The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a "common") in Great Britain and Ireland.
It has also been used in analyzing behavior in the fields of economics, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, game theory, politics, taxation, and sociology. ==Expositions== ===Lloyd's pamphlet=== In 1833, the English economist William Forster Lloyd published a pamphlet which included a hypothetical example of over-use of a common resource.
The concept became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968. Although open-access resource systems may collapse due to overuse (such as in over-fishing), many examples have existed and still do exist where members of a community with regulated access to a common resource co-operate to exploit those resources prudently without collapse, or even creating "perfect order".
If all herders made this individually rational economic decision, the common could be depleted or even destroyed, to the detriment of all. ===Garrett Hardin's article=== In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin explored this social dilemma in his article "The Tragedy of the Commons", published in the journal Science.
They report that Hardin’s 1968 article was the one having the greatest career impact on biologists and is the most frequently cited". ==Application== ===Metaphoric meaning=== Like Lloyd and Thomas Malthus before him, Hardin was primarily interested in the problem of human population growth.
Hardin discussed this topic further in a 1979 book, Managing the Commons, co-written with John A.
Rose, in a 1986 article, discussed the concept of the "comedy of the commons", where the public property in question exhibits "increasing returns to scale" in usage (hence the phrase, "the more the merrier"), in that the more people use the resource, the higher the benefit to each one.
Appell criticized those who cited Hardin to "impos[e] their own economic and environmental rationality on other social systems of which they have incomplete understanding and knowledge." Political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded 2009's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on the issue, and others revisited Hardin's work in 1999.
As Frank van Laerhoven and Elinor Ostrom have stated: "Prior to the publication of Hardin’s article on the tragedy of the commons (1968), titles containing the words 'the commons', 'common pool resources,' or 'common property' were very rare in the academic literature." They go on to say: "In 2002, Barrett and Mabry conducted a major survey of biologists to determine which publications in the twentieth century had become classic books or benchmark publications in biology.
He wrote in his book The Wealth of Networks in 2006 that cheap computing power plus networks enable people to produce valuable products through non-commercial processes of interaction: "as human beings and as social beings, rather than as market actors through the price system".
Elinor Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Science for demonstrating exactly this concept in her book Governing the Commons, which included examples of how local communities were able to do this without top-down regulations or privatization. In a modern economic context, "commons" is taken to mean any open-access and unregulated resource such as the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, ocean fish stocks, or even an office refrigerator.
Appell criticized those who cited Hardin to "impos[e] their own economic and environmental rationality on other social systems of which they have incomplete understanding and knowledge." Political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded 2009's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on the issue, and others revisited Hardin's work in 1999.
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