The Self-fulfilling Tragedy of the Commons

In 2008, I visited 50 schools across Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, East Timor and the Philippines as part an evaluation of UNICEF’s Child Friendly Schools Program. For each school visit, I followed a protocol that consisted of inspecting the school grounds, classroom observations, and teacher interviews. Implied in my task as I understood it was that my own presence in the school was to be nominal. How was I to really evaluate the program if me being there altered its appearance?

One school visit in the Philippines showcased the absurdity of my quest to blend in while conducting research. As I arrived in the school I was taken to an assembly where roughly 1000 children were sitting on the ground. The school head introduced me as international visitor from UNICEF and asked me to sing a karaoke song for the whole school. In horror, I flipped through the thick song book and selected the first song I recognized - Smooth Operator by Sade.

As I cleared my throat and began to sing it quickly dawned on me that I had picked a highly inappropriate song to sing to a school audience. Full of innuendo about a ‘western male’ offering ‘love for sale’. Clearly I was no smooth operator as my button-down quickly became drenched in the humiliating humidity of that morning. The teachers and school head, undoubtably recognizing my plight, decided we would sing the next songs as a group.

I had already learned on my trip that karaoke is a key pastime of the Philippines and any given teacher in the audience could easily replace most music stars in a pinch. So for those subsequent songs I attempted to be a 6’2” white wallflower offering some subdued harmonizing sounds for the refrain while relying on the killer pipes of my fellow singers. Phew.

Beyond the state of my armpits that morning, the point is, I most certainly altered the research environment I was there to assess and it altered me. This entanglement of observer and observed is widely written about in anthropology and even physics (it turns out photons are shy to our attention), but is often minimized in the course of numerous programmatic evaluations.

Some elements of my research were unlikely impacted by my being there: for instance, the number of toilets at the school or the supply of potable water. But many of the subjects of my assessment protocol would be potentially altered. If I did not observe the use of corporal punishment did that indicate the schools had become more ‘child friendly’ in classroom management approaches or did it simply mean the teacher had put the cane away for my visit? If a teacher seemed stilted in interacting with their students was that due to my presence or was that the teacher’s normal demeanor? I needed to take more seriously in my research design how my own presence impacted the research.

The Curious Case of Algoe

These sorts of quandaries of observational entanglement don’t just happen in research. There is that delightful story of the town of Agloe, NY. The town was included in a map of the state produced in the 1930s. Catch was, there was no such town. The map makers deliberately included the fictional town so they could snare any forgeries of their own work. A new map made by another firm that included Agloe would be proof positive of plagiarism as no original effort to create a map could include a town that didn’t exist. Or so the map makers believed when they baited their trap.

When Rand McNally developed a new map several years later that included Agloe, you can imagine the delight of the original map makers. They smelled a lawsuit as Rand McNally must have copied their work.

The twist was Algoe did now exist. An enterprising shop owner, seeing Algoe on the original map, set up the Algoe general store in precisely that location. The map as an abstraction and description of the physical landscape became destiny for that landscape. When the story was covered by NPR in 2014¹, Google Maps and other map programs appeared to delete it from search results in response to the story. Learning of the hoax, again it was declared one. And so Algoe’s fate went from ploy to fact to myth— all due to the entanglement of description and reality.

When is something predictive and when is it self-fulfilling?

If individual research can alter the results like with my experience in the Philippines, can scientific hypotheses themselves lay the groundwork for their own validation? How does one distinguish between prediction and self-fulfillment in science?

An example of this conundrum is the so-called ‘Tragedy of the Commons’. Although the idea had several progenitors dating to the early 1800s, it achieved full form in a 1968 article published in Science by Garrett Hardin². In putting forth his argument, Hardin offers the following scenario of a series of herdsman sharing common grazing land:

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?”. The utility has one negative and one positive component.

1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision making herdsman is a fraction of -1.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd…But this conclusion is reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy…Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom on the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

Hardin’s conclusion is destruction of the commons is inevitable and that only through governmental control or the privatization of land is such an outcome avoidable.

It's a curious soliloquy, but it’s not science. There is no herdsman as algorithmic or unconnected to community as Hardin postulates. The so-called ‘rational man’ beloved by many 19th and 20th century economists is no more real then the Yeti. Behavioral economists such as Richard Thaler, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman have thoroughly debunked notions of human decision making as the summations of partial utility functions. Shocking, I know.

Even more to the point, the late economist Elinor Ostrom examined the issue of commons management by looking at how commons are managed throughout the world (versus what appears to be Hardin’s armchair pontification). It turns out there are many strategies employed by communities to manage commons. Hardin’s scenario only holds, according to Ostrom, in particular situations without trust, relationships, mutual accountability mechanisms and communication. Ostrom writes³:

If this study does nothing more than shatter the convictions of many policy analysts that the only way to solve common pool resource problems is for external authorities to impose full private property rights or centralized regulation, it will have accomplished one major purpose.

The Fate of the Commons

Hardin’s ideas remain widespread and issues such as climate change are often described as an instance of the Tragedy of the Commons scenario— or even seen as evidence that the Tragedy must be true. Yet Hardin certainly didn’t apply the sort of rigorous methodology that is the hallmark of good science and many of his suppositions we know to be wrong.

The Tragedy of the Commons and its 19th century predecessors may then be like Algoe: it primarily exists because many have long accepted it as true and others have a vested interest in it being so.⁴ After all, if the land is bound to be destroyed anyway, then annexing it for the state or for private ownership is justified as a moral act to preserve it. Hardin’s argument will continue to work against us in addressing climate change or any other environmental crisis as it is fundamentally fatalistic and its solutions inequitable, racist and exploitive. In accepting the degradation of common spaces as inevitable, we have already lost.

1. See https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/03/18/290236647/an-imaginary-town-becomes-real-then-not-true-story

2. For the full paper see https://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243

3. Ostrom, E. (2015). A Framework for Analysis of Self-organizing and Self-governing CPRs. In Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action(Canto Classics, pp. 182-216). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316423936.007

4. The Southern Poverty Law Center says “Hardin used his status as a famous scientist and environmentalist to provide a veneer of intellectual and moral legitimacy for his underlying nativist agenda, serving on the board of directors of both the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform and the white-nationalist Social Contract Press.” Yet so far as I can tell, most media pieces that use the phrase ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ in connection to an environmental issue fail to recognize the colonialist and racist history of the phrase. This may be partly due to many individuals hesitancy to deal with flawed scientific arguments that are nonetheless cloaked in impressive looking equations, graphs and jargon.