use the tragedy of commons as a justification for the regualtion on the killing of animals like the formation in of CITES(convention for the protection of international trade in endangered species).With no regulatory mechanisms individual would just keep on hunting animals for the trade untill they become extinct.

Their is enough for everyone's need but not enough for anyone's need. -Mahatma Gandhi