Tragedy of the Commons

The tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individuals acting in their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all others by depleting or spoiling a shared resource through their collective action. The phenomenon was first described by the British economist William Forster Lloyd in 1833. Lloyd observed that because grazing on the commons (fields that were open to anyone) was free, the land was spoiled, which diminished the value of the fields for everyone. Can you think of a free resource that’s possibly subject to the same tragedy? Sharks might!

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COLLABORATORS
Script: Jonas Koblin
Artist: Pascal Gaggelli
Voice: Mithril
Coloring: Nalin
Editing: Peera Lertsukittipongsa
Head of Partnership Program: Selina Bador
Production: Morgan Lizop, Bianka
Proofreading: Susan
Sound Design: Miguel Ojeda
Classroom exercise: Morgan Lizop

SOUNDTRACKS
Toys Are Alive - Studio Le Bus
Terror Avenue - Jack Pierce

DIG DEEPER with these resources:
Bruce Yandle talks about the tragedy of the commons and the ways that people have avoided the overuse of resources that are held in common. Examples discussed in this econtalk include fisheries, roads, rivers and the air.
Learn about carbon tax as a solution for polluting the air and reducing carbon emissions. Carbon taxes are intended to make visible the "hidden" social costs of carbon emissions, which are otherwise felt only in indirect ways like more severe weather events.

SOURCES
Tragedy of the commons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Plastics in ocean
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_New_Plastics_Economy.pdf

Swiss alps law
https://www.csub.edu/~craupp/psyc332/CHPT6.pdf

Age of Humans
https://www.universetoday.com/38125/how-long-have-humans-been-on-earth

Age of Sharks
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/shark-evolution-a-450-million-year-timeline.html#:~:text=The%20earliest%20fossil%20evidence%20for,been%20found%2C%20but%20no%20teeth

Homework assignment
https://economicskey.com/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-5741

CLASSROOM EXERCISE
Don’t Kill The Rabbit! To experience the tragedy of the commons first hand, here is a group game.

The game has four elements:
A circle = the commons
Participants = farmers
Carrots = food
Rabbits = animals to be fed

Getting started:
Choose a number of people (say 5) to do this exercise with.
On an erasable board, draw a circle, then draw carrots in it (say 20).
Give each participant a secret note with a number on it (say: 1, 3, 1, 1, 4). This number represents how many rabbits each participant has to feed. Each rabbit needs to eat at least one carrot per round to stay alive.
Ask participants, one after the other, to take as many carrots from the circle as they want. At the end of the round, double the amount of all the carrots that are left.
Then continue to play round after round until all carrots are gone and the first rabbit dies.

The first time you do this, make sure you have exactly twice as many carrots as there are rabbits to feed so that if everyone picks just what they need (the carrots are replenished). What do you observe? Are the commons being depleted and do the rabbits die?

Try to do this again with a different number of carrots, letting participants tell each other how many rabbits they are feeding, or with settings we haven’t thought of. Let us know what you observe in the comments below.

Chapter
00:00 Introduction
00:47 Tragedy of the Commons theory
01:31 Social Norms
02:01 Privatization
02:33 State Regulation
03:50 What do you think?
04:15 Ending