I take @frank to be saying it's easy to identify as the type of person who chooses number 3, but it's a little empty.

This is the kind of thing figures like Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut made careers of. But they were also incredibly misanthropic outside of being congratulated on being number-threers. I don't know about Vonnegut, but Twain seemed to realize it - as in his Mysterious Stranger - but reconciled himself to not broaching it publically.

I guess not every (important) common is in the hands of a democracy (of the concerned).

_{Tragedy of the commons » Solutions (Wikipedia)}

Three possible solutions:
1. A Big Fat Dictator who shoots anyone who tries to put two cows on the commons.
2. Sell the commons, making it private so that folk take care of it. (We might call this the Selfish Git solution)
3. Develop a culture that treats the commons with respect. — Banno

Choice 3 is the best solution in terms of having raised the awareness of the people concerned. They would know why their actions are good/bad, a knowledge that could be passed down to the next generation.

However given how humans are selfish in nature option 2 is more practical.

Option 1 involves threat-based enforcement which, quite unfortunately, works on some people who are simply too selfish to care.

This is the kind of thing figures like Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut made careers of. But they were also incredibly misanthropic outside of being congratulated on being number-threers. I — csalisbury

Number three ends up being a very broad condemnation.

I like this:

"Why, for instance, do we not focus in Hardin's metaphor on the individual ownership of the cattle rather than on the pasture as a common?"

Looks like @Banno's (3.) to me.

I used to live in a mountain village in South France. Every year, every able-bodied person came together to clear and reopen a complex irrigation system that brought water from the river to all the gardens along the valley. Several miles of ditching. When it was all working, there was a rota so that the gardens upstream did not use all the water. And then there was the forest, also owned by the village - that was managed differently, with felling rights sold to produce an income. Tragic.

Hunter/ gatherers typically shun those who display self-important attitudes, or try to claim more than their fair share. This is a spontaneous act of community, not something imposed from above by law. — Janus

Sure. Thats why I posted again in response to the same quote by Banno:

Sounds like a true libertarian response. Let the people, not the government, treat cheaters how they should be treated. — Harry Hindu

In Richard Dawkin's book, The Selfish Gene, he explains how intelligent social beings with long memories can communicate their experiences with cheaters within their community so as to eventually shun them from the community.

The problem with these authoritarian socialists like Banno and unenlightened is that they think government is the answer to all ethical problems and that everyone in government is there for serving the public and not themselves. Govt. is made up of people and if Banno and unenlightened are worried about the greed of people in general and propose that greed is the reason you need govt. then why would you give certain people more power over others?

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
The government promises to give you two cows if you vote for it. After the election, the president is impeached for speculating in cow futures. The press dubs the affair "Cowgate".

That seems generous to say the least. The American "Democracy" version looks more like this (from where I sit, within it): You can have as many cows as you can get your hands on, you can exterminate all other farmers or any interloper on the grazing land, even it it belongs to them, and when the land is rendered useless, claim another piece of land and exterminate whoever is there. And finally, when the cows' methane gas has caused severe global warming, you can declare yourself the winner.

OK, no worries, I missed your second post.

It's a little empty -- but only because we are stuck in certain habits, I think.

I mean 3 can mean all kinds of things. It's kind of a negative space -- what counts as culture, after all? And how do you foster it? Is it possible to do so today? And if so, how?

For my part I am happy to point out that the supposedly pragmatic solutions are just not very pragmatic on the basis that they aren't working. By all means get them working -- maybe that's the best we can do. But we surely shouldn't defend what's not working on a pragmatic level if it's just not accomplishing the task of building sustainable economies.

It's a little empty -- but only because we are stuck in certain habits, I think.

I mean 3 can mean all kinds of things. It's kind of a negative space -- what counts as culture, after all? And how do you foster it? Is it possible to do so today? And if so, how?

For my part I am happy to point out that the supposedly pragmatic solutions are just not very pragmatic on the basis that they aren't working. By all means get them working -- maybe that's the best we can do. But we surely shouldn't defend what's not working on a pragmatic level if it's just not accomplishing the task of building sustainable economies. — Moliere

I actually do agree with you. It was very unclear, but what I'm objecting to with 'number-threeism' is the selection of number three as more or less the endpoint of productive thought. A discussion like this thread can easily degenerate into 'choose your fighter' and proceed to everyone having a basically moral argument, with the selection of 'number-threeism' being nothing but self-identifying as 'good.' Other people can select other fighters to identify as 'no-nonsense' and 'realistic'. What the kids call virtue-signalling.

And then you have a terrible thing where the 'good' and the 'realistic' are separated, and people fight them out, identifying with what virtue they value most. Like you said, it's bogus because the 'realistic/pragmatic' options aren't really. And the 'good' option for the sake of choosing the good option often leads to misanthropy, where instead of devoting creative energy to solve the problems, you maintain your goodness by lamenting the badness of everyone else in a 'broad condemnation' as @frank put it.

My objections and complications weren't meant to nix number three, but to try to point out some of the really fundamental problems it would have to overcome--- the 'alien threat' is a joke, but also really does seem like the only option at first blush (it's really an old neoconservative argument about needing an Other to unify against). So I guess the trick would to be to reverse engineer things to see why the alien would work as a solution ( I think it would) and then break that down, and figure out what could have the same effect, without (a)waiting for a miraculous threat from the skies, like the god that heidegger said could save us or (b) fostering a 'noble lie' about an external enemy (e.g. islamofascism). Take the neocon insight and separate the wheat from the imperial chaff. I think the wheat is that concerted virtuous effort needs some kinf of ethical telos, and that's what's lacking if we talk about virtuously maintaining for the sake of maintaining.

addendum - I mentioned Kant in a previous post, because I think his bending-back of the ethical telos (toward man as end in himself) leads directly to this kind of impasse. It's one thing when you're advancing this idea in a world where that advancement is still partly radical. But when everyone agrees, it stops working so well. I agree that we shouldn't treat people as means, but we also can't treat people as ends really, because people need external ends. If you put the ends 'inside' them, the thing falls apart (it deconstructs straight to Nietzsche, then Heidegger) In other words, it's better as a prohibition (don't treat people as means) than as a positive ethics.

Well -- I, for one, want to hear more.

Though don't we have external ends, now? I think wealth acquisition is a kind of external end, no? And, in our current environment at least, it's the insatiable desire for wealth meeting the finite resources required for that wealth that's ruining our commons. Or do you mean that the opposition, in eliminating said telos, doesn't offer anything and so just isn't compelling?

Or maybe I don't understand, and I should just stand by my first comment -- that I want to hear more.

2. Sell the commons, making it private so that folk take care of it. (We might call this the Selfish Git solution) — Banno

This proposed solution also depends on your 'A Big Fat Dictator who shoots anyone who tries to put two cows on the', what is now, private property.

Using "Big Fat Dictator" to refer to government, doesn't somehow remove reliance on government in the privatization solution, as you need government to enforce exclusion from the space.

And if you assume government is there to enforce exclusion from the space for the benefit of a private individual, then by definition government can enforce some reasonable sharing scheme, including some while excluding others.

For, imagine you're the farmer and bought the privatized land, but someone comes and puts a cow on it? Will your whining and complaining and maybe some ranting about government help? No, what will help is phoning the government and asking the government to enforce exclusion to your property.

Privatization is not a structurally different scheme then any other scheme to manage use of a publicly owned asset, they all rely on the government's ability to force exclusion and select usage of the asset.

There is no intrinsically moral or structurally political difference, the relevant question is simply "what's a good deal for the public".

The proponents of privatization are generally not arguing against the power of government (which they need), but rather they are generally arguing that public assets should be sold below the true worth of the asset, either by fanciful accounting that undervalues the asset or then "just because".

Usually, the fanciful accounting excludes the future utility of the land to the public and includes fanciful interest and discount rate calculations to try to show the public gains more from the capital exchanged for the land than a renting scheme. However, since the difference between selling and renting is extremely low in any calculation, the net-present-value of future utility (government wants to make some project and suddenly it's convenient all that land is public) easily exceeds the sell-rent difference, it's almost never reasonable to sell public lands based on the same accounting methods companies use to value their own assets.

What makes matters worse, is that the main reason for a private company to sell land would be the management costs exceed the revenue from that land, but the main management cost for the public (policing and a court system to settle disputes, which can just as easily come up with private owners and between renters) will be the same if privatized or rented!

So, if we simply don't know what the land will be worth to the public in the future and supporting a police force and justice system is the same if things are rented or sold, then the economic optimum is a rolling rent scheme (and whether to one or several users doesn't really matter, just like if the rent was sold and the buyer then rented to several farmers the proponents of privatization wouldn't care). If you object "ah but farmers need long term foresight", well the rolling rent scheme can be long term, whatever is optimum. In most circumstances, it's almost impossible to argue against this in economic terms, and third-party un-biased economists brought into evaluate these cases typically demonstrate the above with lot's of numbers and conclude renting provides both revenue and future flexibility if a new public optimum usage of the land is found.

Hence why privatization proponents try to cast it in moral terms, that somehow it is a morally superior outcome to privatize in which case it's a moral imperative to privatize, and if assets need to be sold below their value that's fine. Of course it makes no sense (why would the public sell something below the value, isn't this economically irrational? how could "economics" seriously conclude such a thing), so they will flip-flop between these moral arguments for privatization and fanciful accounting.

The tragedy of the commons only occurs if there is no effective way for the government to enforce exclusion, in which case there is no effective way to privatize either, and "developing a culture that respects the commons" becomes the only option. For instance, if there is no effective way to exclude people from using a common space to dump small pieces of trash, aka littering, then developing a culture against littering is the only option.

Tedious.

Fear. Might work. It would have to be something really direct; in-your-face.

But that's just the Big Fat Dictator.

But this isn't a moral question... — Hanover

...abd that's were we went wrong. It is a moral equation. That's the point of this thread - to point out that the solution is neither political big fat dictators nor economic privatisation, but showing respect fort the commons.

How about internalizing the externalities? We already do this in California, with our highest gas prices in the nation...?

internalizing the externalities — Wallows

No idea what that means. Is it a Californian thing?

You internalize the negative externalities. — Wallows

What?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Internalizing_externalities

...and there goes Meta, wandering lonely as a cloud...

Clouds are lonely?

Going to university to learn a trade...

That's the crack in education, right there.

I'd be interested in more on this. It would suit my own prejudices nicely if the argument for privatisation turned out to be based on a lie.

Another solution is to have an ultimately government-supervised management of the commons, where part of how the commons are run is via public polling of preferences, and whoever utilizes the commons in a manner that most closely meets the public preferences is rewarded with scarcer resources. — Terrapin Station

The public voted for Trump.

Not a good track record.

Yep.

but what kind of sense does it make to ignore what you say are sound observations about behavior — Bitter Crank

Because behaviour is malleable.

Doubtless the cop will have a submachine gun to keep the peace. It's an oddly American view, but it has leached out into the real world.

Yep.

And we have to admit that option 2 requires option 1, though there are those who may wish to limit option 1. — Moliere

A good point. Made earlier by someone else. It shows how undemocratic such notions actually are.

Me. I missed it.