Comedy and Tragedy of the Commons

Comic swiped from the lecture slides of one of my geography classes today:




If you know anything about the "Tragedy of the Commons" model of behavior, I suspect you are already laughing.


If you don't:

The "Tragedy of the Commons" theory was proposed by Garrett Hardin (1968). According to it, in cases where multiple individuals use the same communal resource base (shepherds grazing sheep in a pasture), the tendency will be toward degradation of the resource. This is because the benefit to each individual of using more than his or her fair share (aka putting an extra sheep in the pasture to graze) is greater than the cost to him or her (which is spread amongst all of the resource users). If all users act in this way, the pasture will soon be overrun with sheep to the downfall of all. Following this to its logical end, an outside entity is needed in order to regulate the selfish behavior of the resource users.

A dominant critique of this, however, is that it doesn't account for the social relations between users. It suggests that they are incapable of talking to each other and generating their own locally agreed upon resource management solutions.

Now read the comic again. :D