Question

Section 1. The Readings and Related Lecture Notes 1. Consider the article Tragedy of the Commons. How confident is Professor Hardin that Adam Smith's metaphor of the invisible hand can be relied upon to prevent a population catastrophe?

Answer 1

Hardin dismissed the wild hope that improved food production technologies would allow infinite population growth: "a finite planet can only sustain a finite population." More importantly, we can not expect to achieve growth in both the material quality of life and population. Mathematically, it is not possible to optimize all factors at once; and biophysically, as population increases, the calories available per person will decrease. Therefore he invalidated the objective of "the greatest good for the greatest number" of Jeremy Bentham, and argued that "the optimum population is then less than the total.

But we have trouble choosing to restrict the population and choosing the products to seek in a world which can not provide for any particular good because we leave the option of "the better" to individuals in our capitalist society. We act as if individual choices are going to solve collective problems like population in some way. The laissez-faire theory of the invisible hand by Adam Smith tempts us to believe that the public interest is best served by a network of people following their private interests. But it would be devastating to add that. Hardin used a central example, the Commons Tragedy (ToC) to illustrate why.

Hardin argued that when a resource is kept "in common," with many people having "ownership" and access to it, a self-interested "fair" person will decide to increase his or her use of the resource as he or she enjoys the full benefit of the increase, but the costs are shared among all users. Nonetheless, every person's remorseless and tragic outcome of thinking this way is the ruin of the commons, and hence of everyone using it. The simple application of the metaphor of "herdsman" to the world population is that each couple expects to experience a great benefit from having another child, but only a little of the full social and ecological price.

Both the solutions of Hardin and their shortcomings arise from the supposed items in this model. His simple solution is that in breeding we have to abandon the common system (as we already have in food production and emissions-instances where we used privatization and legislation to do this). People no longer have to be free to add unlimited numbers of offspring to the total load on the ecosystems of the earth. That sounds pretty simple, but the key question is how to accomplish this limitation.