# The Tragedy of the Commons

*Hardin · Commons & Governance · Science · 1968 · Paywalled*

The essay that named the tragedy of the commons, based on a 1968 presidential address to the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Its subject is population. Hardin defines a technical solution as one requiring a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, with little or no change in human values or ideas of morality, and argues that the population problem, as conventionally conceived, has none. His rebuttal to the invisible hand in population control is a scenario he credits to an 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd: a pasture open to all, on which each rational herdsman gains nearly all the benefit of one more animal while bearing only a fraction of the cost of the extra overgrazing, which all the herdsmen share. So each adds another, and another, and freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. He finds the same logic, reversed, in pollution.

Following Charles Galton Darwin, he holds that conscience is self-eliminating, since those who heed appeals to it leave fewer descendants; such appeals are also pathogenic, he argues, catching a man asked to desist in the name of conscience in what Bateson called a double bind. Responsibility without substantial sanctions he calls an attempt to get something for nothing; if the word is to be used at all, he suggests the philosopher Charles Frankel's sense, the product of definite social arrangements. He recommends mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected, through taxes, fines and other coercive devices. On population this means relinquishing the freedom to breed. He asks how, in a welfare state, we shall deal with any family, religion, race or class that adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandisement, says that if we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and writes that it seems to him that, if inheritance is to differ, those biologically more fit to be custodians of property and power should legally inherit more. The pasture open to all is a scenario, not a description of any historical commons; Cox (1985) answers its later reading as English history, and Ostrom (1990) answers the model from commons governed by their users. Nothing here concerns teams; the bridge is ours. We read the passage on conscience as close to a familiar workplace move: asking people to speak up out of responsibility while the arrangements around them stay as they are.

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## Neighbours (5)

- [Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/ostrom-2010.md) (paper)
- [Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/ostrom-1990.md) (paper)
- [Accountability](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/accountability.md)
- [Efficiency vs Resilience](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/efficiency-vs-resilience.md)
- [No Tragedy on the Commons](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/cox-1985.md) (paper)