Tragedy of the community properties

The tragedy of the community properties , or tragedy of communal, is an economic class of phenomenon describing a competition for the access to a resource limited, driving to a conflict between individual interest and Community property. The expression was popularized by an article of Garret Hardin published in Science in 1968, entitled " The Tragedy off the Commons". The opposite principle is called, by analogy, the Tragédie of the anticommuns.

The original text describes how the free access with a limited resource for which the demand is keen inevitably leads to the Surexploitation of this resource and finally to its disappearance. Each individual having an personal interest use the common Resource in order to maximize his individual use, while distributing between each user the costs of exploitation, is the cause of the problem.

The typical example used to illustrate this phenomenon is that of a field of fodder common to a whole village, in which each stockbreeder comes to make feed his own herd. Hardin describes the utility which each stockbreeder has to add an animal moreover to his herd in the common field as being the value of the animal, while the costs incurred by this same stockbreeder is only that of the animal divided by the number of stockbreeders having access to the field . In light, the interest to monopolize the most common resources possible always exceeds the price to be paid for the use of these resources. Quickly, each stockbreeder takes along animals as many as possible to feed in the common field to prevent, as far as possible, the other stockbreeders to take an advantage on him by using the common resources, and the field quickly becomes a mud pond where nothing any more pushes.

Hardin estimated that this metaphor cancelled the conclusion of Adam Smith according to which the continuation of the individual interest in an open market joined the shared interest. In fact the theory of Smith, improved and supplemented by, inter alia, the economists of the Leave-to make, was based on a starting assumption of Private property, rather than common, means of production: a single owner of a resource not having to face a conflict of divergent individual interests to reach it, it has an personal interest preserve the use of this resource and thus not exhaust it. The Tragedy of the community properties can thus apply, in an open market, only with the resources being able to be suitable by nobody: the atmosphere, the biodiversity and the ocean are examples.

Solutions

To find a solution with the tragedy of the community properties belongs to the recurring problems of the political Philosophie and the political economy. Many the solutions of conservation of the common resource imply the installation of restriction measures of access by an agency external or an authority selected by the users of the resource. A different solution is to convert the common resource into private property to encourage to it (S) owner (S) with one to manage rationally. Historically, this last solution was applied in England to the common grounds. It is the solution which is recommended by the liberal while following the principle lockéen of the initial appropriation by work: the first which transforms a resource not-adapted by its work becomes the rightful owner of this resource.

The Salish Indians managed their natural resources using a system localized where each family had the responsibility for a place and resources which were there. The access to food was the independent source of richness, and the capacity with being generous had a moral value raised, which gave an interest to the conservation of the resources.

Another economic solution with the problem is that of the Théorème of Coase where the individuals who make use of the community properties pay the ones the others so as not to overexploit the resource.

In the original test of Hardin, this one proposes that the users of the common resource, and by extension, of the problem of the Surpopulation, choose a unanimously approved mutually coercive solution, in the case of overpopulation would be to give up the right collectively to procreate. In Managing the Commons appeared in 1979 Hardin and John A. Baden discuss this solution. Only one country appliqé to a certain extent this recommendation: the Popular republic of China with the policy of the single child. Into its original article, Hardin rejected education like means of reducing the population growth, but since it appeared that the increase in economic and educational opportunities for the women involves a reduction of the rate of Natalité. Thus, several developed countries (for example Japan) at present seek to increase birth rate after this one decreased too much.

See too

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