Well into the 1800s, much of rural England was considered commons—property owned by the king but available to everyone—like the open range in the western United States before the advent of barbedwire fencing. Using the English commons as his model, Hardin purported to show what happens when a resource is communally owned. He reasoned that in “a pasture open to all ... each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible.” Though destructive to the pasture, the herdsman’s selfishness makes good economic sense from his personal perspective. Hardin wrote, “The rational herdsman [will conclude] that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd.” This is the only rational choice because all will share the cost of the degradation to the land from overgrazing, while the profit gained from additional animals will be his alone. Since each individual herdsman will come to the same conclusion, the common ground will inevitably be overgrazed. “Freedom in a commons,” Hardin concluded, “brings ruin to us all.”
Like Malthus’s thoughts on population growth relative to agricultural capacity, Hardin’s argument was a hit because (1) it features an A+B=C simplicity that appears to be inarguably correct; and (2) it is useful in justifying seemingly heartless decisions by entrenched powers. Malthus’s essay, for example, was often cited by British business and political leaders to explain their inaction in the face of widespread poverty in Britain, including the famine of the 1840s in which several million Irish people starved to death (and millions more fled to the United States). Hardin’s articulation of the folly of communal ownership has provided cover repeatedly to those arguing for the privatization of government services and the conquest of native lands.
One other thing Hardin’s elegant argument has in common with that of Malthus: it collapses on contact with reality.
As Canadian author Ian Angus explains, “Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real commons: self regulation by the communities involved.” Hardin missed the fact that in small rural communities where population density is low enough that each of the herdsmen knows the others (the actual case in the historical English commons and in ancestral foraging societies), any individual who tries to game the system is quickly found out and punished. Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom’s studies of commons management in small-scale communities led her to conclude that, “all communities have some form of monitoring to gird against cheating or using more than a fair share of the resource.”6
Despite how it’s been spun by economists and others arguing against local resource management, the real
What allows these chain-linked tragedies is the absence of local, personal shame. The false certainty that comes from applying Malthusian economics, the prisoner’s dilemma, and the tragedy of the commons to pre-agricultural societies requires that we ignore the fine-grain contours of life in small-scale communities where nobody “could have escaped public scrutiny and judgment,” in Rousseau’s words. These tragedies become inevitable only when the group size exceeds our species’capacity for keeping track of one another, a point that’s come to be known as
