this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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The tragedy of the commons is a capitalist myth
How so? I think of it as an anti-capitalist thought problem in the first place.
It's not how either commons or people work, it's the fantasy of one eugenicist freak
So uh, did you read this article? It most certainly does not claim "It’s not how either commons or people work". Quite the opposite.
It's a thought problem, not a literal pasture anywhere.
In other words, "he's not wrong, he's just a racist". I didn't know about the guy before this article. Ironically, they have accomplished exactly the accreditation they were trying to discourage.
That is already how I understood the thought problem's relevance to climate change prior to reading this article.
Double strawman. 1) No one invokes "Hardin", that's why they had to tell us who he was. And 2) The tragedy of the commons doesn't make any claims about who is to blame for hogging the hypothetical "commons". The tragedy of the commons is just a situation. It could apply to any finite resource; ex. if someone is selfishly hogging the wifi bandwidth, everyone's netflix experience sucks. It's not relevant whether 20 people are hogging it, or just one or two people.
The article seems like a non-sequitur, and a waste of time. It means well, but I wish they wouldn't preserve this racists legacy in this way. Feels like taking it's taking the discussion 2 steps backward to take 1 step forward.
He is wrong, because he's a racist. The commons the "tragedy of the commons" is about were an actual real social system which did not work the way he supposes. Capitalism inclosed and ruined them, just like it's inclosing and ruining the planet. The idea that this is just a natural result of a shared resource existing is entirely ass backwards, and comes from this guy's racism and capitalist ideology.
It seems like Hardin didn't even originate the thought problem. The article conveniently leaves out that Hardin simply wrote an article about, and created terminology to refer to William Forster Lloyd's thought problem from over 100 years earlier. Instead they opt to give the racist credit. Why?
Again, the commons is not an imaginary thought experiment, but a real thing that existed, and the so called tragedy is just flat out bad history.
William Forster Lloyd was an early 19th century British economist, I can fucking guarantee he was racist too.