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Unmasking the Tragedy of the Commons

Abstract

Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” was a 135-year-old hypothesis that he presented as inevitable fact. Untested, it was promoted by economists bent on privatization. In 1990, Elinor Ostrom published her work thoroughly disproving the theory. In 2003 upon his death, the university where he was a faculty member denounced Hardin’s theory and Hardin himself for the “morally repugnant and ethically reprehensible”, views underpinning his promotion of the theory. In 2009, Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for her work in this area. Nevertheless, Hardin has become popular among the hard-right — Southern Poverty Law Center maintains his profile in its Extremist Files as a white nationalist.

The Premise of Inevitable Tragedy

Garrett Hardin & William Foster Lloyd

In a 1968 essay titled “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Garrett Hardin described a concept that dates back at least to Aristotle, who wrote, “What is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.” The premise, now known by the title of Hardin’s essay, is that if a group of people have unfettered access to a finite resource (such as a community pasture), they will tend to overuse it, eroding or destroying its value. Further, the argument posits that if only some users exercise voluntary restraint, the others would simply use more, resulting in tragedy for all. It can be dressed up in a variety of hypotheticals and anecdotal examples, but this is the essential theory.

Garrett Hardin argued that common property is inherently prone to decay when individuals could benefit at a cost to the community.

Hardin argued that common property is inherently prone to decay if individuals could benefit at a cost to the community. The pasture example came with the concept itself from Oxford economist Rev. William Forster Lloyd, who wrote in 1833 suggesting that that cattle who grazed in a commons were “puny and stunted” because people would overgraze the commons in a way they would never do on their own land, because grazing on their own land is a cost to themselves, whereas grazing in the commons spread the cost among others. Hardin took that speculation and turned it into an inevitable prediction, dubbing it a tragedy, which he then applied to a broad array of scenarios.

If the summary of Hardin’s (and Lloyd’s before him) position seems brief, it is. The concept is based largely in an anecdote, extrapolated with logic based in the proponent’s presuppositions about human nature. The theory is not backed by research, statistics, or actual fact-finding of any sort. This alone doesn’t make it wrong, but means that despite its later popularity, the idea must be evaluated as unproven, pending further study. Hardin’s essay has been much-discussed, though often with uncritical acceptance in support of other theories, mainly economic ones.

Essentially, Hardin dragged out a 135-year-old hypothesis, expounded upon it as fact, and presented it as certainty.

The Tragedy Reconsidered

The History of Enclosure in England

Land and natural resources are typical examples for explaining a commons, so we can consider how land has been shared – or not – historically. In England, the practice of enclosure in this context refers to the practice of appropriating land previously held in common or by the crown, enclosing it literally by establishing boundaries using hedges, walls, fences, or other border markers to deprive commoners of previously-held rights to access and use the land.

The concept of private ownership of land is only a few hundred years old.

The concept of private ownership of land is only a few hundred years old, having been inconceivable for much of history. At one time, peasants enjoyed the right to use the land on an estate owned by the king or Lord of the Manor, to graze livestock, cut wood, or grow crops. In central England, the open field system was a classic common property system from late medieval times into the modern period, and still seen in many parts of the world today. The open field system was equitable and allowed anyone without land or capital to make a living and gradually build up his holdings. The pooling of resources in a commons created a group economy of scale that allowed small-scale farmers access to land that they could not have afforded to purchase under any other system. (Fairlie)

From the 14th to 17th centuries, England’s open field system and communal pastures were targeted by wealthy landowners seeking to privatize them. Opponents of enclosure included luminaries like Thomas More, Hugh Latimer, William Tyndale, Lord Somerset, and Fancis Bacon, among others. Prior to 1750, most enclosures turned arable land into sheep pasture, which were less productive but more profitable for the landowner. Later, with ready availability of wool from Scotland and India and cotton from the American South, the argument for enclosure was to turn everything into mixed farm land. (Fairlie)1

The enclosure movement in England ended when commoners took communal action to preserve what remained of their commons.

The enclosure movement ended in the 1860s when influential city-dwellers noticed that areas for recreation were becoming few and far between. The Commons Preservation Society was formed and took action, from leveling fences to court cases, gaining parliamentary support within a few years. (Fairlie)

To sum up, the practice of enclosure for private ownership of land is only a few hundred years old, having worked successfully for hundreds of years prior. What we will discover as we look further is that far from Hardin’s assertion that the ruin of the commons was inevitable, history illustrates that not only have commons often been managed very successfully, but their loss has had negative consequences for the group while creating profit for the few, increasing the gulf between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” The enclosure movement in England ended when commoners took communal action to preserve what remained of their commons.

Defining the Commons

Elinor Ostrom described the commons as a boundaried, regulated space.

Hardin… recognized that the common ownership of land, and the history of its enclosure, provides a template for understanding the enclosure of other common resources, [including] intellectual property.

Elinor Ostrom, whose work we will detail in the next section, describes the commons as a boundaried, regulated space. This is likely the simplest definition.

Hardin… recognized that the common ownership of land, and the history of its enclosure, provides a template for understanding the enclosure of other common resources, [including] intellectual property. (Farlie)

This is one thing Hardin got right. The physical markers of private ownership boundaries are helpful metaphors for discussing more sophisticated forms of private property, including intangible property rights. Hardin got more wrong than right though.

“There is just one significant flaw in the tragedy parable. It does not accurately describe a commons.” (Bollier) Hardin describes an unbounded pasture without rules, hence no punishments for rule-breaking. Moreover, in his hypothetical scenario, there is no identifiable community of users communicating with one another. “Hardin has not described a commons, but a free-for-all”, confusing it with a “no-man’s-land”, and in the process has “smeared the commons as a failed paradigm for managing resources.” (Bollier)

Ostrom made three important distinctions to understand the structure of a commons, but we will highlight only the first one at this point, that between open access and the commons. Hardin described unrestricted, unregulated, open access, but in Ostrom’s definition, the fact that it is unregulated means he was not describing a commons. (Fennell)

In practice, “mixed ownership regimes are neither unusual nor avoidable, due to the scale, in that different activities are best addressed at different scales.” (Fennell) For example, a common pasture addresses a situation where the minimum feasible pasture size is larger than any one shepherd could own and maintain, given the cost of land ownership and fencing. At the same time, pooled ownership of the sheep may not be the proper scale, and herds are therefore owned individually. In this mixed scenario, setting regulations ensures that the individual ownership of sheep does not result in disproportionate harm or benefit to the community. (Fennell) Under the heading, “All the world a semicommons? The ubiquity of mixed systems”, Fennel writes,

Property, as experienced on the ground, is never wholly individual nor wholly held in common, but instead always represents a mix of ownership types. Indeed, two of the most foundational institutions in modern life – the neighborhood and the corporation – plainly constitute “mixed systems of communal and individual property rights” (Fennell)

Elinor Ostrom
Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom

What we can see here is that even in Hardin’s example, the situation is mixed between open access and individual ownership of the cattle in the pasture. We can go further to posit that it’s the mix that causes the issue, since if the cattle were part of the commons, there would be no competition for the resources they need. Yet as we’ll see, these mixed regimes are all around us, and ones that mix the commons with private interests can tend to work well, given proper conditions. Tragedy is not inevitable.

Disproving the Inevitability of Tragedy

Contemporary scholarship has reframed the commons as something other than what mainstream economics has characterized it to be, with a body of literature on governing the commons from Elinor Ostrom, Robert Keohane, Margaret McKean, and others. (Boyle) For this, the late political scientist Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University deserves special credit.2 In the 1970s economic theory championed abstract models of the economy “based on rational individualism, private property rights and free markets.” (Bollier) Framing a discussion of the commons in economic terms is important, as this is where Hardin’s argument got the most traction.

Ostrom had always been interested in cooperatives, and in the 1960s began to question some core economic assumptions, chief among those being that people cannot or will not cooperate in any stable sustainable manner. Working at times with her husband, political scientist Vincent Ostrom, she began a new cross-disciplinary study of systems that manage “common-pool resources,” or CPRs. In these systems, no one has private property rights or sole control over these common resources, all of which are highly vulnerable to over-exploitation, which in turn is difficult to police. This could be called the “tragedy of open access.” (Bollier)

Ostrom’s scholarship was distinguished by painstaking empirical fieldwork. Her landmark 1990 book, Governing the Commons is still the default framework for evaluating natural resource commons.

What distinguished Ostrom’s scholarship from that of so many academic economists was her painstaking empirical fieldwork. She visited communal landholders in Ethiopia, rubber tappers in the Amazon and fishers in the Philippines. She investigated how they negotiated cooperative schemes, and how they blended their social systems with local ecosystems. As economist Nancy Folbre of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, explained, “She would go and actually talk to Indonesian fishermen or Maine lobstermen, and ask, ‘How did you come to establish this limit on the fish catch? How did you deal with the fact that people might try to get around it?’” (Bollier)

Ostrom’s answer was Governing the Commons, a landmark 1990 book that set forth some of the basic “design principles” of effective, durable commons. These principles have been adapted and elaborated by later scholars, but her analysis remains the default framework for evaluating natural resource commons. (Bollier)

That said, her conclusions were not without resistance. Early in her career, colleagues criticized her for spending too much time studying the differences between systems instead of looking for a unifying theory. “‘When someone told you that your work was “too complex”, that was meant as an insult,’ [Ostrom] recalled.” (Nijhuis)

I still get asked, “What is the way of doing something?” There are many, many ways of doing things that work in different environments. We have got to get to the point that we can understand complexity, and harness it, and not reject it.’

Elinor Ostrom

Ostrom insisted that complexity was as important to social science as it was to ecology, and that institutional diversity needed to be protected along with biological diversity. ‘I still get asked, “What is the way of doing something?” There are many, many ways of doing things that work in different environments,’ she told an audience in Nepal in 2010. ‘We have got to get to the point that we can understand complexity, and harness it, and not reject it.’ (Nijhuis)

Ostrom became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work documenting over 800 case studies from around the world describing patterns of successful commons governance.

Ultimately, Ostrom became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work documenting over 800 case studies from around the world to describe patterns of successful commons governance, which she was able to distill as “eight rules for managing the commons”, which we will outline after the next section.  (Böll Foundation)

The fundamental economic assumption her work disproved was a sociological one, that people either could not or would not work together for the common good in any sustainable manner. It is noteworthy that an interdisciplinary approach is required here, since economists are evidently not the best judges of human behaviour.

Lloyd and Hardin inject laissez-faire individualism into an agrarian village and then gravely announce that the commons is dead.

“Both [Lloyd and Hardin] inject laissez-faire individualism into an old agrarian village and then gravely announce that the commons is dead.” (Bollier) These misunderstandings of human nature also form the basis for too many flawed studies of “prisoner’s dilemma” experiments that purport to show how people behave when confronted with dilemmas pitting trust against mistrust and personal interest against group interests, like resource allocation. (Bollier)

Aghast at the pretzel logic of economic researchers, Lewis Hyde suggested that the “tragedy” thesis be called, instead, “The Tragedy of Unmanaged, Laissez-Faire, Common-Pool Resources with Easy Access for Noncommunicating, Self-Interested Individuals.” (Bollier)

With mounting evidence from current and historical commons, in the early 1990s following Ostrom’s work disproving his theorem with hard research data, Hardin conceded,

“The title of my 1968 paper should have been ‘The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons’… Clearly the background of the resources discussed by Lloyd (and later by myself) was one of non-management of the commons under conditions of scarcity.” (Fairlie)

After conceding the work was flawed, Hardin continued to write about the commons as an inevitable tragedy, drawing allusions to Marxism and socialism as trigger words to describe a commons.

Rather than giving up on the concept, however, he continued to write about the commons as an inevitable tragedy, drawing allusions to Marxism and socialism as trigger words to describe the commons. He blames the government for causing the S&L Crisis by creating a commons, and claims that roads without tolls are congested because they too are a commons. While roads and thoroughfares generally are considered to be a commons, congestion is still not inevitable, as its cause is not so simplistic as saying the road is congested because it is shared. This defies even simple logic.

Deeper into the Commons

Software in the Commons

Levitating Meditating Gnu

Having established that (a) Hardin (and Lloyd) did not describe a proper commons, and (b) the failure of a commons is not an inevitability, we turn to the commons of intangible resources like intellectual property or software. Although we’ve already defined the term, let’s begin here with legal scholar, Harvard law professor, and Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig’s definition of a commons:

By a commons I mean a resource that is free. Not necessarily zero cost, but if there is a cost, it is a neutrally imposed, or equally imposed cost. …Open source, or free software, is a commons: the source code of Linux, for example, lies available for anyone to take, to use, to improve, to advance. No permission is necessary; no authorization may be required. These are commons because they are within the reach of members of the relevant community without the permission of anyone else. They are resources that are protected by a liability rule rather than a property rule. …The point is not that no control is present; but rather that the kind of control is different from the control we grant to property. (Boyle)

The free software movement works at building an ecosystem of open code, defined by a software license, the best-known of which is the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License, or GPL, which freely invites modifications with the caveat that they be shared with the community. The model does not fit with the free-for-all of the public domain, as there is a license restricting what can or cannot be done with the software. The framework does fit the previously-mentioned literature on governing the commons, which demonstrates not only that tragedy is not inevitable, but that successful commons were not entirely “free” but instead contained various rules or “norms” that were often invisible to the legal system or to outsiders, but which governed behaviour within the community of the commons. (Boyle)

The old dividing line in the literature on the public domain had been between the realm of property and the realm of the free. The new dividing line, drawn on the palimpsest of the old, is between the realm of individual control and the realm of distributed creation, management, and enterprise. (Boyle)

Boyle suggests,

The remarkable thing is not merely that the software works technically, but that it is an example of widespread, continued, high-quality innovation. The remarkable thing is that it works socially, as a continuing system, sustained only by a network consisting largely of volunteers.

The technical aspects of how it works (or can work) are well documented in works like The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond,3 and Rebel Code by Glyn Moody, with the Linux kernel being the classic example of a widespread free software project licensed under the GPL.

Boyle continues, suggesting that since anyone can copy and use the software without paying the creator(s), it sounds like a tragedy of the commons, since “with a non-rival, non-excludable good like software, this method of production cannot be sustained; there are inadequate incentives to ensure continued production.” (Boyle) Thus, the tragedy of the commons argument is applied to free software.

But on a global network, there are a lot of people, and with numbers that big and information overhead that small, even relatively hard projects will attract motivated and skilled people whose particular reserve price has been crossed. (Boyle)

“Reserve price” here should be understood with reference to the classic argument for free software, where a user who needs a feature that the software lacks modifies the code to add the feature and contributes it back to the commons. The reserve price is the point at which the need is great enough to warrant investing in the modification, either spending the development time personally (given the skillset) or footing the bill to hire a developer to do the work.

Not only can the software production be decentralized, but its controls systems and governance can be as well. “Governance processes, too, can be assembled through distributed methods on a global network, by people with widely varying motivations, skills, and reserve prices.” (Boyle) The variations are too important to gloss over. Every contributor will have different motivations, skillsets, and reserve prices, combined with a different balance between them.

It Matters How it Works

The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions. (Nijhuis)

The tragedy of the commons is real, but not inevitable: Ostrom’s work gives us eight clear rules for managing a commons successfully.

Throughout her career, Elinor Ostrom documented and analyzed more than 800 cases from around the world to be able to describe “Eight rules for managing the commons”  (Böll Foundation), which we can now outline. 

  1. Clearly defined boundaries, addressing who is entitled to access what.
  2. Rules that fit local circumstances, rather than assume a one-size-fits-all approach resource management.
  3. Participatory decision-making, achievable through a variety of mechanisms make people more likely follow rules and decisions they had a voice in making.
  4. The commons must be monitored to ensure the agreed-upon rules are kept. Commons don’t run strictly on good will, and require accountability.
  5. Graduated sanctions for rule-breaking. The best-working commons didn’t just ban people who broke the rules, but had a system of warnings, fines, and informal reputational consequences.
  6. Easy access to conflict resolution ensures that when issues come up, resolution is informal, cheap and straightforward so anyone can take their issues for mediation.
  7. Commons need the right to organise, as higher local authorities need to recognise their legitimacy.
  8. Commons work best when nested within larger networks. While some things can be managed locally, others may need regional cooperation.

“The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is real, but it is not inevitable.” (Williams) These eight rules provide the framework for a successful commons. Each may be addressed in a variety of ways, but they all must be present to ensure not just success, but longevity. Finally, thanks to Ostrom’s work, we have solid guidelines for the “how”. Members can also apply these guidelines to an existing commons to determine its health and take any corrective action which may be needed to ensure lasting success. Ostrom’s rules are based primarily for a commons of real property or resources, but each rule will have an application to non-tangible property such as intellectual property rights and particularly, open source or free software.

“Humans have great capabilities, and somehow we’ve had some sense that the officials had genetic capabilities that the rest of us didn’t have,” Ostrom said late in life. “I hope we can change that.” (Seal)

Does it Matter Why it Works?

A variety of incentives exist for different people in a global network where distribution costs approach zero and teams can work in a modular fashion. “It just does not matter why they do it. In lots of cases, they will do it.”

Amid speculation and attempts to understand why the system works, Yochai Benkler and James Boyle would argue the reasons are ultimately irrelevant. Speaking about software, Boyle points out that a wide variety of incentives exist for different people in a global network. Distribution costs  approach zero, and teams can work in a modular fashion. “With these assumptions, it just does not matter why they do it. In lots of cases, they will do it.” (Boyle)

Ostrom’s Law: A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.

Lee Anne Fennel

In this context, in 2011 Lee Anne Fennell coined Ostrom’s Law, which states that “A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.” (Fennell) The problem for Hardin is that the assertion that something can’t work is necessarily disproven by examples where it does work. To use Boyle’s example here, Galileo is reputed to have said “E pur si muove” in response to Cardinal Bellarmine having forced him to recant his claim that the earth revolved around the sun. “And yet it moves.” (Boyle) While the Roman Inquisition could proclaim whatever it wanted, it couldn’t change the fact of the matter. In other words, if it works in fact but not in theory, the theory is clearly wrong.

Ostrom documented over 800 instances (Böll Foundation) where collective, cooperative methods are used to meet needs. Villagers in Törbel, Switzerland have done so since 1224, and are not the only example of commons that have thrived for hundreds of years. “Their success can be traced to a community’s ability to develop its own flexible, evolving rules for stewardship, oversight of access and usage, and effective punishments for rule-breakers.” (Bollier)

The how overrules the why by virtue of the somehow. For all the theories about why it can’t work, somehow it simply does.

The why might therefore be a fun academic exercise, but the how is the important thing. Here, we can observe that the economists assumptions about “rational man” or homo economicus have been so wrong about the commons because they are rooted in a flawed assumption about the why. The how overrules the why in this case by virtue of the somehow. For all the theories about why it can’t work, somehow it simply does. Having accepted the varying motivations and incentives for members to contribute in different ways, we can understand the how without fully comprehending the why.

The Miracle of the Commons4

Even well-established systems are vulnerable to internal conflict and external pressures. As Ostrom often reminded her audiences, any strategy can succeed or fail. Community-based conservation is distinctive because many societies have only begun to understand – or remember – its potential. ‘What we have ignored is what citizens can do,’ she said.

Ostrom and her husband Vincent, also a political scientist, founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, where current students of commons management struggle, with the difficulty of managing large-scale resource problems such as air pollution at the community level. They also wrestle with the implications of her findings for the digital landscape, where the veneration of open access often collides with Ostrom’s definition of the commons as a boundaried, regulated space. And despite ‘Ostrom’s Law’, even her admirers sometimes echo her earliest critics, lamenting that the field lacks an overarching theory. (Nijhuis)

The miracle of the commons is that it does work, and has for not just hundreds, but thousands of years.

Perhaps the miracle of the commons is that it does work, and has for not just hundreds, but thousands of years. The fact that we’re dealing with technologies and intangibles that our ancient tribal forebears could never have comprehended doesn’t change the miracle. In addition to Ostrom being awarded the Nobel Prize for her work disproving the theory, when he died in 2023, his university issued a statement, saying (in part), “‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was not based on an engagement with scientific evidence and promoted an ideological agenda and conclusions that have largely been debunked by numerous scholars, including Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom (Ostrom et al. 1999).” (UCSB) 

A Tragic Foundation

I’ve relegated this part of the essay to the end for two reasons. First, it’s something of an exposé of Hardin’s belief system revealed in his other writings. Since holding one wrong idea does not mean your next one is equally flawed, this is not the manner in which to approach the tragedy of the commons. I do, however, think that in Hardin’s case there is a connection between his other ideologies and this one, in that one of those ideas was behind his purpose in writing the 1968 essay on the commons. Second, having shown that this assertion has been thoroughly disproven, we want to look at where and why it persists and to consider instances where Hardin’s fallacy as a building block for other ideologies that necessarily pose a threat to the commons, or to the common good. In short, Hardin had a flawed starting point before he wrote the Tragedy of the Commons, and others have taken it to a flawed end point.

Hardin’s Worldview & Presuppositions

As we’ve seen, Hardin’s essay was heavily criticized by anthropologists and historians who cited numerous instances of successfully-managed commons, pointing out that “commoners were not without commonsense.” For example, in pre-enclosure England, farmers met semi-annually to plan for the coming months, exchange information, and sanction those who took more than their share from the common pool. Anthropologist Arthur McEvoy wrote,

The shortcoming of the tragic myth of the commons is its strangely unidimensional picture of human nature. The farmers on Hardin’s pasture do not seem to talk to one another. As individuals, they are alienated, rational, utility-maximizing automatons and little else. The sum total of their social life is the grim, Hobbesian struggle of each against all, and all together against the pasture in which they are trapped. (Fairlie)

This is one of Hardin’s first missteps, as his hypothetical necessarily assumes all humans act in a certain manner (homo economicus). They suggest it was naive and unrealistic to depend on people’s altruism and cooperation. To them, “[t]he idea that commons can set and enforce limits on usage also seems improbable because it rejects the idea of humans having unbounded appetites.” (Bollier) Economists nonetheless picked up on this, as it fit well within their economic presuppositions.

This way of seeing the commons reflects the worldview of market economics, which distorts biophysical and social realities. It sees human beings as separate from each other and existing independently of earthly systems. This is the economic view of life: humans as autonomous individuals constantly striving to maximize their “personal utility” through competition in Darwinian Markets. This point of view implies that living systems are best managed through individual property rights, and that our relationship with the Earth should be extractive and market-based. (Böll Foundation)

Hardin’s primary impetus for writing his 1968 essay was to argue that we needed population control.

Hardin’s primary impetus for writing his 1968 essay was to argue that we needed population control. This was a popular subject at the time and into the 1970s, with assumptions based on projections from that time erroneously carried through the next 30+ years, as Hans Rosling has shown. He may not have gotten it 100% correct – predicting the future by extrapolating from the past can be a tricky business filled with uncontrollable variables – but he did successfully show that in his 1993 book, Living Within Limits, Hardin was wrong about population.

To manage the commons of Planet Earth’s resources, Hardin’s solution was to reduce the group size, essentially managing the group rather than the resource. A look at how he proposed to achieve his solution reveals a very deep ugliness. As Michelle Nijhuis puts it,

Hardin, for his part, seemed bent on making his own ideas as repugnant as possible. Among his proposed solutions to the tragedy of the commons was coercive population control: ‘Freedom to breed is intolerable,’ he wrote in his 1968 essay, and should be countered with ‘mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon’. He feared not only runaway human population growth but the runaway growth of certain populations. …Several years after the publication of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, he discouraged the provision of food aid to poorer countries: ‘The less provident and less able will multiply at the expense of the abler and more provident, bringing eventual ruin upon all who share in the commons,’ he predicted. He compared wealthy nations to lifeboats that couldn’t accept more passengers without sinking. (Nijhuis)

In later years, Hardin’s racism lost its thin veil. In 1997 he told an interviewer that the idea of a multiethnic society was a disaster. He even doubled down, saying “A multiethnic society is insanity. I think we should restrict immigration for that reason.” “Still,” as Nijhuis observes, “many of those who abhor Hardin’s racist ideas – or would if they were aware of them – are seduced by the simplicity of his tragedy.” (Nijhuis)

In 1963, Hardin began advocating for reproductive rights, but in later interviews admitted that he had used the rhetoric to cloak his true interest in abortion and sterilization, because “[t]o mention abortion’s effect on population growth would be to arouse the suspicion that I was a nasty Nazi.” (SPLC)

With the 1968 publication of “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Hardin began calling for the United States to reject the UN Declaration of Human Rights,

With the 1968 publication of “The Tragedy of the Commons,” he began calling for the United States to reject the UN Declaration of Human Rights, asserting that the US government should adopt coercive measures to prevent the “wrong” people from breeding. As to what those measures might be, he elsewhere spoke in praise of China’s one-child policy and suggested that forcible sterilization was a viable option.

Hardin asserted black people were intellectually inferior, which gives sinister overtones to his statement in an undergraduate biology textbook that “[t]here seems to be little danger of society’s being deprived of something valuable by the sterilization of all feeble-minded individuals.” If any doubt remained that his population concerns were simply a cover for his racist ideology, he opposed groups like Zero Population Growth, which encouraged their primarily white membership to remain child-free. (SPLC)

To Hardin, Earth was a lifeboat with limited carrying capacity. “Complete justice”—tending to the needs of all, like those cats on the farm—would lead to “complete catastrophe,” as he later wrote. Poor countries—and poor people—were responsible for the lion’s share of population growth; it was the responsibility of wealthy countries to limit their fertility rates, he argued. (Seal)

He viewed disabled persons as intellectually, physically, and culturally inferior and openly supported policies to restrict immigration, promote racial segregation, and forcibly sterilize people of color and disabled persons along with the “intellectually feeble.” (UCSB Statement on Garrett Hardin) These views weren’t new for Hardin – just four years after World War II, he wrote in a biology textbook for undergraduates providing a full discussion of “positive and negative eugenics,” making the case in support of both to prevent “a dysgenic future.” He asserted that

In all cases, the studies indicate that as long as our present social organization continues, there will be a slow but continuous downward trend in the average intelligence . . . The sterilization of the feeble-minded has been opposed for various reasons. One of the strongest reasons has been the feeling that it somehow interferes with the “rights” of the individual. In discussing this point, one must first emphasize that sterilization alters an individual in one respect only: it keeps him from having children. (Amend)

While his statements so far are deeply based in racism and eugenics, he also appears to regard the poor as somehow deficient. When Hardin’s ideas are applied in economic circles where his essay continues to be popular, the direct implication would be that the wealthy should provide no aid to the poor and let every person act in their own self interest so that the weaker would perish (presumably by design) rather than consume any share of resources that may directed to the wealthy, allowing them to continue and prosper in the hoarding of their wealth in true Darwinian fashion. Repugnant, indeed: these were his actual points of view, relatively covert in the 1960s, but by the 1990s it was in full view.

Hardin supported the end of international aid in food, agriculture, and medicine; approved of forced sterilization; and advocated the segregation of nations by ethnicity and religion. He said that “a multiethnic society is insanity,” and believed there was scientific evidence that black people had a lower IQ.

Hardin supported the end of international aid in food, agriculture, and medicine; approved of sterilization; and advocated the segregation of nations by ethnicity and religion. He said that “a multiethnic society is insanity,” and signed onto “Mainstream Science on Intelligence,” a Wall Street Journal editorial that argued IQ tests provided scientific evidence of Black Americans’ inferior intelligence. His support for abortion rights and birth control often emphasized developing nations and “feeble-minded individuals.” (Seal)

In 1997, he wrote a letter to the ACLU denouncing them for defending the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause. He claimed to be “daily confronted with hordes of highly pregnant Mexicans coming across the border at the last minute and having their babies in American hospitals—at American expense.” (Amend) The rhetoric sounds somewhat familiar in today’s political climate, for reasons we’ll come to.

Hardin’s “scientific” writing generally targeted the educated public with the assertion that immigration was a plausible ecological threat, denying any racist intent for saying so. Meanwhile, for a different audience he published articles for far-right publications like The Social Contract, a magazine founded by an anti-immigration activist, and Chronicles, another far-right magazine, this one controversial even among conservatives due to its blatant racism and anti-Semitism. (SPLC)

Hardin expressed concern in a 1960 essay about “competitive exclusion”, the idea that two cultures living in the same space would compete for resources, with the larger population eventually winning out. As with his later argument about the commons, “these abstract but commonsense sounding ideas were presented as immovable laws of nature,” going so far in the essay to say that “the competitive exclusion principle cannot be ‘subject to proof or disproof by facts, ordinarily understood.’” (Amend) It’s hard to argue a point with those constraints. Given his anti-immigration stance, he was clearly concerned that non-whites would outnumber whites in America. Thirty years later, he hadn’t given up on the argument, facts be damned. He wrote, “in time the slowly reproducing population will be displaced by the fast one. This is passive genocide. It may be that no one is ever killed, but the genes of one group replace the genes of the other. That’s genocide.” (Amend)

UCSB, where Hardin taught until his death in 2023, issued a statement calling his “nativist, ableist, and eugenicist” views “morally repugnant and ethically reprehensible.”

UCSB, where he taught until his death in 2023, in a statement the same year called his nativist, ableist, and eugenicist views “morally repugnant and ethically reprehensible.” (Seal) After his death, John Tanton and Wayne Lutton of the aforementioned The Social Contract founded the Garrett Hardin Society to continue Hardin’s work to transform environmentalism into a weapon against immigrants, minorities and poor nations. (SPLC)

Rereading Hardin with an understanding of his racist worldview and ulterior motives, everything shifts from the pessimistic tone one finds in a first reading to a much more sinister one. It seems fair to assert that his extreme white nationalist and eugenicist inform and underpin all his writings, specifically, “Tragedy of the Commons” can be singled out as promoting this agenda. Final words on Garrett Hardin’s body of work go to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who maintains his profile in its “extremist files” and classifies him as a white nationalist.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, maintains Hardin’s profile in its “extremist files” and classifies him as a white nationalist.

Over the course of his career, Hardin wrote 27 books and over 350 articles, many of which were frank in their racism and quasi-fascist ethnonationalism. Nevertheless, whenever Hardin’s views are presented to the public, the white nationalism that unified his thought is invariably glossed over. In general, the only places to find open discussions of the entirety of Hardin’s thought are on white supremacist websites, where he is celebrated as a hero.

Politics & Economics in the Tragedy of the Commons

Hardin averred that private property ownership or its equivalent was the only way to avert tragic outcomes. Rather than focus on his dubious case for population control, Hardin’s argument was capitalized on (pun intended) by free market economists and right-wing theorists promoting privatization schemes going into the 1990s. (Bollier) These economists, like the English landowners before them,  argued for privatization of the commons, but they too missed the mark. (Fairlie)

Still, with Hardin being a libertarian-minded scientist, his work has “been catnip to conservative ideologues and economists (who are so often one and the same).” Viewing Hardin’s essay like a gospel parable affirming core principles of neoliberal economic ideology such as the importance of “free markets” and justification of the property rights of the wealthy. While bolstering commitment to private property and  individual rights as the cornerstone of economic thought and policy. (Bollier)

Even in academia, the tragedy of the commons is seen as an economic truism, with Hardin’s essay becoming “a staple of undergraduate education in the US, taught not just in economics courses but in political science, sociology and other fields.” Little wonder then that so many are dismissive of the commons. To them, the “commons = chaos, ruin and failure.” (Bollier)

One tends to examine less critically the opinions with which one agrees.

As a proof-text, Hardin has found amplification among neo-liberals who are less concerned about Hardin’s essay having been thoroughly debunked, caring only that it supports their position. After all, one tends to examine less critically the opinions with which one agrees.

Building policy on such flawed assumptions causes real and lasting harm. For example, John Locke was used to justify treating the New World as terra nullius—open, unowned land—even though it was populated by millions of Indigenous people who “managed their natural resources as beloved commons with unwritten but highly sophisticated rules.” (Bollier)

In the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, the economic mindset conveyed by Hardin’s essay prompted Wall Street to maximize private gain without regard for systemic risk or local impact. “The real tragedy precipitated by “rational” individualism is not the tragedy of the commons, but the tragedy of the market.” (Bollier)

Arguments in favor of the new enclosure movement “depend heavily on the intellectually complacent, analytically unsound assumptions of the ‘neo-liberal orthodoxy’ of economic policy trusting in “deregulation, privatization, and the creation and defense of secure property rights as the cure for all ills.” (Boyle)

In the face of dwindling cod stock in Atlantic Canada during the 1970s, the government stepped in to impose its version of management. Unfortunately, social anthropologist Tobias Haller suggests that overuse of resources often stems from “the paradox of the state being present and absent at the same time.” The cod collapse bears this out. …The real tragedy, Haller says, is the use of Hardin’s writing to justify the removal of commons. …Hardin’s essay maintains its influence, Haller says, because it explains resource exhaustion in a way that continues to legitimize the funneling of power to the powerful, steering control of the commons away from the individuals who most rely on them and toward states and the private market. (Seal)

In other words, if Hardin’s essay can be pulled out and waved around, it can justify the exertion of someone’s power over a commons. As in many cases where this took place, it didn’t end well in Atlantic Canada.

Epilogue

Late in his life, Hardin wrote about another animal—the ostrich, famous for burying its head in sand. By ignoring the taboo of overpopulation, he said, we were all becoming the ostrich.

But, as Hardin noted, the ostrich doesn’t actually bury its head. The metaphor was based on a myth. It didn’t reflect reality, even though it had seeped into the public consciousness.

He then asked an ironic question: “What accounts for the endurance of such a silly story?” (Seal)

Next: Why This Matters.

Notes

  1. The main arguments for enclosure were that the open field system prevented “improvement” because individuals could not innovate; that the waste lands and common pastures were “bare-worn” or full of scrub, and overstocked with half-starved beasts; and that those who survived on the commons were lazy and impoverished (in other words “not inclined to work for wages”), and that enclosure of the commons would force them into employment. On the other side, the main arguments for the commons (against enclosure) were that common pastures and waste lands were the mainstay of the independent poor; when they were overgrazed, it was often the result of overstocking by the wealthiest commoners, who were also the people arguing for enclosure; and that enclosure would engross already wealthy landowners, force poor people off the land and into urban slums, and result in depopulation. (Fairlie) ↩︎
  2. Born in Los Angeles in 1933, Elinor Ostrom was “the only child of a musician and an out-of-work set designer who grew food in a backyard garden to help weather the Great Depression. Her mother secured her a spot at Beverly Hills High School, where she was a self-described ‘poor kid in a rich kid’s school.’“ (Seal) She joined the school’s debate team, where she learned that public policy questions always have multiple answers, a lesson she would carry. Success at Beverly Hills High opened the opportunity to study political science at UCLA, where she became the first in her family to attend college. She eventually earned a PhD despite objections from both the university, which was skeptical of a woman’s employment prospects in the field, and her first husband, whom she promptly divorced. (Seal) ↩︎
  3. The title is the first in a series of three essays published by Raymond (“ESR”) online, later compiled and released in book form. Commonly abbreviated as CatB. THe other two essays were titled “The Magic Cauldron” on the economics of open source software, and “Homesteading the Noosphere”, which deals with ideology, behavior, and customs customs surrounding open-source software, its underlying theory of property rights, hacker culture as a “gift culture”‘, and conflict resolution. ↩︎
  4. Credit for this heading goes to Michelle Nijhuis’s beautifully-titled article cited above. ↩︎

Works Cited

Various or Unspecified Authors

Further Reading

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The Commons

Unmasking the Tragedy of the Commons

by Brent Toderash time to read: 25 min
The Commons Why Unmasking the “Tragedy of the Commons…