[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons:

[Bill Totten]

Population and the disguises of Providence

by Garret Hardin

from Commons Without Tragedy (Shepheard-Walwyn, 1991)

edited by Robert V Andelson

_____

Note: Compare this 1991 article with the scathing attack by Ian Angus on
a 1968 article by the same author that I posted here a few hours ago.  I
wonder why Angus didn't even bother citing this article: Was he
maliciously using Professor Hardin and his 1968 article as a straw man
to knock down, or was he just too lazy to read the 1991 article. I
haven't yet read Dr Hardin's 1998 article from Science Magazine at
www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/280/5364/682, but I suspect it is
much more similar to this 1991 article than the one attacked by Ian
Angus.  Bill Totten.
_____

THE COMPLEX of concerns we blanket with the name 'the population
problem' has been with us for almost two hundred years. Any 'problem'
that persists that long without resolution should lead us to suspect
subconscious resistances. In this instance a major resistance is, I
think, centered around the concept of Providence. We would do well to
look into the origin and variations of this concept.

The word 'Providence' was much used in the eighteenth century, but it is
seldom heard now. Nonetheless, the idea behind the word still plays a
role in shaping people's thoughts. There seems to be an almost
irreducible hunger for this supportive idea. Psychoanalytically
speaking, this hunger is no mystery: each of us starts life as a
helpless little being to whom all the essentials must be supplied. It is
natural and necessary that an infant should expect to be provided for.
As we develop we outgrow some of these expectations; but under stress,
or when puzzled, we may relapse into an infantile attitude of expecting
Providence (under whatever name) to take care of us.

The Latin word providere means to see ahead, hence to provide for. As
the word 'God' became somewhat unfashionable in the eighteenth century,
'Providence' became its surrogate. The psychoanalytic weight of the two
words is much the same. This century was later labeled 'the
Enlightenment' by those who approved the change.

In the same century another substitution was made, as Robert Nisbet
tells us {1}. Turgot, one of the seminal minds of the time, made the
personal transition in less than a year. In July of 1750, in a public
address at the Sorbonne, Turgot praised the idea of Providence as one of
Christianity's great gifts to the world. But by December of the same
year he had decided that the idea of progress (which also has ancient
roots) was far more deserving of admiration. As Nisbet says: 'with
respect to the idea of progress, Turgot, without abandoning the
structure or framework of his first address at the Sorbonne, secularized
it.'

Progress - a secularized version of Providence - soon came to mean
principally technological progress. A new faith developed: 'Technology
will solve our problems'. This is surely a providential idea. The
emotional appeal is the same; the hunger is the same. As the
acknowledged historian of progress, J B Bury, says: 'it was just the
theory of an active Providence that the theory of Progress was to
replace; and it was not till men felt independent of Providence that
they could organise a theory of Progress' {2}. We note that in 1751,
after he had abandoned Providence for Progress, Turgot renounced his
ecclesiastical ambitions.

At the end of the same decade, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam
Smith gave memorable form to another providential idea:

The rich ..., though they mean only their own conveniency, though the
sole end which they propose be the gratification of their own vain and
insatiable desires, ... divide with the poor the produce of all their
improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same
distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made had
the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants;
and thus, without intending it, without knowing it, advance the
interests of society ... {3}

Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is, of course, a figure of speech. Note
his clever salesmanship in tying the argument to what would, two
centuries later, be called the 'trickle-down' theory of distribution,
thus easing the pain of accepting what looks at first like wholly
selfish behaviour. The selfish entrepreneur, though he intends only his
own good (said Smith), nevertheless acts for the benefit of all society.
Such is the faith of laissez-faire; it is surely a providential idea.
Seventeen years later Adam Smith developed it more fully in his classic
text, The Wealth of Nations.

Other men added rhetorical embellishments. Ten years before Smith's
classic work, La Riviere asserted that laissez-faire produced l'ordre
naturel. Then, as now, the word 'natural' enjoyed prestige. In 1810
David Ricardo, in The High Price of Bullion, claimed that 'Where there
is free competition, the interests of the individual and that of the
community are never at variance' {4}. I have italicized the word 'never'
to call attention to several points. First, italics suggest the
authority Ricardo was trying to bestow on the idea. Second, the claim of
an invariable correlation of individual and community interests is one
that was easily accepted by economists, though it was, as we shall see,
denied by many serious students of population, beginning with Malthus.
Lastly, for many economists laissez-faire became something of a
religious belief, a ready substitute for 'Providence'.

Pursuing the history of ideas to their earliest origins one finds the
germ of laissez-faire in the writings of Chuang Tzu of the fourth
century BC: 'Good order results spontaneously when things are left
alone' {5}. Of course few in eighteenth century Europe were aware of
what had been thought in China two millennia earlier. Following the idea
of 'spontaneous order' all the way to the present we find that the Nobel
economist F A Hayek, in a book published in 1988, echoes Chuang Tzu,
matching the unqualified praise of Ricardo: 'Order generated without
design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive' {6}.

Few biologists would argue with that assertion: but what is explicitly
said hardly justifies that which the author no doubt hopes the reader
will infer, namely that human beings can never improve on nature. Even
if human-generated order is usually a poor match for nature's designs it
does not follow that economic libertarians are wise in holding that
humanity should renounce all foresight, all planning and all
intervention in the order of nature.

The Utterly Dismal Theorem

The congruence of self-interest and community interest implied by
laissez-faire was a comforting one to the people of the late eighteenth
century. Into this complacent world burst Malthus with his assertion
that, when population is involved, laissez-faire reproduction does not
automatically produce a pleasant world. Unhindered reproduction, he
said, causes the population to increase 'geometrically'
('exponentially', we say now), while the means of subsistence increases
only arithmetically. Reproduction can easily outrun food production.

Malthus was right in the first assertion: in the absence of
'environmental resistance' exponential reproduction is the innate result
of all healthy living. We can hardly imagine a different biology. But
Malthus' belief that subsistence increases arithmetically has no basis
in fact. There is no general law that predicts the rate at which the
human species improves the technology with which the environment is
exploited. Later commentators suggested that Malthus was dimly aware of
the principle of 'diminishing returns'. Malthus denied this explanation.
The dispute need not detain us here.

It is manifestly clear that Malthus's theory does not lead to the
attainment of happiness through laissez-faire reproduction. This
conclusion has been expressed unequivocally in our time by another
economist, Kenneth Boulding. He first describes Malthus's 'famous dismal
theorem of economics' which he summarizes in these words:

... if the only check on the growth of population is starvation and
misery, then no matter how favorable the environment or how advanced the
technology the population will grow until it is miserable and starves.
The theorem, indeed, has a worse corollary which has been described as
the utterly dismal theorem. This is the proposition that if the only
check on the growth of population is starvation and misery, then any
technological improvement will have the ultimate effect of increasing
the sum of human misery, as it permits a larger population to live in
precisely the same state of misery and starvation as before... {7}

In spite of its pessimistic cast the Essay of Malthus was given a
favourable reception when it first appeared. But its hard-headed
approach to human problems was better suited to the century of the
Enlightenment than it was to the succeeding Romantic century. A
determined and continuing search was made for 'softer' mechanisms than
the 'misery and vice' that Malthus proposed as the great controllers of
population size. In 1832 (two years before the death of Malthus) one
Thomas Rowe Edmonds put forward an interesting theory:

Amongst the great body of the people at the present moment, sexual
intercourse is the only gratification; and thus, by a most unfortunate
concurrence of adverse circumstances, population goes on augmenting at a
period when it ought to be restrained ... When [the working class] are
better fed they will have other enjoyments at command than sexual
intercourse, and their numbers, therefore, will not increase in the same
proportion as at present. {8}

Society should make the poor rich, advised Edmonds, so that they will
have better things to do with their free time than entertain one another
as animals do. This recommendation was no doubt favourably received by
many Victorians, who - publicly at any rate - deprecated sexual
intercourse. The substitution theory even surfaced more than a century
later when it was suggested that television sets be put in every village
in India, so that villagers would discover that other recreations are
more enjoyable than 'doin' what comes naturally'. Many villages in the
Third World now have television sets, but the predicted effect on human
fertility has failed to make its appearance.

Ten years after Edmonds' ill-starred proposal Thomas Doubleday put
forward another:

It is a fact, admitted by all gardeners as well as botanists, that if a
tree, plant, or flower, be placed in mould, either naturally or
artificially made too rich for it, a plethoric state is produced, and
fruitfulness ceases ... There cannot be a doubt that, with the animal
creation ... fecundity is totally checked by the plethoric state ... the
doe, or female rabbit, and ... the sow will not conceive if fed to a
certain height of fatness ... leanness is indispensable to conception
... {9}

Is it true that fertility is inversely correlated with the quality of
the diet? Doubleday's thesis of 1842 became a priori suspect when Darwin
published his theory of evolution in 1859. Natural selection has the
automatic effect of making good (though unconscious) economizers of all
species. It makes Darwinian sense for individuals to convert an increase
in food into an increase in progeny; a species that became more fertile
under starvation conditions would imperil its survival.

Empirical facts corroborate the evolutionary predictions. In reviewing
these it will help to make the distinction that has become standard in
demography: fecundity is the potentiality for having children, while
fertility measures the actual production of children. As far as the
fecundity of human beings is concerned the effect of nutrition is beyond
controversy. Rose Frisch, a leader in this field of research, has
summarized the findings in this way: 'Good nutrition leads to greater
weight, more body fat in the female, leading to regular menstruation and
higher fecundity, [thus] leading to greater fertility' {10}.

The explanation of Doubleday's facts is easily given. The excessive fat
of penned-up rabbits and pigs is an artefact of domestication: their
relatives in the wild would never achieve such gross fatness, thanks in
large part to the regimen of involuntary exercise imposed on them by
predators. Natural selection has not had to deal with Doubleday's kind
of 'plethoric state'.

 From the earliest days students of population have tried to induce
desired political changes from scientific facts. Edmonds, for instance,
saw the hand of Providence at work: 'To better the condition of the
labouring classes, that is, to place more food and comforts before them,
however paradoxical it may appear, is the wisest mode to check
redundancy' {11}. When Providence works this way it is easy for human
beings to cooperate with her. But Frisch's findings point to the
opposite conclusion, a fact that disturbs her (and no doubt many
others). Of Rose Frisch it has been reported that: "She expresses
concern that her findings on the fat-fertility relationship might be
used as 'scientific' documentation of the negative value of sending
surplus food to the underfed populations of the world ... She believes
'a greater effort is needed to provide contraceptive methods together
with adequate nutrition' " {12}.

The providential bias in population theories has been strong from the
earliest days. Going back to 1847 we find that the anonymous translator
of the works of a Genevan economist, Sismondi, opined that; 'Sanitary
improvements, and whatever tends to lengthen life, are the most
effectual means of restraining a too great increase of population' {13}.
By the end of the nineteenth century the tenderhearted view of
population dynamics had a firm hold on such influential people as those
in the Bloomsbury set. Geoffrey Searle has given a telling description
of their position:

Socialists, predisposed to believe that the solution to all difficulties
lay in a radical improvement of the social environment, also noted that
there was an inverse relationship between fertility and income. From
this they deduced that higher wages and better living conditions
automatically brought about a reduction in the birth rate. This was the
conclusion reached by the Webbs [Sidney and Beatrice] in Industrial
Democracy [1897], which includes a discussion of differential fertility
within the working class. Many other socialists followed the Webbs'
lead. Thus, Mrs Pember Reeves wrote in 1913: '... for those who deplore
large families in the case of poor people, it must be a comfort to
remember a face which experience shows us, that as poverty decreases,
and as the standard of comfort rises, so does the size of the family
diminish. Should we be able to conquer the problem of poverty, we should
automatically solve the problem of the excessively large family.' {14}

The imputing of the miseries of overpopulation to the actions of
injustice was made more explicit in 1952 in the writings of the
Brazilian nutritionist, Josue de Castro. In The Geography of Hunger he
wrote: 'Hunger has been chiefly created by the inhuman exploitation of
colonial riches, by the latifundia and one-crop culture which lay waste
the colony, so that the exploiting country can take too cheaply the raw
materials its properous industrial economy requires' {15}.

Sadly, Castro reports that 'A large part of the world is not yet
convinced of the necessity of doing away with hunger once for all',
which is unfortunate because: 'when all the world's parts are
indissolubly linked into one living whole, it is no longer possible to
let one region rot and starve without infecting the rest, and
threatening the whole world with death' {16}. One can empathize with
Castro's intention - namely, to mobilize the indifferent to eradicate
hunger from the world - without accepting his hypothesis that hunger is
infectious in the same way that microbial diseases are infectious. If
hunger spreads from the poor to the rich it is either because the rich
are too stupid to manage their own affairs, or because they become
infected by the idea of sharing-without-limit. Ideas, even malfunctional
ones, are infectious.

All of the many causes proposed for overpopulation suffer from the same
logical weakness: they assume that correlation equals causation. But
correlation can be read in either direction. Mrs Reeves' assertion that
'as poverty decreases, the size of the family diminishes', implies that
wealth is the cause of diminished fertility. Why did she not say, 'as
the size of the family diminishes, wealth increases'? In truth, most
couples, rich or poor, know that adding another child to their family
will, in all probability, diminish their wealth and well-being. So the
hypothesis that fertility causes poverty is not an ungrounded
speculation. Closer co the truth is the hypothesis that the causal
relation of poverty and fertility is a circular one, an increase in
either tending to increase the other: a true vicious circle.

Long ago logicians labeled the error of deducing cause from sequence as
the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. ('After this, therefore because
of this'.) It's a pity that many scholars continue to fall into this
trap. One who did not was Joseph Townsend, an English minister.
Commenting on his travels in Spain in 1791 he wrote: 'In a fully peopled
country, to say, that no one shall suffer want is absurd. Could you
supply their wants, you would soon double their numbers.' {17} Note that
this was said eight years before Malthus' Essay was published. Was this
insight a new discovery of Townsend's? Undoubtedly it was not. It is
highly probable that ordinary folk understood this population principle
for millennia, but it was not often voiced precisely because 'everybody
knew it'. Then after Malthus it seemed too heartless and pessimistic a
thought to state in public. The assertion of more providential
principles was a surer path to public favor.

Anti-Malthusian hypotheses are legion. The diminution of fertility was,
at various times, asserted to follow from: amusements alternative to
sex; rich food; excess protein; better sanitation; industrialization;
modernization (whatever that is); land reform; social justice; lessening
of infant mortality; education; or - according to one's political bias -
the adoption of communism or capitalism. The pattern is clear: since the
most plausible proposals for controlling population are 'unacceptable',
whoever has the temerity to admit that population might be a problem
promptly sees a chance to advance the reform of his choice by asserting
that his reform is the best way to control population. Providence is in
the saddle again.

The less doctrinaire commentators sometimes say that simple wealth is
all that is needed to bring down fertility. This raises a question of
definition, which is implicit in most of the entries on the reformers'
lists. What is wealth, really? Both income and wealth per capita are
greater in European countries than they are in the 'Third World'
countries. By conventional measures, wealth and fertility are inversely
related. But it has been remarked that, in Europe at least, 'a housing
shortage is the best contraceptive'. Can a shortage be a true form of
wealth? A young couple reduced to sharing the inadequate apartment of
parents cannot agree that this shortage is wealth. As concerns fertility
and population matters, the Gross National Product is a gross and
inaccurate measure of real wealth. Statistics are tricky.

In the middle of the twentieth century, there appeared a population
hypothesis so minimally specified as to be almost mystical in nature,
namely the Benign Demographic Transition. The initial adjective has here
been added to the usual form of the name for reasons that will be made
clear presently.

The Benign Demographic Transition

Ignoring short-term fluctuations, the population of Europe was nearly
stable for many centuries, with both fertility and mortality at high
levels (the rate of each being about forty per thousand population per
year). In the last few centuries both fertility and mortality have
fallen, with mortality falling first. The result has been an increase in
population. After a delay of some time, fertility also fell. It is
reasonable to assume that, sooner or later in a world of limits, the
fertility race must once again equal the mortality rate, but this time
at a low level for both. This situation seems to have been reached in
some of the Central European countries (Hungary and West Germany, for
instance). The change from [High Fertility & High Mortality] to [Low
Fertility & Low Mortality] is called the demographic transition. It was
first identified in France in 1934 under the name 'revolution
demographique' {18}. The anglicization of the name came a decade later.

The term 'demographic transition' has come to be more than mere
description. Implicitly it is a theory about the way human populations
automatically adjust to improved circumstances. It is assumed that the
transition will eventually be complete (low fertility = low mortality)
and stable, even though there has not been time to validate the latter
point. It is also assumed that the forces that keep fertility low will
(providentially!) not be painful to contemplate or experience. The fact
that pain was not emphasized in the transition experience in European
history is no doubt a consequence of two factors: the slowness of the
transition (it took place over some two or three centuries); and the
fact that most histories were written by the comfortable people who
suffered the least from the transition. It was easy for demographers
immersed in a European culture to assume that European history was the
model for the history of all cultures, sooner or later. The demographic
transition was seen as a historical imperative. Such a gratuitous
assumption has been condemned by the philospher Karl Popper as
historicism {19}. The demographic transition theory is a post hoc
fallacy universalized and projected into the future.

If the world has limits - which is the only reasonable assumption -
terrestrial population growth must eventually come to an end as the
aggregate fertility rate once more becomes equal to the aggregate
mortality rate. For both to be high, or both low, would equally well
bring the transition to a close, but transitionists assume that both
will be low: that is the reason for calling the theory they support the
Benign Demographic Transition Theory. As used in argumentation the
theory implied that making people rich and comfortable would remove the
threat of overpopulation.

By 1969 a widely used population textbook called transition theory 'one
of the best documented generalizations in the social sciences' {20}.
Only a few years later the demographer Michael Teitelbaum expressed
serious doubts: 'its explanatory power has come into increasing
scientific doubt at the very time that it is achieving its greatest
acceptance by nonscientists' {21}. In 1985 Teitelbaum and Winter spelled
out a more forceful criticism: 'It is doubtful whether this theory was
ever truly a theory at all (that is, a set of hypotheses with predictive
force) ...' {22}.

The literature undercutting the Benign Demographic Transition theory
grows ever larger. Etienne van de Walle concludes that 'central Africa
is one vast contradiction of the theory: mortality has fallen, and
fertility has risen, for two generations, with no end in sight' {23}.
Ester Boserup predicts that 'Population increase will be rapid in Africa
for many decades ...' {24}. Demographers and other professional students
of population have learned their lesson, but still the Benign
Demographic Transition theory guides the work of those engaged in
professional telephilanthropy - philanthropy targeted on people who are
distant in space or ethnic characteristics.

There are two reasons for the continued fashionability of the Benign
Demographic Transition theory. First, it is a providential theory and
hence eminently acceptable. Second, it justifies the jobs of those who
are employed by telephilanthropic foundations. The persistence of hunger
and poverty in distant lands after millions of dollars have been poured
into them discourages domestic donors; an optimistic reference to the
Benign Demographic transition can often quiet doubts and loosen
purse-strings.

As transition theory declined in prestige there developed a realization
that perhaps the basic theory of human population dynamics was not
providential after all. Perhaps the details of human behavoir needed to
be studied more carefully? Fortunately the basis of this study was laid
early in the nineteenth century, though it was noticed by virtually no
one, probably because the resultant 'theory of the commons' is the very
opposite of a providential theory.

The Tragedy of the Commons

The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus sought an explanation of his dismal
theorem in the comparison of his two ratios (one of which we no longer
defend). A better approach was taken by another man of the cloth in
1833, the year before Malthus died. This man was the Oxford
mathematician and economist William Forster Lloyd. He showed how the
properties of a distribution system, interacting with human nature, can
produce unwanted effects.

In a manner that would develop into a habit in science a century later,
Lloyd began by setting up a 'model':

Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common
itself so bare-worn, and cropped so differently from the adjoining
inclosures? ... The difference depends on the difference of the way in
which an increase of stock in the two cases affects the circumstances of
the author of the increase. If a person puts more cattle into his own
field, the amount of the subsistence which they consume is all deducted
from that which was at the command, of his original stock; and if,
before, there was no more than a sufficiency of pasture, he reaps no
benefit from the additional cattle, what is gained in one way being lost
in another. But if he puts more cattle on a common, the food which they
consume forms a deduction which is shared between all the cattle, as
well that of others as his own, in proportion to their number, and only
a small part of it is taken from his own cattle {25}.

A careful reading shows that Lloyd had a clear conception of carrying
capacity and the unfortunate consequences of exceeding it {26}.
Short-run self-interest drives a herdsman in a common to add animals to
his herd beyond the carrying capacity of the domain because the profit
from so doing accrues to him alone, while the attendant costs caused by
overpopulation are commonized over the entire community of herdsmen.

In a common pasture that is managed by no powers other than chose of
herdsmen acting individually, the exploiters are caught in a 'Double C -
Double P Game' (CC - PP Game): Commonize the Costs while Privatizing the
Profits {27}. Unhappily, in the long run all the herdsmen lose in an
unmanaged common; but - so long as they cling to this system - they
cannot escape ruin. Ruin that is both foreseen and inevitable is the
very essence of Greek tragedy: recall, if you will, Oedipus Rex.

The idea of the tragedy of the commons has ancient but modest roots.
Antiquarians like to quote Aristotle: 'That which is common to the
greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks
chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest' {28}.
Aristotle's statement is undoubtedly a precursor of the theory of the
commons, but it is not rich enough in meaning to generate the formal
theory. The closest Aristotle's aphorism comes to mathematics is a vague
hint of less and more. But what Lloyd said, though he used no
mathematical symbols, has led to explicit mathematical equations {29}.

The primary interest of the Oxford economist was not in malnourished
cows but in human overpopulation. 'Marriage is a present good', he said,
'but in a community of goods, where the children are maintained at
public tables, or where each family takes according to its necessities
out of the common stock, these difficulties [impinging on the parents]
are removed from the individual. They spread themselves, and overflow
the whole surface of society, and press equally on every part.' {30}
What Lloyd assumes in this model is a distribution system resembling the
one Karl Marx praised 42 years later: 'From each according to his
ability, to each according to his needs' {31}. Marx, ignorant of Lloyd's
work, naively promoted his motto as a formula for felicity.

It is puzzling that Lloyd should have so emphasized the dangers of
commonizing the costs of child-rearing, for in his day and his community
these costs were almost entirely privatized. Since Lloyd's time the
commonization of the costs of child-rearing has gone much further and
Lloyd's strictures are much more appropriate. Guilt-mongers of our time
delight in blaming parents for the overpopulation of a nation: such has
been the message of Zero Population Growth, Inc, an American
organization operating principally on college campuses. ZPG literature
never refers to Lloyd's work, This is a pity, for he pointed out long
ago that 'the simple fact of a country being overpopulous ... is not, of
itself, sufficient evidence that the fault lies in the people
themselves, or a proof of the absence of a prudential disposition. The
fault may rest, not with them as individuals, but with the constitution
of the society, of which they form part' {32}.

Not blame but mechanism was Lloyd's quarry as he puzzled over the
persistence of human suffering. How was his work received in his day?
Apparently it had little impact. The reasons were partly personal {33}.
He suffered the handicap of being a member of a sickly family. In five
years he gave only a very few lectures at Oxford and then, with private
means, retired to Prestwood, Great Missenden, where he lived 'in
apparent obscurity' until his death from a stroke at age fifty-eight.

In 1953 the United Nations published a large and useful summary of
population doctrines and beliefs under the title The Determinants and
Consequences of Population Trends. Out of a total of 330,000 words only
43 are devoted to Lloyd, and these occur at the end of a long footnote.
Worse, in summarizing Lloyd's contribution to the theory of population
this scholarly work gets his position 180 degrees wrong. (Since the book
is the work of a committee we don't know whom to blame.) It's no wonder
that the resurrection of Lloyd's work in 1968 came as a surprise {34}.

Laissez-Faire and Equality

Production, trade, distribution: what limits to freedom shall we impose
on these interrelated functions? The laissez-faire position is that
there should be complete freedom for the first two, while the third must
be constrained by the rights of private property. Setting aside the
vexed question of property, what about the first two functions? Looking
at the world as it is, Walter Lippmann once wrote some revealing words
(to which italics have here been added):

The pure doctrine of non-intervention in production and trade has never
in fact been practiced anywhere. Even Adam Smith, let alone John Stuart
Mill, recognized exceptions to the rule. One could go further, I
believe, and argue plausibly that most men have shown in their behaviour
that they wished to impose free capitalism on others and to escape it
themselves. Employers have believed in it for their employees, and have
appealed to it against factory laws and unionism. But they have not
hesitated to call upon the state for protection against foreign
competitors. Manufacturers who had to ship goods have not hesitated much
about regulating the railroads ...

There is no reason to think that business men under capitalism have had
any consistent conviction of laissez-faire. Their employees have
certainly not had it, They have voted for tariffs when they were told
their jobs depended upon them. They have voted to close the labor market
by restricting immigration. They have voted for labor laws and they have
organized unions. Like their employers they have believed in
laissez-faire for others. {35}

The paradox can be put in the following terms. However passionately
theoreticians may cling to symmetry and reciprocity in elaborating their
theories of production and trade, those who are actual practitioners of
economic living can be just as passionate in defending asymmetry and
non-reciprocity in their daily lives. The merits of the case, as
concerns production and trade, will not be argued here: our present task
is to take up the distribution function.

The thrust of rhetorical pronouncements identified as 'idealistic' is
symmetrical and reciprocal. Traditional religions, atheistical
egalitarianism, and liberation theology all glorify equality in
distribution. But intentions do not necessarily lead to accomplishment.
Distributing a community's wealth in the light of Marx's ideal (From
each ...) first produces inequality, and then (ultimately) widespread
poverty. For two reasons:

First, human abilities are the product of the interaction of innate
abilities and training. People are unequal at birth, and education
exaggerates their inequality. Consequently productivity varies
fantastically from one individual to another.

Second, what should be the grounds for allocating wealth? Idealists tell
us that distribution should be according to a person's 'need'. But who
determines 'need'? If agents of the state do so, freedom goes out as
restraint and resentment come in. Revolution may be just around the
corner. On the other hand, when each individual is the sole judge of his
own need, the door is opened to greed. Adam Smith spoke of the
'insatiable desires' of the rich, but the desires of the poor can also
be difficult to control. Rich or poor, people vary in their
susceptibility to satiation. A political decision to satisfy variable
'needs' would end up giving greater rewards to the insatiable. Is that
the 'fairness' that idealists seek?

'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs'
defines a highly asymmetrical, non-reciprocal system of distribution.
You must contribute to the common pot according to your ability, while I
demand the right to take out of the pot according to my needs, as I
reckon them. 'Need creates right', say I. But with every I saying this,
in a world of shortages there can be no spontaneously generated
stability. (If there were no shortages there would be no problem of
course: but that does not describe our world.)

We need to look at the commons from another point of view, namely its
relation to responsibility. Unfortunately, most of the statements that
include the word 'responsibility' are vacuous rhetoric. Typically, a
politician who proclaims his responsibility thereby claims power; he
will oppose attempts to make him operationally responsible for his
errors. To serve the needs of society, responsibility needs to be
defined in the following way; An agent is fully responsible when he pays
all the costs of the benefits he receives.

Is a distribution by the formula of the commons a responsible
distribution? The formula for the system of the commons may be written
as CC - PP: Commonize the Costs against everyone, but Privatize the
Profits - to me. The first term of each dyad represents the actor, which
is C in the first dyad and P in the second. Since the actors are
different - C versus P - commonizing does not meet our operational
definition of responsibility.

Irresponsibility opens the door to malfunction and uncontrollable costs.
Applications of the theory of the commons extend far beyond common
pastures, far beyond overpopulation among human beings. For instance,
the theory extends to the capture, by speculators, of gains in the value
of real estate as a result of community development. This diversion of
community wealth was vigorously condemned by Henry George. Robert
Andelson has explained the deep equivalence of George's ideas and
commons theory {36}. The theory extends to the dysfunctional
multiplication of water projects made possible by the federal
commonization called 'subsidies' {37}. The theory is applicable to all
insurance schemes, which commonize the losses of a few among all those
who subscribe to a system; though insurance is a defensible way of
dealing with exceptional losses, it inevitably encourages carelessness
and dishonesty. The theory of the commons also applies to the many
variants of socialized medicine, as Howard Hiatt first made clear {38}.
In the medical case the waste is due less to the abuse of the commonized
system by hypochondriacs than it is to its exploitation by liability
lawyers whose forensic creativity pushes physicians into the practice of
'defensive medicine', that is, the employment of expensive medical
procedures that defend doctors against lawyers, producing a waste of
resources that defrauds the general public. Like Proteus of the Greek
myth, the irresponsible commons take on ever new forms in a society in
which all too many people fail to keep in the forefronts of their minds
the economists' anti-Providential assertion that 'There's no such thing
as a free lunch'.

In the pure case, commonizing leads to ruin. But the modern state
operates as a 'mixed economy', and so ruin is less common than simple
waste. Moreover, under conditions of true plenty the unmanaged commons
is not only tolerable, it may also be the most economical way of
exploiting the environment. When an American frontiersman shot a dozen
passenger pigeons for his dinner he harmed no one. Restricting such
activities of the pioneers would have been wasteful of human time and
effort.

Criticisms of the Commons Theory

After the resurrection and elaboration of Lloyd's theory of the commons
several papers were published arguing that even with shortages a
commonized resource need not necessarily come to a bad end. Some of the
criticisms are just and call for a clarification of the idea of
'commons'. Arthur F McEvoy (1987) spoke of 'the commons myth',
maintaining that it:

... misrepresents the way common lands were used in the archetypical
case (that is, England before the privatization of landed property).
English farmers met twice a year at minor court to plan production for
the coming months. On those occasions they certainly would have
exchanged information about the state of their lands and sanctioned
those who took more than their fair share from the common pool.
Likewise, Italian, Chinese, and other immigrant fishing communities in
late nineteenth century California kept very tight control over the
allocation and harvest of their resources so as to produce what we would
now call an optimum yield for their group. As the San Francisco
Chronicle put it in 1907, 'if any Italian thinks it is possible to catch
crabs for the market without joining the association, let him try it' {39}.

McEvoy's criticism has merit, but the merit must be evaluated in the
light of a remark made by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: 'All
propositions are erroneous unless they are construed in reference to a
background which we experience without any conscious analysis' {40}.
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. In contrast, the English farmers and Italian fishermen cited
by McEvoy were managing access to the resources they were exploiting.
The title of my 1968 paper should have been The Tragedy of the Unmanaged
Commons'. The commons discussed by McEvoy were managed by forces that
are variously called 'community pressure' or 'shame'. When pressures are
given the legislated form of laws the result is sometimes called
'socialism'.

By long tradition, the open ocean - far beyond the reach of national
sovereignties - is an unmanaged common. That is why the stocks of most
oceanic fisheries are now accelerating toward exhaustion. Oceanic
fisheries haven't a chance of survival so long as their exploitation is
guided by the rubric, 'freedom of the seas' (read, 'laissez-faire' once
more). An apparent exception is the Alaska fur-seal resource which has
prospered for nearly a century, but that is because the commons of its
breeding grounds in the Pribilof Islands are in fact managed jointly by
only two exploiters, Russia and the United States.

A more serious case is that of air pollution which is out of control
because the absorptive capacities of the atmosphere are created as
unmanaged commons. As people have become concerned with the proven
damage of acid rain and the possible disaster of an atmospheric
greenhouse, nations have moved closer to converting the global
atmosphere from an unmanaged common to a managed one. (The political
roadblocks to this reform are, of course, formidable.)

We should speak of the 'commons model', rather than the 'commons myth'.
Both Lloyd and I investigated the logical properties of this model
(though this use of the word 'model' did not develop until the twentieth
century). Whether any particular case is a materialization of that model
is a historical question - and of only secondary importance. What human
ecologists are most concerned with are the commons of our time that are
truly unmanaged (or poorly managed). After these have been identified
the next question is, How can we bring about the successful management
of the remaining, deteriorating commons?

In a strict sense, it is not the commons that need managing, but the
people who exploit them. Managing people requires a deep knowledge of
human nature - but what is the nature of human beings? McEvoy is not
satisfied with the answers he infers from the literature. He says that
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.' This is
a serious misapprehension of the evidence, as can be shown by abandoning
the hypothetical model to examine some relevant empirical evidence.

The Hutterites of northwestern North America have adapted their
behaviour to the providential motto of Karl Marx. (Whether they even
know about Marx is not important.) Each Hutterite gives such labor as he
or she feels is reasonable to the community, and takes out of the common
scores what he/she feels is needful. Hutterites are admirable and
successful farmers, and they have discovered something about human
nature and its bearing on the limitations of the commons that should
interest everyone. John Baden and Richard Stroup describe the problem:

There is a saying commonly heard among the Hutterites: 'All colonies
(especially "other" colonies) have their drones'. Further, it is
recognized that the number of 'drones' increases more than
proportionately with an increase in colony size. Given that: (1) all
goods are public goods, (2) individual economic incentives are minimal,
and (3) material differentials are outlawed, a rational, maximizing
person would operate to maximize his pleasure, including leisure.
Included in such self-seeking activities are trips into town or to a
neighboring ranch to 'check on' or 'pick up' something allegedly
relevant to his assigned task. {41}

Keeping in mind McEvoy's roster of the shortcomings of exploiters of the
commons we must judge that the Hutterites are, on the testimony of Baden
and Stroup, rational and utility-maximizing. But, to use McEvoy's term,
are Hutterites alienated from their community? Far from it. Many
independent accounts make it crystal clear that the Hutterites lead a
richly communal life, far from a 'grim, Hobbesian struggle of each
against all'. Though the word 'struggle' seems too violent and too
colorful, some sort of competition does seem to be going on. No English
word is entirely adequate to describe the low-key jostling of wills in a
Hutterite community; the word 'competition' will have to do. The Oxford
English Dictionary defines 'compete' as 'to strive after (something) in
company or together'. It must be said that 'togetherness' is a specialty
of Hutterites: as the community increases in size there's many a
competition between 'gold-bricks' or 'goof-offs' to see who can get the
cushy assignments on the community's work-roster. No bloodletting, no
alienation: just quiet 'jockeying for position', to use an image from
harness-racing.

What is the result of this very human behavior? The Hutterites have
learned that they can make the Marxian system of distribution work only
within rather narrow limits: from (approximately) sixty to 150 persons
in the colony. The lower limit is explained by the economist's favourite
'economies of scale'. The upper limit is explained by 'human nature',
more mysterious but just as undeniable a reality as economies of scale.

What aspect of human nature is involved in the control of a nominally
unmanaged commons? Words are treacherous, but close observation of
well-functioning groups exploiting a common resource - herdsmen,
fishermen, Hutterite farmers, or whomever - leads to the strong feeling
that it is old-fashioned shame that keeps would-be defectors in line.
For this to work the size of the decision-making group must be small,
apparently less than 150. Let us call this the Hutterite Limit.

The observations needed to test the Hutterite limit have usually escaped
recording. Traditional anthropology has not been sufficiently numerate
to establish the effects of scale. Nevertheless some confirmations of
the Hutterite limit have been recorded {42}, with no clear-cut
disconfirmations. A study of population control in modern China showed
the importance of close observation in discerning the effective social
arrangements. The first observation indicated a group of two thousand
people as the unit of control in Beijing. More careful observation
showed that the actual unit within which control was exerted varied
between 50 and 150 people {43}. Conclusion: the Hutterite limit was
observed.

Intuitively, the scale effect makes sense. It is a matter of common
observation that the effectiveness of shame depends very much on
face-to-face confrontations. It is easy for a small group to impose a
feeling of shame on its errant members; in a large group, the feeling
doesn't transmit well. It looks as though self-seeking is something of a
biological constant, while shame is diluted by numbers. That is why
formal, explicit government is more necessary in large groups than
small. Idealists who feel repelled by explicit government - and such
idealists are numerous in our society - should be advised to work for
reductions in the size of the operational groups.

Implicitly referring to groups of trans-Hutterite size, James Madison
aptly made the connection between human nature and the necessity of
government:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man
must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be
a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to
control the abuses of Government. But what is Government itself, but the
greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no
Government would be necessary. {44}

Wise as it is, the last sentence cries out for correction: 'If all men
(and women) were angels, no Government would be necessary'. Observations
of unmanaged Commons ('no Government') show that when the Hutterite
limit is transgressed non-conforming behavior (which may begin with a
minority of one) is infective. The larger the group, the more rapid the
infection. Destructive behavior that begins with a minority soon becomes
the behavior of the majority.

This makes sense. The non-conformer benefits from his actions in a
community in which the majority conform to a self-denying ideal. As such
a minority visibly prospers, another factor in human nature enters in;
envy. One by one, hitherto self-denying conformers, envious of the
prosperity of non-conformers, join the ranks of the less-than-angels.
Positive feedback sets in. The ideal withers away. The process is
sensitive to scale; only by keeping the size of the group small can
shame triumph over envy.

That this needs saying is evidence of the power of taboo. In the 1960s
the 'Free Speech' movement in Berkeley effectively ended the taboo on
many four-letter English words, but not on the four-letter word 'envy'.
As Helmut Schoeck's scholarly study shows, envy is still one of the most
powerfully tabooed words of our society {45}. Much that should be
discussed under the subject of 'envy' is often automatically converted
into the uncompromising assertion of 'rights'.

Psychological denial not only lays a taboo on existent words, it can
also slow the coinage of new ones that affront ruling attitudes.
'Optimism' was coined in 1737; 'pessimism' came along 57 years later.
'Shortage' was coined in 1868; 'longage' arrived 107 years later.
Optimists who believe in Providence are energized by the word 'shortage'
to look harder for more resources, which they are sure must be out
there, someplace. To admit that there is a 'longage' of people or
demands is to give up the belief in a providential plethora of
resources. It is no wonder that 'longage' is not yet an accepted part of
the popular vocabulary.

The world of terrestrial resources is strictly limited, but not
seriously so if we can learn to curb human demands. Given temperate
demands, our world is vast -

And has more than enough - for no more than enough.
There is a shortage of nothing, save will and wisdom;
But there is a longage of people. {46}

Every asserted 'shortage' of supply can equally aptly be described as a
'longage' of demand. Those who trumpet 'shortages' are likely to fight
vigorously for 'rights'. (Remember '... to each according to his
needs'.) This position bespeaks an admirable egalitarian sentiment, but
how does the natural environment fare in such a rhetorical environment?
If 'needs' include the need to reproduce at will, the drive toward
equality of per capita distribution will finally exhaust the
environment. In an unmanaged - or weakly managed - common, 'shortage'
implies 'rights' implies ruin.

But if we admit that envy is a natural and powerful part of human
nature, a part that needs to be curbed, we will speak less often of
shortages of supplies and begin to think about longages of people and
longages of human desires. When we see longage as the central problem
there is a possibility that we may find ways of controlling the
proportions of the various populations and the dimensions of their
demands, thus making it possible for at least a modicum of the world's
environmental riches to be passed on to our grandchildren. The rhetoric
we speak reveals the models with which our minds do their work. The
rhetoric we live by determines our effects upon the world.

NOTES:

{1} Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic
Books, 1980), pages 181-182.
{2} J B Bury, The Idea of Progress (1932; New York: Dover, 1955), page 73.
{3} Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; Indianapolis,
Indiana: Liberty Classics, 1976), page 304.
{4} V Stark, The History of Economics in its Relation to Social
Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), page 24.
{5} Ronald Hamowy, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of
Spontaneous Order (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1987), page 6.
{6} Friedrich August Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1988), page 8.
{7} Kenneth E. Boulding, The Image (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of
Michigan Press, 1956), page 117.
{8} Garrett Hardin, Population, Evolution and Birth Control (2nd
edition;  San Francisco: W H Freeman, 1969), page 34.
{9} Ibid, page 36.
{10} Rose E Frisch, 'Demographic implications of the biological
determinants of female fecundity', Social Biology, 22 (1975), page 22.
{11} E P Hutchinson, The Population Debate (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1967), page 345. (The passage is quoted from a work of Edmonds, 1828).
{12} News report, Technology Review, 78, 4 (1976), page 24,
{13} D E C Eversley, Social Theories of Fertility and the Malthusian
Debate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), page 201.
{14} J DuPaquier, A Fauve-Chamoux, and E Grebenik, editors, Malthus Past
and Present (New York: Academic Press, 1983), page 345.
{15} Josue de Castro, The Geography of Hunger (Boston: Little Brown, 1952).
{16} Ibid, pages 21 and 24.
{17} E P Hutchinson, loc. cit., page 131.
{18} Etienne van de Walle [Book review], Population and Development
Review, 13 (1987), pages 547-550.
{19} Karl R Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1957).
{20} William Petersen, Population (2nd edition; New York: Macmillan,
1969), page 11.
{21} Michael S Teitelbaum, 'Relevance of demographic transition theory
for developing countries', Science, 188 (1975), page 420.
{22} Michael S Teitelbaum and Jay M Winter, The Fear of Population
Decline (Orlando, Florida: Academic Press, 1985), page 14.
{23} Vide 8, supra.
{24} Ester Boserup, 'Economic and demographic interrelationships in
sub-Saharan Africa', Population and Development Review, 11 (1985), page 395.
{25} William Forster Lloyd, Two Lectures on the Checks to Population
(1833; facsimile edition; New York: Augustus M Kelley, 1968), pages 30-31.
{26} Garrett Hardin, 'Sentiment, guilt, and reason in the management of
wild herds', Cato Journal, 2 (1982), pages 823-833.
{27} Garrett Hardin, Filters Against Folly (New York: Viking, 1985),
chapter 10.
{28} Aristotle, Politics (New York: Viking, 1971), page 27 (Book 2,
chapter3).
{29} Garrett Hardin and John Baden, editors, Managing the Commons (San
Francisco: W H Freeman, 1977). See chapters by H V Muhsam, 'An algebraic
theory of the commons' and Daniel Fife, 'Killing the goose'.
{30} Lloyd, op cit, page 21.
{31} Karl Marx, 'Critique of the Gotha program' in R C Tucker, The
Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1972), page 388.
{32} Lloyd, op cit, pages 22-23.
{33} Richard M. Romano, 'William Forster Lloyd - a non-Ricardian?,
History of Political Economy, 9, 3 (1977), pages 412-441.
{34} Garrett Hardin, 'The tragedy of the commons', Science, 162 (1968),
pages 1243-1248.
{35} Walter Lippman, The Method of Freedom (New York: Macmillan, 1934),
pages 25-26.
{36} Robert V Andelson, 'Commons Without Tragedy', this volume, chapter 2.
{37} Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert (New York: Viking, 1986).
{38} Howard H Hiatt, 'Protecting the medical commons: who is
responsible?', New England Journal of Medicine, 293 (1975), pages 235-241.
{39} Arthur F McEvoy, 'Toward an interactive theory of nature and
culture: Ecology, production, and cognition in the California fishing
industry', Environmental Review, 11 (1987), page 299.
{40} Alfred North Whitehead, Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1948), pages 85-86.
{41} John Baden and Richard Stroup, 'Choice, faith, and politics: the
political economy of Hutterite communes'. Public Choice, 12 (1972),
pages 1-11.
{42} Nathan Keyfitz, Population and Biology, (Liege: Ordina Editions,
1986), page 150.
{43} Ruth & Victor W Sidel, 'Medicine in China: individual and society',
Hastings Center Studies, 2, 3 (1974), pages 23-36.
{44} James Madison (1788), in The Federalist, Number 50 (New York:
Scribner, 1893), page 360.
{45} Helmut Schoeck, Envy (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969).
{46} Garrett Hardin, 'Carrying Capacity' in Stalking the Wild Taboo (Los
Altos, California: William Kaufmann, 1976), pages 260-261.

Garrett Hardin (Ph D, Stanford University), professor emeritus of human
ecology, University of California at Santa Barbara, is generally
recognized as one of the seminal thinkers of our time. His books include
Nature and Man's Fate (1959), Exploring New Ethics for Survival (1972),
Naked Emperors: Essays of a Taboo-Stalker (1982), and Filters Against
Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely
Eloquent (1985). His most widely-reprinted articles are 'The Tragedy of
the Commons' (1968) and 'Living on a Lifeboat' (1974).

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