Summary
Ahead of the 2024 election, Generation Z has sparked a trend on TikTok, “canceling out” family members’ votes by voting opposite their Trump-supporting relatives. Many young women post videos showing them voting for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, contrasting with family members supporting Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Although Gen Z voters lean slightly toward Harris, a significant portion supports Trump. With over 47 million early votes cast, polls show a tight race, especially in key swing states.
Yes and/but you might be interested to know these things about the “Tragedy of the Commons”:
Elinor Ostrom, awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, fundamentally challenged the “tragedy of the commons” theory, which Garrett Hardin popularized in 1968. Hardin’s theory argued that shared resources—like grazing land or fisheries—inevitably suffer from overuse because each user, acting in self-interest, seeks to maximize personal gain. Without external regulation or privatization, Hardin claimed, such resources would degrade irreparably.
Ostrom’s work provided a different perspective based on extensive field research across diverse communities managing shared resources, such as forests in Nepal and fisheries in Turkey. Through these studies, she found that local groups often developed effective, self-governing systems to sustain and share resources equitably. Ostrom identified eight core principles, such as clear resource boundaries, community-devised rules, local monitoring, and graduated sanctions for rule violations, which contribute to sustainable communal resource management. By documenting these successful cases, she demonstrated that, under certain conditions, communities could avoid the “tragedy” without privatization or top-down control.
Ostrom’s insights reshaped economic thinking by showing that cooperation, rather than competition alone, could lead to sustainable resource use. Her findings emphasize that real-world communities often solve commons problems through trust, local knowledge, and shared governance, challenging the idea that only private ownership or government intervention can manage common resources effectively. Ostrom’s approach has since inspired policies and frameworks for resource management across environmental, urban, and even space governance contexts, as her principles underscore the potential of collective, decentralized solutions to common-pool problems.
Her work offers an empowering view of human capacity for self-organization, contradicting the inevitability of Hardin’s “tragedy” and suggesting new possibilities for addressing global commons issues like climate change and biodiversity loss. This impact has encouraged rethinking in fields ranging from political science to ecology and economics.
Sources:
• Inside Story, “The not-so-tragic commons”
• Resilience, “The Victory of the Commons”
• Space Foundation, “The Commons Solution”
The distinction between “government regulation” on one hand and “community-devised rules, local monitoring and graduated sanctions for rule violations” on the other seems entirely artificial to me. In both cases rules and enforcement are set up to avoid the tragedy. The latter just uses more feel-good words to describe local government.
Also Hardin was a white nationalist and pushed his “tragedy of the commons” theory as a justification for eugenics.
So every time someone references his pseudoscience, they’re breathing life back into a dead fascist’s racism. Yaaaaayyy…
The concept of the tragedy of the commons existed centuries before Hardin. He just uses that concept to justify an unsound conclusion and the concept would exist whether he wrote his paper or not.
Every time someone references it, they’re referencing that concept that really does affect communal resources, and probably have no idea what argument Hardin ever made based on it.
The beginning of the paper lays out the idea very well and I use it to teach people to treat shared resources respectfully, but tell them not to bother reading the conclusion.
The Tragedy of the Commons is a capitalist myth just like the Myth of Barter.
How?
OP explained the former. David Graeber talked about the latter in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years
I don’t see the former, maybe I’m overlooking something. Also, I’m not going to read a book to get that answer.
Imagining Hardins tragedy is a tragedy in itself. It would imply that throughout all of human history, the only way civilization has advanced at all is by being pulled along, kicking and screaming, by great men.
What an absolute bleak view of existence, of people, our neighbors and their compacity, capabilities and faculties. I can only assume that Hardin was so caught up in his tragedy he failed to realize how self aggrandizing it is. That it’s more a display of his contempt of people than his realizing a deeper understanding. Like a flashing neon sign that says:
Main character syndrome ↙️ 🙋
I think ultimately Hardin, and those that share his perspective, suffer from a form a Last-Thursday-ism, where they just can’t be convinced the universe didn’t form completely and exactly like this last Thursday, because it’s almost as if they put effort never taking the past into account, and assuredly if there IS a past, that they are more advance and smarter than anyone of “them” that “supposedly” existed. The fact that humans 250,000years ago were just as intelligent, just as clever, just as complicated - that they were just adapted to their environment (as are we all), is impossible for them to grasp. I’m sure attempting would cause them to stroke out. We are all cavemen. We just build our own caves out of tree bones, baked earth, or ground up and reconstituted rock.Modern contemporary humanity just has access to more knowledge, but we aren’t any more innately equipped for it. We aren’t any better at processing and memorizing it, or even responsibly attenuating and distributing it. With time, sure, we have maybe gotten better at describing it, but even there, perhaps most obviously there, we are far from complete. Language is still evolving, and accurate language to describe an enormity of what we experience does not yet exist.