February 6, 2025 • 49 mins
Since it was introduced in the 60s, the Tragedy of the Commons, the idea that humans will inevitably ruin any resource we all share, has had sweeping effects on government and public attitudes on who owns the environment. Problem is, it was fictitious.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and it's just us again, Jerry who And this
is stuff you should Know. That's right.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Another Econ edition. Typically not my favorite, but you know,
this one I could wrap my head around for the
most part.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I think that's one of the reasons why it's had
such an enormous impact on the world. Yes, because it
is so easy to wrap your head around. We should
probably say, we're talking about the tragedy of the Commons.
And for those of you who aren't familiar, it's this idea,
this concept that if you have a shared resource a commons, say,
(00:52):
and people are able to use it at their own
leisure for their own purposes. Event as they seek to
maximize their profits, they're going to overuse this commons and
inevitably it'll be ruined because people can't have anything nice. Essentially,
(01:13):
you know.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
It's funny, you're gonna laugh at me here, they're all
gonna laugh at you. Central the central area of my
high school was called the Commons. Yeah, and it just
occurred to me thirty five years or so after I
graduated that that's what that meant.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Oh, I see, I thought you were going to say,
like my teenage years were the tragedy of the comments.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
No, I just I don't know. I never thought about
the word because it was when you're in high school,
it's just sending the comments will meet the commons. But
it never occurred to me that that's what that meant,
just like a common area sure by everybody.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
It didn't either to me. I know exactly what you're
talking about. There was, if not high school, then maybe
middle school. There was some school where that was called
that too. Yeah, and I wonder if it was like
a surreptitious shot at kids, like they're all sheep, because
I don't think that's true. But one of the major
uses for commons traditionally has been for grazing. That's a
(02:09):
really good example. If you've let a bunch of people
graze on a shared resource, but they're taking what they
can from that resource to make money for themselves to
support themselves, then just because humans are rational, selfish, horrible beings,
that metal or that high school cafeteria will be ruined.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Yeah, that's right. And the idea of the tragedy of
the commons started out in nineteen sixty eight an article
from Science, the journal Science. It was called the Tragedy
of the Commons, and it was by a biologist named
Garrett Hardin, and he was sort of piggybacking on a
nineteenth century English mathematician and economist named William forsteror not Foster.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I would say, piggybacking or hijacking.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Hijacking William Forster Lloyd. And you mentioned grazing, and this
is sort of the thought experiment Harden went with, which
is like, you have a you know, a grazing field,
and let's say three farmers have use of it, and
they're letting their cows and cheap and you know grays
out there. But at some point one of them is
(03:16):
going to get an extra fat cow that they sell
for pretty good money. And they're like, hey, well, if
that worked out, maybe I can add like an additional cow,
and maybe it'll make you know, the value of all
of these cows go down a little bit, including my own,
because they're not getting as fat because I've added another
cow here, right, But if I can sell it for
(03:36):
this much money and it's only costing me a fraction
of that, for you know the.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Won't you extra cow?
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Well, I mean it would only cost a fraction of
loss of resources for the other cows. Like I'm still
coming out ahead and so bad to being bada boom,
that's what I'm going.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
To do, right Yeah. So if everybody was making one
dollar off of their caw when everything was being raised unsustainably,
then if you add one more cow, now everybody's making
eighty five cents off of their cows because you're starting
to overtax the commons. But that person who added that cow,
that's an extra eighty five cents they wouldn't have had before,
(04:17):
right yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
And if you're able to sell that cow for like
five bucks, that eighty five cents is a pittance compared
to what you're making on the other side.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Right, So there's always, under the logic of the tragedy
of the comments, there's always a reason to add another cow,
and add another cow, and add another cow, because your
returns are always going to be more than the cost
that you can offset with the returns. Right.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Well, that and you're also on the assumption that like
everyone else is going to be adding cow. So I'm
not going to be the only sucker not adding cows.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Right, So you're either a sucker or you're just somebody
who wants to survive. Because if people start ad cows
and you're the one farmer who's like, I'm not going
to do that. I find that morally repugnant. I really
like sustainably grazing here, and I'll just take one for
the team. In very short order, that farmer would find
(05:16):
that they were no longer making money because exactly because
each additional cow was taking an additional fraction. So let's
say that every time you added a cow, it reduced
the price that all the other cows got by fifteen percent.
That's not a steady price because if you reduce a
dollar by fifteen percent, now you're getting eighty five cents
(05:39):
for a cow. But now when you're adding another cow,
that reduces that eighty five cents by fifteen percent. So
all of a sudden, you're making seventy two cents, and
then sixty one cents and then fifty two cents. Right.
But again, if you're adding cows, that's always extra almost
found money. If you're not adding cows, then the cows
that you had originally are now getting less and less
(06:00):
and less, until you're making zero money, so you are
forced into adding cows. And that's why it's considered the tragedy.
You're why Garrett Harden called it the tragedy of the
comments because inevitably, under these circumstances, which are have long
been considered to be universal circumstances, basically the commons will
(06:21):
always get ruined and depleted and everybody will be totally
up the creek.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
That's right. And if Harden was basically like, there's a
couple of solutions here. You can either divide this area
up and now each person has their own little private
part of the past year that they're only in control
of and no one else can get on it and
graze there, or a government a body is going to
have to step in and regulate this stuff and manage it.
(06:48):
And you know, if you listen to Harden, and we'll
talk a little bit about the problems with this guy
in a second, Yeah, but if you listen to Harden,
he'll say, when you divide the things, this thing up
and make it just private it and everyone you know
is incentivized to basically preserve their plots and do it
sustainably so their profits are maximized. With, you know, making
(07:13):
sure the land isn't ruined so they can keep those
profits maximized.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, because now it's their land and they suddenly realize, oh,
this is a finite resource. If I start to degrade
this land, it's only coming out of my profits because
the other farmer's land is not degraded. So I'm the
only one in competition with myself here, really, and I
need to make sure that this land is preserved because
(07:37):
now it's the gold of the goose that laid the
golden egg, and I need to keep it nice and
healthy and happy. That's the direct result of privatization, as
far as Garrett Harden was explaining, as far as the
tragedy of the Commons goes right, simple solution, just give
people an incentive to take care of it by making
it their own. And the other way, like you said,
(07:58):
is government inter And this seems to be what hardens
big Like this is his favorite. I think solution was
bring the government in and just say you can't over
you can't graze more than these number of sheep, and
if you do, we'll wipe out your entire family line
something along those those lines.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Yeah. But here's the thing, like It wasn't like he
was some big champion of the government, because if you
read the whole article, Harden is like, and another thing,
the reason why the world is headed toward a bad
place or a bad place already is because freedom to
breed is intolerable. So there's just too many people. We're
(08:42):
making too many babies, and the welfare state that the
government is encouraging is taking away the natural consequence of
what happens if you have too many kids, like they're
going to not be able to sustain that, and the
kids are going to starve to death. So we're overbreeding.
And all of a sudden, everyone's going whoa, whoaa, whoa.
And he said and another thing, he said, this overbreeding,
(09:04):
it could actually be a strategy where a cohesive group
could come along to increase their power. And they're like,
wait a minute, are you talking about the great replacement?
And he said, I don't know what that is, right,
and they said, well, it'll be a thing at some point.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
He's like, I like the ring of it though, Yeah,
it's catchy, so yeah. Yeah. His whole thing was we
using scare quotes are overbreeding, meant poor non white countries
are overbreeding. Right, that was basically his whole thing, and
that yes, because there was such thing as international aid
(09:39):
in the way of food, in the way of money,
that that people could just keep having kids and knowing
that the western wealthier governments were going to take care
of him. And he was like, that's that's not what
we should be doing. And here's why the tragedy of
the commons. And to say that, by the way, the
(10:00):
I read another paper of his two called Lifeboat Ethics,
the Argument against Helping the poor. Yeah, hell is the subtitle,
so we really just put it out there. But he
basically said, Okay, let's imagine that all of the countries
in the world are lifeboats. Some are ridiculously overloaded with people,
(10:23):
others the wealthier, more advanced ones. Let's say that they're
in a lifeboat that seats one hundred and they only
have ninety people, but there's tons of people swimming around
them trying to get into the lifeboat. Do you pick
ten people out of these, you know, thousands of people
out there to let come into your lifeboat? If so,
(10:45):
how do you pick those people? What do you tell
the people you don't pick? And he ultimately concludes that
just don't help anybody, then you don't have to worry
about playing favorites or anything like that. Plus you keep
your ten person safety buffer in case things change for
you in your lifeboat, and you're fine. He actually argues
(11:08):
against guilt. You shouldn't feel any guilt, and as a
matter of fact, we shouldn't put guilt on people for
making decisions like these because they're just smart. And then secondly,
he also says that if you are one of those
people like that one farmer who is like overgrazing is
morally repugnant, and now I'm not going to do it.
If you were like that farmer in this lifeboat and
(11:29):
you said, I just I can't do this. I can't
sit there and watch people drown while I'm sitting here.
I'm going to give up my seat for somebody else.
Harden argued that just by virtue of a person accepting
your seat, they are less moral than you, and that
over time is more people in the lifeboat give up
(11:50):
their seat for moral reasons. Morality will be replaced in
this lifeboat with self interest, and then what do you
have then, So he makes all these like like if
you're a rational person and you take emotion out of it,
You're like, you know, I guess that kind of makes
sense in a little bit, but the moment you add
in any a drop of humanity to it, you're like,
(12:11):
this is horrible that this guy wrote a series of
papers arguing this.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Yeah, and he, you know, as far as the tragedy
of the Commons goes, he very explicitly says like, you know,
you got to prioritize yourself here, and you're you know
what you're doing and maximize your profits, and if you don't,
if you have ethics or something, then you're you're not
a very smart person.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Right exactly. So this is his whole thing that you know,
like all of it was over of population. The thing
is it got diluted or take him very literally, very quickly,
and it was applied to actual commons as we'll see,
and just it was stripped of its overpopulation, xenophobia, racism,
(12:56):
all of that stuff and just got applied to real
world old commons management. And to say like it changed
things is the understatement of the century.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
Chok, that's right. Should we take a break.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Yeah, let's all right, We'll be right back, everybody.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Okay, So, uh, the tragedy of commons became like the
dominant way of looking at the world among Western nations
because it did two things. It said that you can
solve this problem everyone is going to have. Any time
you have a shared resource, people are going to deplete it.
That's what it said, no matter where you are in
(14:04):
the world, no matter who you are, but we want
to save these shared resources. Because this paper came out
at about the same time the environmental consciousness came up,
so it was like perfect timing for that. But it
also said, just privatize, buddy. And at that time, neoliberalism
was on the rise, and they're like, yes, privatize, take
all these government run things and put them in the
(14:27):
hands of corporations and we'll all be better off.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Yeah. And you know, one of the ways that happened
was and we're going to talk about sort of different
versions of this here and there in this episode, but
environmental trading markets emerged and that came from Canada actually
an economist named J. H. Dales in nineteen sixty eight.
But the eighties and nineties or when they really kind
of started flying off the shelf. But that's like when
(14:52):
the government comes in with a regulation. Let's say to
cap whatever in this case, like let's say they're capping
emissions on.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
On baseball caps.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Baseball cap, I need to get rid of some baseball caps.
So that's great.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
You have too many? Do you have any good Hawks ones?
I'm on the I'm on the lookout for those.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
I have one Hawks cap that I wear.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
I gotcha.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
I just gave away a second one because it was
too big. But your your head is too small for
this thing.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
It's a really tiny head. I'm like that that one
Safari hunter and beetle juice.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Do you know what your hat size is?
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Uh? Like point six point six?
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Okay, that's good. So let's say it's fisheries, because we're
going to talk about the fisheries a lot. So yeah,
you know, the government will come in and say, hey,
you're overfishing, so we're going to cap how many fish
you can harvest or make it a certain size and
a certain area or something like that. And then here's
your permit Fishery A, and here's your permit fishery B
and fishery C. And they grant these permits. But and
(15:53):
this is the key to the etm's environmental trading markets.
The word trade you can trade as i e. Buy
and sell these permits, which and this is something that
I don't fully understand, or maybe I do understand, And
that's the whole point. But if company A is let's
say it's an environmental like, hey, you're a factory and
(16:17):
we're incentivizing you to clean up your pollution and here's
your permit or whatever. If Company A does a really
good job and does the right thing and comes in
like way under the amount of emissions that they're supposed
to hit, by simply selling that to Company B, who's like, man,
we're not too good at that. I mean, is it creating?
Like doesn't that kind of defeat the whole purpose?
Speaker 2 (16:39):
No, it doesn't. And we talked about this in the
acid rain episode. Do you remember whatever happened to acid rain?
That thing?
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yeah, it can work, and it does work. We actually
reduced sulfur dioxide emissions that we were associated with acid
rain so much. The acid rain went away and it
was like the ozone layer of like the early eighties,
I think in seventies, like it was a big scary
thing and we took care of it because of cap
(17:08):
and trade schemes. So it can work.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
But how That's what I don't get. If one company
is lowering their output but another one is increasing theirs
because they just bought the other companies, then how is
that a net loss.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Because of the cap? Because you put the cap at
something close to a target that you want to reduce
things to, so you don't make like some sky high
cap that's more than what you're at now. You make
it less and then maybe a couple of years later,
you make it less than that. So those caps, those
those little shares or whatever, those allowances that they can trade,
(17:43):
they get more and more valuable the less and less
they represent because the law is kind of bringing these
emissions down further and further. So ultimately you're rewarding a
company by reducing their emissions because they can make money
selling that to another company, and that other company is
actually technically be punished because they're having to shell out
more money than they budgeted for because they're omitting more
(18:04):
than they are supposed to. So ultimately you're penalizing and
rewarding through this cap and trade scheme, but you're also
creating an artificial cap. All these companies could just pollute
as much as they want, but this government is saying no,
you actually can't. Here's your level. Here it is divided
among the ten companies go to town. But does that
(18:26):
make sense?
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Well? Yeah. The thing I still don't get though, is
the company that's, you know, buying extra emissions whatever output
from the company that's like really good at it, are
they allowed to go over the cap?
Speaker 2 (18:41):
They know they But let's say they have a cap
to put out ten pounds of CO two, right, yeah,
and they're going to they know they're putting out fifteen
that year. Well, this other company that's putting out five
pounds of CO two that year, they can sell their
other five pounds, So no one goes over the cap
total cap, but different companies can contribute different amounts based
(19:05):
on how much of those allowance shares they can purchase
or sell. Does that make sense?
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I promise it works. It worked for sulfur dioxide. It
does work. The problem is is it's also like it
requires a lot of buy in from industry or really
heavy handed government regulation.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
Well, either way. It became a big deal in the eighties,
and by the end of the eighties, the World Bank
referred to tragedy of the commons as quote the dominant
paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues. So
I mean you can't like there's a bunch of different
policies in a bunch of different areas, so you can't
(19:46):
just look at the entire thing as a whole and
say like, well it's been a huge success, Like you
can pick out something like acid rain or say it
was success in this case, but there's humans involved, so
you never can tell. Well, it's not like you never
can't tell like I say, can forecast, but there's not
just one big blanket like nope, this is the exact solution.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Right for sure, And it depends on the on the industry,
right like you said, acid rain, that was a great
success story. Fisheries are another example. If you take a
fishery like you were saying, and you divide up the
total catch between companies, those companies can actually go around
and buy you know, huge portions of the other company shares, right,
(20:30):
and so all of a sudden, they're basically one company
with all of the rights to catch all of the
fish in that fishery because they managed to consolidate the
shares over time. And that's a huge problem that's not
at all what you want. Like, yeah, that that fishing
company is still staying within the total number of fish
that can be caught annually, but they ran all the
(20:52):
other people out of business. That's so that's not at
all what you want with it. So there's there's pluses
and minuses. There's a situation. The thing is is the
tragedy of the commons has largely been overblown and the
idea that you can come out on top just by
privatizing things like natural resources has been a lesson learned
(21:13):
the hard way. That's just overall, that's not necessarily the
best way to do it, and it can really really
harm some groups while enriching others tremendously.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
Well. Yeah, and like in the case of a fishery,
like if you're a small fishing crew or something, good
luck kind of working your way up and maybe establishing
yourself as one of the larger companies, especially if the
people that are buying these things up are people that
don't live around. There are these corporations that right that
don't have necessarily a local interest. And again, while they
(21:45):
might be like hitting you know, staying under the threshold environmentally,
it might be working out, but you're consolidating the wealth.
Sometimes there's regulations on that where they say you have
to be you know, like on the fishing boat, and like,
you know, like Chick fil A. If you're going to
buy Chick fil A franchise, you gotta manage that.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Thing exactly right. You want that Chick fil A Cadillac.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
Exactly But sometimes there aren't regulations like that. And what's
been proven over and over, especially with etms, if there's
a way for a system to be exploited for profit,
then a company will come along and do it no
matter what.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
That's basically the neoliberalism tea shirt what you just said
to you know exactly.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Here's the thing, if you look at the actual try
tragedy of the commons, Harden sort of just leaves conveniently
leaves a lot of stuff out. Like he's assuming in
this argument that like the people that the farmers that
are sharing this grazing spot aren't talking to each other
at all about what's going on and saying like, hey,
we're ruining this land. By the way, maybe we should
(22:48):
dial it back, like everybody get rid of two cows.
And it also assumes that their only interest is to
maximize profit and do not care for the land, and
that's just not always the case.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
No. I mean that's really a tough sell to a
neoliberal policy maker, Like they're just like, you're crazy, you're
so naive for even thinking that. Of course their goal
is to maximize profits. But what's really cool is we'll
see a little later on real world examples prove that
that's not true. They disprove the tragedy of the commons
(23:22):
by themselves. It wasn't like, oh, let's set up this crazy,
really kind of rickety experiment and see if we can
disprove the tragedy of the commons. Now, people went out
and looked at real world, for example, indigenous treatment of
common resources, and they're like, these people have been managing
and not depleting these things for thousands of years now
because they came up with their own sensible rules that
(23:46):
aren't neoliberal in nature.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Yeah, for sure, if you look at the original sort
of like it's not just a theoretical thing. If you
look at the paper by William Forrester. I think he
said Forster earlier, not Forrester Lloyd, that this is the
one hardened would you say, hijacked to begin with, he did.
He was talking about actual English commons, which was how
(24:09):
it used to work in medieval England. Was the lord
would own all this land, but there were people that
lived on it. It wasn't like, hey, this is my
private land, no one can be here at first. So
the people that lived there, they you know, they had
to graze their animals and fish out of the streams
and ponds and things like that, and they were allowed
to with you know, through certain age old customs. Sometimes
(24:32):
the local government would step in and kind of help
manage this stuff and limit grazing and things like that.
But it wasn't like this set codified system in place
all over England. It was just they had been working
it out for centuries like this. It wasn't perfect, but
it was sustainable and they didn't like just destroy their
land because they all had self interest to keep it sustainable.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Right, And then they were enclosed. And enclosure was this
huge mass as have overlooked world changing event, and we
need to do an episode on the fencing of the
Commons someday because it's just it changed the entire mentality.
Remember our episode on the Luddites and how they emerged
(25:16):
from a world that was just it just completely turned
everything on its head. That's what happened with enclosure. When
they fenced the commons, it changed everything, and the concept
of private property like really kind of developed out of that,
at least in the West, right. So we'll do a
whole separate episode on that, but suffice to say that
it seems to be once the commons were fenced and
(25:37):
we're no longer a shared resource, that's when the issue
started to come up. If you ask Karl Marx, he
would have said that this is where we came up
with the landless proletariat, the working class who had to
work for wages because they no longer owned anything. It
created the very, very wealthy class that didn't actually have
(25:59):
to do anything because because all they had to do
was start renting this private property of theirs to the
people who needed to work. It created a whole system
of problems. And in fact, some people are like, whether,
however you feel about capitalism, you can kind of trace
us back to the beginning of capitalism, the fencing of
(26:19):
the commons. The irony of all this is that William
Forrester or Lloyd was arguing against Adam Smith's capitalist idea
that the invisible hand of the market will always guide
things to a good outcome. He created, ultimately the Tragedy
of the Commons as a thought experiment to show like, no, actually,
(26:41):
people don't. People aren't guided to this bottom good. Instead,
they are going to act in their own self interest
and destroy this stuff. So Harden actually took it and
turned it around as an argument for capitalism, for private
enterprise advertising stuff. This argument that was originally used to
(27:03):
disprove that.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Yeah, and if you were enclosing your own comments or
arguing in that favor at the time, you were saying, hey,
everything has been chaos up into this point. It's very
inefficient and there's got to be a more organized way
to do this. And that was you know, it wasn't
a guys, I guess, but what they were really saying
(27:25):
was is we want this area, right, it's ours. Yeah,
I mean, let's just oversell the chaos, maybe because it
was actually working out okay for many centuries, but we're
going to just sell it as this this chaotic mess
that needs to be cleaned up and organized.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Right, That's how it's done. It seems like, isn't it.
Charles Like people people come along and create a problem
that's not actually there for their own benefit. Ultimately.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
Yeah, I have a friend who ever since college, he
was just one of those guys that while we were
just like what over, he was about what about everything
about the world, about politics, about you know that that
period of college would you just kind of check out
and all you care about is like where you're going
that night? All that to say, he was a very
smart guy back then, and he used to just say
stuff that used to shake all of us to our
(28:15):
core about what's coming about this, that or the other
with a government. And he would always say, but here's
how they're going to sell it to you, And I, oh, yeah.
That always stuck with me, and he's totally right, like
they'll sell it to you as this, but then it
becomes this.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Right, Yeah, that's really interesting. I love stuff like that
about how just massive sweeping changes come from just a
change in an idea, change in yeah, in perspective, And
that's a really great That's what the tragedy of the
Commons was. It was an idea, it was a perspective.
He'd like Garrett Harden, didn't undertake a bunch of different
(28:51):
experiments or field studies or anything like that. In his paper,
which was published in Science by the way, it was
an essay at his own thoughts on something that he
presented so reasonably that people who were again neoliberals, who
were in favor of privatizing everything, including common resources, could
(29:12):
go to government policymakers and be like, here's how it works.
Doesn't that make sense? And the government said, yes, that
makes sense, let's start privatizing everything. And it was just
because this guy took this idea and made it approachable,
that's it. Yeah, it's not. It became fact even though
it was never faced. I just find that fascinating how
(29:35):
something like that can just change the world.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
Well, you know, I think there were so many people
licking their chops. They were like, oh, here's a great
opportunity for us to jump on this bandwagon to take
more for ourselves.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Right, But what if the bandwagon had never been there?
Would anyone have figured out how to manipulate things so thoroughly,
especially so quickly too? Without this one paper, this one biologist.
Speaker 3 (29:58):
Wrote, Yeah, someone would have.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Yeah, but it would have happened piecemeal. I think, I
don't know, it's questionable that it would have happened like
it had.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Yeah, maybe let's.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Take a break.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
All right, we'll be right back. We're going to contemplate
that and come back with the definitive answer. Right for this,
(30:48):
we don't have a definitive answer.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
I was just kidding, You got me.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
We should talk about Eleanor Ostrom though. This is a
woman who wrote a book in nineteen ninety called Governing
the Commons colon the Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action,
and she's probably like at the top of the list
for really bringing this to the upper echelons of the
(31:13):
political world worldwide. I guess she took a bunch of
examples all over the world of controlled cprs, like grazing
areas it's always a good one in Switzerland in this case,
forests in Japan, meadows in Japan, and of course fisheries
(31:33):
and things like that in this case in the Philippines.
So kind of really kind of picking different spots all
over the world and examining these and how they've worked out,
and basically argued that like, hey, these things are had
been working out for centuries and it worked out pretty
good because everybody lived there who was involved. And when
(31:55):
you have local people that have long term interest in
the well being of their land and their area and
keeping that up. Then the economic side of things, it
is not going to go away, but it's going to
take a back seat to ensuring that this land that
they live in stays as close to as it is
as possible.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Yes, And so she was the one who went out
and actually did those field studies that Garrett Harden didn't like.
She had the receipts to back up what she was saying,
which was the tragedy of the Commons isn't actually true.
It's certainly not in every case. And what's the ironic
thing is this Chuck the tragedy of the Commons played out.
(32:42):
I feel like for the most part, when things were
privatized and outside industry were allowed to come in and
have a share of the Commons, that's when it was
that's when the problems really began.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
So I want to say one other thing too, because
I know I'm kind of known for having a very
hard nos certain opinion about things and its lants, you know,
in this particular direction. Typically, I don't know, in the
last like years, so I've kind of lost my taste
for brigidity like that, or black and white thinking. So
(33:22):
I don't want anybody to think that I'm just like
neoliberalism equals bad alternatives to neoliberalism all good. Like, I
just don't see the world like that anymore. So I
don't want anybody to think that I'm just like I'm
bashing neoliberalism as if there's no redeemable quality to it whatsoever.
I just don't believe that. But in the case of
(33:45):
the tragedy of the commons, I feel like more often
than not, neoliberal policies again, privatizing shared resources or taking
oversight away from the government and just putting it in
the hands of the market has been disastrous for the
world over the last it's like forty fifty years. It's
been really good for wealthy people and helping other people
(34:07):
get wealthier, but that ignores the expense on the backs
of other people that it's created too. I just wanted
to put that out there, yeah, that I don't want
anybody think I'm just bashing neoliberalism because it does help
in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
No, And I know you well, and I can tell
everybody that you are a very varied person who looks
at things from all angles and is very considerate of
you don't just shut anything down outright. You like to
consider things now. Okay, So back to Austrom though, she
(34:42):
argues that, hey, this we've shown time and time again.
I show in these real world examples in my books
in Japan and in Switzerland and the Philippines with the
fisheries that this can work. But there's some parameters that
have been shown to ensure that it works, and you
got to follow these or it's not going to work.
(35:03):
And she had narrowed it down to eight principles of
like a successful you know, regulation of a commons, which
is clearly defined boundaries. So who can use this area,
what is this area? Rules that fit local needs. And
this is something we've been kind of hammering on. It's
got to be the local parties that come up with
these rules. The addition of outside people stepping in it
(35:29):
seems to be when all of the problems start because
their interests are not the same as local interests.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Yeah, history kind of tells us that when outside groups
come in and start pushing the people who've been using
this thing for a thousand years, pushing them around. Yeah,
it just doesn't go very wellpeatly because the outside groups
don't necessarily understand this. And as we'll see, that doesn't
mean that there shouldn't be the involvement of any outside groups.
What Ostrom was saying that she found from these studies
(35:56):
is that you have to begin the base the the
people who are really laying the groundwork and setting the
rules for this. They have to be the people who
are actually using this resource.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Yeah, for sure. The third one is group decision making,
so it's not just a couple of people or a
small board deciding these things, like get as many people
in there as possible, local people monitoring. You have to
have people monitoring, and you know, she used her forest
land example in Japan was one where she was like, hey,
they had locals monitoring the stuff and levying fines. So
(36:30):
you've got to know that someone is out there doing this,
so people, you know, know they're going to be held accountable.
And then the next one ties into that. And then
when you do that, you've got to start out small
with these sanctions. It's got to be like a warning
first and then a small fine. You can't just come
in there with the billy club and say you're out.
It's you've got to encourage people to stick around and like,
(36:54):
all right, here's a warning, but you can't keep letting
this happen. That kind of thing I was.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Really curious with the ultimate punishment is for repeat offenders,
And the only example I could find was among a
group in Bali. And ostracism is what the person ultimately faces, which, yeah,
and that's bad enough in like like a Western society,
you know, but also you can make do you know,
(37:21):
there's the internet. If you go into a store, the
person basically has to take your money for food. In
a more traditional culture, ostracisms like you're in big trouble
because groups rely on one another for help. And the
example they gave was if one of your relatives dies,
there's certain rights you have to perform, and if you're ostracized,
you have to figure that out all by yourself because
(37:43):
the community is not going to show up and help
you for these death rights that your ancestors demand of you,
because that's just tradition.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
Yeah, yeah, for sure. The last three of the eighth
easy dispute resolution, so just something on the on the
cheap that's pretty informal and not some big, drawn out
expensive you know, tribunal or something like that.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
Yeah, no wigs, no powdered wigs.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
No potter wigs at all. You have to have support
from authorities. And it may be a local thing, but
you've got to have the blessing of a larger government
body to at the very least not get in there
and mucket up themselves and just sort of let you
do your thing, but maybe also support and then finally
building up to a larger system. So again, keep it local,
(38:31):
but if it's a system that connects to a larger system,
like a creek that connects to a larger watershed, you're
going to have to start linking up with other local
groups and make it a larger thing.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Right. But the point that she made too is that
that works, that's actually scalable, which is good because, like
you said, you know, a creek is one thing, but
it depends on a watershed. And so if you can
get together with other people who are managing their own creeks,
you can manage the watershed based on the individual common
(39:05):
I guess rules that that groups have come up with,
and that you can scale that into more modern systems too. Right, So,
like say a city has somehow created a cap on
how much emissions that the factories in the cities can create.
You can combine that with other cities, and now you're
starting to manage a larger part of the atmosphere. And
(39:26):
then that the state can come in and work with
all of those cities, and then the state can work
with other states, and all of a sudden, now you
have regional air quality being controlled from the rules that
are based on the actual stakeholders in each individual community.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
That's right, And did she win something for this work?
Speaker 2 (39:44):
She won the Nobel which Livia foot in parentheses fake
Nobel Prize and economic science is because that's not one
that the no that was actually organized originally.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
She meant by that, but what one of the things
that that came out of the book. There's a University
of Chicago legal scholar name named lee Ann Fennel who
points to that book and says, you know, this is
sort of a corrects these legal theories that say property
is all or nothing, like you either own it or
and have total control over it, or you don't. And
(40:19):
it's actually possible. You can have a common you can
have an area that people share and the example that
and still have some autonomy. And the example that Livia
gave was like a house and if you got a
family in the house, you know, let's say you know
two people that have coupled up and have children. You know,
(40:40):
it's a collective. But like you know, generally speaking, unless
you live in a in a terrible house with an
authoritarian dictator as the head of the household.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
Or a stepdad, that makes you feel stupid.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
Yeah stepdad and makes you feel dumb. You've got you know,
your kid has your room, and you know what you
can This is your room. You know, you have a
right to your room and you can basically decorate it
how you want, within within reason, and do what you
want in here. But it's still part of the.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
House, right and technically your parents own that room. Yeah,
but because of custom, custom and tradition, they probably respect
that room as your private space.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
Yeah. And that's something as a parent I found is
super important because at a certain age, and this has
been the last couple of years with Ruby, like you know,
I'm gonna go into my room and shut the.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Door, yeah, and you're like, no, you're not, well.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
I'll open the door because I just like and it's
not in a spy way. I just like peeking in
and seeing the fun stuff she's doing. And Emily's like,
you know, leave the door shut. You get she's got
to have that autonomy.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
And I'm like, good for Emily, that's really sweet. When
you open the door, do you suddenly open and go
what are you doing?
Speaker 3 (41:49):
I'll give it you. I'll give a little knock now,
you know. And you know she's usually in their drawing
pictures of cats and listening.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
To music, reading Team Beat.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Man, do you remember? So was your room your own
private sanctuary? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (42:03):
I mean Scott and I shared a room until I
was I feel like I was probably ten or eleven.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
That's the that's the room age right there.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Yeah, and that's when we split. But we were upstairs
at our house. It was just two bedrooms and separated
by a joined bathroom. And my sweet brother, he I
was so sad about moving out of his room. At first,
he agreed to keep his bathroom door open so I
could lay in bed and see through the bathroom to
(42:34):
him and his work.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
God, he is such a he'd be the rancher that
would be like, I'm not overgrazing all.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
I know. He's one of the best. But yeah, so
I had my own room and it was like my
sports posters and I went through a Marylyn and Roe
phez for some reason, where I had a bunch of
hard posters up.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
I went through a James phase that was similar.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
Yeah, exactly, But yeah, it was my room. I took
a lot of pride in decorating it and doing my thing.
And my parents my father literally did not come upstairs.
That's a whole other story, and my mom did for
a while, but basically, I mean that was our zone
for the most part.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
That's awesome, you know. I remember they're not being anything
more satisfying than undertaking a total remodeling of your room,
moving stuff around, furniture all of a sudden, the beds
over here, and like doing that, it was it was
so it just changed everything. I'd love that so much.
I have so many great memories of my room.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
Yeah, me too, And I used to do that two
apartments I lived in, uh and I had ironically recently
had a thought about how much I used to enjoy
that and how like our house there, you can't really
do that, Like it's set up in a in a
way that I can't be like, hey, let's rearrange our
living room. It's like, well, you can't because.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Let's move the built ins outside.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
Yeah, exactly, So those days are over for me unfortunately. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
Same here. That's just how it goes as you get older.
It's one more thing that brings you joy or brought
you joy that's now dead, old leaf.
Speaker 3 (44:06):
All right, Well, let's finish up on tragedy of the commons,
because we can use an example of Maine lobster fisheries
as a pretty good example of how people can start
to do the wrong thing but correct course on their own. Yeah,
And that was the case in the nineteenth century when
the state of Maine started setting legal minimum sizes for
(44:29):
catching lobsters, and they couldn't enforce it that well at first,
and people broke the rules and we're like, you know,
trying to make extra money or keep more lobsters than
they should for a while. But eventually they were like, hey,
wait a minute, we're not doing ourselves any favors here,
and if we're going to all continue this to sustain
our living doing this, we got to work together. So
(44:50):
they form harbor gangs to start self policing.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Basically, so main lobsterman harbor gangs. Is there anything scared
than the sound of that? Just seeing them kind of
slowly come up on your boat and they're all like
they have chains in their hands.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Don't go over that. That's where the Hobba gangs are
very nice.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Boy, you just took me to cabit Coat.
Speaker 3 (45:13):
So they started self policing, and everyone bought into this
idea that let's not ruin all of our livelihood here.
And one thing that gets pointed out is you can
do this in a case like that because lobsters are
close to shore. It's a small, small community. It's local
people in the case of cod. And at some point
(45:33):
we should do one on the Cod Wars because that's
where this factors in cod travel long distances and so
it's hard to regulate something like that that's widespread and
there's different countries involved.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
So yeah, I guess tragedy of the Comments has been
largely debunked, even though it completely altered the world for
decades and decades and still does.
Speaker 3 (45:56):
Yeah, I mean either blamed or credited with the birth
of capitalism.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
This no small thing, it's pretty big. Yeah, yeah, Yeah,
So we're gonna do one on fencing of the commons
one day, and then we're also going to do one
on neoliberalism.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
Someday and the cod Wars.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Yeah, and the cod Wars. There you go. Well, since
Chuck corrected me and added cod Wars, of course, that
means it's time everybody for listening to mail.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
Uh. First of all, quick correction to a correction. When
we got written in about the hodgepodge, I kept saying
modgepodge right, it is modpodge, and the corrector got it right.
I just kept saying it wrong, wow, And I played
it off to myself as his joke, but it was not.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
Modgepodge is better. I think the inventor of mod podge
is just like, oh, why didn't I call it mogepodge?
Speaker 3 (46:47):
Mister vote?
Speaker 2 (46:48):
That rhymes even I wonder if it was from the
time when mod squad was out, because it does have
kind of like a hippie dippy flower look to it,
doesn't it.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Well. Decoupage is a very old thing, and I suppose
that meant a modern des coupage, is my guess.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
Okay, don't you think I don't know? I didn't ever
think about it more than I have in the last
couple of weeks. I know, right, we should never brought
it up.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Oh man, how do you go?
Speaker 2 (47:18):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (47:19):
I remember now we mentioned Martha Stewart and I said,
there's the Hodgepodge everywhere. M all right. So this is
from a friend in the Netherlands who said, good luck
pronouncing the name. But I think I've nailed it, so
we're going to see.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
Okay, stay tuned for the end.
Speaker 3 (47:34):
Hey, guys, just finished finished the episode on automats, and
I felt I needed to write in I'm from the
Netherlands and believe it or not, automats are still a
big thing there. And I remember now after I got
a couple of emails about these of being in Amsterdam,
Amsterdam and seeing these feebos.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
F e b o places I've not heard of that.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
Well, it's an automat basically, except instead of a huge restaurant,
it's just like a you know, a smallish room. We
refer to it as eating out of the wall. These
places mostly just sort of deep pried food, but in
general is quite fresh. Not sure why they're still so
popular though. Maybe it's because the Dutch aren't really known
for they're fine dining, as we just want our meals
(48:14):
to be efficient and cheap. Nevertheless, if you ever around
and invite you to take one of our famous croquettes
or bitter balls out of the wall, which are especially
good after a night of heavy drinking, I love the
show best regards, and that is from Hez.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
Nice. Will you spell that for us non Dutch speakers?
Speaker 3 (48:35):
At least that's how I was told to say it.
It is pronounced or as I'm sorry spelled, Gijs said, Hes.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
That is fantastic. That looks like I just like brushed
up against the keyboard.
Speaker 3 (48:49):
It really does.
Speaker 2 (48:50):
Can you pronounce it one more time?
Speaker 3 (48:52):
What I've gotten and what I'm sticking with is Hez.
Speaker 2 (48:55):
That is great. I hope you nailed it, Chuck, you
deserve too of them. I will say thanks a lot, Hes.
Speaker 3 (49:03):
The name you're trying to pronounce is Hez.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
We appreciate the email. Thanks for filling us in. I
had no idea about bitter balls and eating from the
wall through out of the wall in Amsterdam, So thank you.
And if you want to be like the name is Hes,
then you can send us an email to send it
off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (49:32):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and it's just us again, Jerry who And this
is stuff you should Know. That's right.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Another Econ edition. Typically not my favorite, but you know,
this one I could wrap my head around for the
most part.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I think that's one of the reasons why it's had
such an enormous impact on the world. Yes, because it
is so easy to wrap your head around. We should
probably say, we're talking about the tragedy of the Commons.
And for those of you who aren't familiar, it's this idea,
this concept that if you have a shared resource a commons, say,
(00:52):
and people are able to use it at their own
leisure for their own purposes. Event as they seek to
maximize their profits, they're going to overuse this commons and
inevitably it'll be ruined because people can't have anything nice. Essentially,
(01:13):
you know.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
It's funny, you're gonna laugh at me here, they're all
gonna laugh at you. Central the central area of my
high school was called the Commons. Yeah, and it just
occurred to me thirty five years or so after I
graduated that that's what that meant.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Oh, I see, I thought you were going to say,
like my teenage years were the tragedy of the comments.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
No, I just I don't know. I never thought about
the word because it was when you're in high school,
it's just sending the comments will meet the commons. But
it never occurred to me that that's what that meant,
just like a common area sure by everybody.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
It didn't either to me. I know exactly what you're
talking about. There was, if not high school, then maybe
middle school. There was some school where that was called
that too. Yeah, and I wonder if it was like
a surreptitious shot at kids, like they're all sheep, because
I don't think that's true. But one of the major
uses for commons traditionally has been for grazing. That's a
(02:09):
really good example. If you've let a bunch of people
graze on a shared resource, but they're taking what they
can from that resource to make money for themselves to
support themselves, then just because humans are rational, selfish, horrible beings,
that metal or that high school cafeteria will be ruined.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Yeah, that's right. And the idea of the tragedy of
the commons started out in nineteen sixty eight an article
from Science, the journal Science. It was called the Tragedy
of the Commons, and it was by a biologist named
Garrett Hardin, and he was sort of piggybacking on a
nineteenth century English mathematician and economist named William forsteror not Foster.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I would say, piggybacking or hijacking.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Hijacking William Forster Lloyd. And you mentioned grazing, and this
is sort of the thought experiment Harden went with, which
is like, you have a you know, a grazing field,
and let's say three farmers have use of it, and
they're letting their cows and cheap and you know grays
out there. But at some point one of them is
(03:16):
going to get an extra fat cow that they sell
for pretty good money. And they're like, hey, well, if
that worked out, maybe I can add like an additional cow,
and maybe it'll make you know, the value of all
of these cows go down a little bit, including my own,
because they're not getting as fat because I've added another
cow here, right, But if I can sell it for
(03:36):
this much money and it's only costing me a fraction
of that, for you know the.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Won't you extra cow?
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Well, I mean it would only cost a fraction of
loss of resources for the other cows. Like I'm still
coming out ahead and so bad to being bada boom,
that's what I'm going.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
To do, right Yeah. So if everybody was making one
dollar off of their caw when everything was being raised unsustainably,
then if you add one more cow, now everybody's making
eighty five cents off of their cows because you're starting
to overtax the commons. But that person who added that cow,
that's an extra eighty five cents they wouldn't have had before,
(04:17):
right yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
And if you're able to sell that cow for like
five bucks, that eighty five cents is a pittance compared
to what you're making on the other side.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Right, So there's always, under the logic of the tragedy
of the comments, there's always a reason to add another cow,
and add another cow, and add another cow, because your
returns are always going to be more than the cost
that you can offset with the returns. Right.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Well, that and you're also on the assumption that like
everyone else is going to be adding cow. So I'm
not going to be the only sucker not adding cows.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Right, So you're either a sucker or you're just somebody
who wants to survive. Because if people start ad cows
and you're the one farmer who's like, I'm not going
to do that. I find that morally repugnant. I really
like sustainably grazing here, and I'll just take one for
the team. In very short order, that farmer would find
(05:16):
that they were no longer making money because exactly because
each additional cow was taking an additional fraction. So let's
say that every time you added a cow, it reduced
the price that all the other cows got by fifteen percent.
That's not a steady price because if you reduce a
dollar by fifteen percent, now you're getting eighty five cents
(05:39):
for a cow. But now when you're adding another cow,
that reduces that eighty five cents by fifteen percent. So
all of a sudden, you're making seventy two cents, and
then sixty one cents and then fifty two cents. Right.
But again, if you're adding cows, that's always extra almost
found money. If you're not adding cows, then the cows
that you had originally are now getting less and less
(06:00):
and less, until you're making zero money, so you are
forced into adding cows. And that's why it's considered the tragedy.
You're why Garrett Harden called it the tragedy of the
comments because inevitably, under these circumstances, which are have long
been considered to be universal circumstances, basically the commons will
(06:21):
always get ruined and depleted and everybody will be totally
up the creek.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
That's right. And if Harden was basically like, there's a
couple of solutions here. You can either divide this area
up and now each person has their own little private
part of the past year that they're only in control
of and no one else can get on it and
graze there, or a government a body is going to
have to step in and regulate this stuff and manage it.
(06:48):
And you know, if you listen to Harden, and we'll
talk a little bit about the problems with this guy
in a second, Yeah, but if you listen to Harden,
he'll say, when you divide the things, this thing up
and make it just private it and everyone you know
is incentivized to basically preserve their plots and do it
sustainably so their profits are maximized. With, you know, making
(07:13):
sure the land isn't ruined so they can keep those
profits maximized.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, because now it's their land and they suddenly realize, oh,
this is a finite resource. If I start to degrade
this land, it's only coming out of my profits because
the other farmer's land is not degraded. So I'm the
only one in competition with myself here, really, and I
need to make sure that this land is preserved because
(07:37):
now it's the gold of the goose that laid the
golden egg, and I need to keep it nice and
healthy and happy. That's the direct result of privatization, as
far as Garrett Harden was explaining, as far as the
tragedy of the Commons goes right, simple solution, just give
people an incentive to take care of it by making
it their own. And the other way, like you said,
(07:58):
is government inter And this seems to be what hardens
big Like this is his favorite. I think solution was
bring the government in and just say you can't over
you can't graze more than these number of sheep, and
if you do, we'll wipe out your entire family line
something along those those lines.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Yeah. But here's the thing, like It wasn't like he
was some big champion of the government, because if you
read the whole article, Harden is like, and another thing,
the reason why the world is headed toward a bad
place or a bad place already is because freedom to
breed is intolerable. So there's just too many people. We're
(08:42):
making too many babies, and the welfare state that the
government is encouraging is taking away the natural consequence of
what happens if you have too many kids, like they're
going to not be able to sustain that, and the
kids are going to starve to death. So we're overbreeding.
And all of a sudden, everyone's going whoa, whoaa, whoa.
And he said and another thing, he said, this overbreeding,
(09:04):
it could actually be a strategy where a cohesive group
could come along to increase their power. And they're like,
wait a minute, are you talking about the great replacement?
And he said, I don't know what that is, right,
and they said, well, it'll be a thing at some point.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
He's like, I like the ring of it though, Yeah,
it's catchy, so yeah. Yeah. His whole thing was we
using scare quotes are overbreeding, meant poor non white countries
are overbreeding. Right, that was basically his whole thing, and
that yes, because there was such thing as international aid
(09:39):
in the way of food, in the way of money,
that that people could just keep having kids and knowing
that the western wealthier governments were going to take care
of him. And he was like, that's that's not what
we should be doing. And here's why the tragedy of
the commons. And to say that, by the way, the
(10:00):
I read another paper of his two called Lifeboat Ethics,
the Argument against Helping the poor. Yeah, hell is the subtitle,
so we really just put it out there. But he
basically said, Okay, let's imagine that all of the countries
in the world are lifeboats. Some are ridiculously overloaded with people,
(10:23):
others the wealthier, more advanced ones. Let's say that they're
in a lifeboat that seats one hundred and they only
have ninety people, but there's tons of people swimming around
them trying to get into the lifeboat. Do you pick
ten people out of these, you know, thousands of people
out there to let come into your lifeboat? If so,
(10:45):
how do you pick those people? What do you tell
the people you don't pick? And he ultimately concludes that
just don't help anybody, then you don't have to worry
about playing favorites or anything like that. Plus you keep
your ten person safety buffer in case things change for
you in your lifeboat, and you're fine. He actually argues
(11:08):
against guilt. You shouldn't feel any guilt, and as a
matter of fact, we shouldn't put guilt on people for
making decisions like these because they're just smart. And then secondly,
he also says that if you are one of those
people like that one farmer who is like overgrazing is
morally repugnant, and now I'm not going to do it.
If you were like that farmer in this lifeboat and
(11:29):
you said, I just I can't do this. I can't
sit there and watch people drown while I'm sitting here.
I'm going to give up my seat for somebody else.
Harden argued that just by virtue of a person accepting
your seat, they are less moral than you, and that
over time is more people in the lifeboat give up
(11:50):
their seat for moral reasons. Morality will be replaced in
this lifeboat with self interest, and then what do you
have then, So he makes all these like like if
you're a rational person and you take emotion out of it,
You're like, you know, I guess that kind of makes
sense in a little bit, but the moment you add
in any a drop of humanity to it, you're like,
(12:11):
this is horrible that this guy wrote a series of
papers arguing this.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Yeah, and he, you know, as far as the tragedy
of the Commons goes, he very explicitly says like, you know,
you got to prioritize yourself here, and you're you know
what you're doing and maximize your profits, and if you don't,
if you have ethics or something, then you're you're not
a very smart person.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Right exactly. So this is his whole thing that you know,
like all of it was over of population. The thing
is it got diluted or take him very literally, very quickly,
and it was applied to actual commons as we'll see,
and just it was stripped of its overpopulation, xenophobia, racism,
(12:56):
all of that stuff and just got applied to real
world old commons management. And to say like it changed
things is the understatement of the century.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
Chok, that's right. Should we take a break.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Yeah, let's all right, We'll be right back, everybody.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Okay, So, uh, the tragedy of commons became like the
dominant way of looking at the world among Western nations
because it did two things. It said that you can
solve this problem everyone is going to have. Any time
you have a shared resource, people are going to deplete it.
That's what it said, no matter where you are in
(14:04):
the world, no matter who you are, but we want
to save these shared resources. Because this paper came out
at about the same time the environmental consciousness came up,
so it was like perfect timing for that. But it
also said, just privatize, buddy. And at that time, neoliberalism
was on the rise, and they're like, yes, privatize, take
all these government run things and put them in the
(14:27):
hands of corporations and we'll all be better off.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Yeah. And you know, one of the ways that happened
was and we're going to talk about sort of different
versions of this here and there in this episode, but
environmental trading markets emerged and that came from Canada actually
an economist named J. H. Dales in nineteen sixty eight.
But the eighties and nineties or when they really kind
of started flying off the shelf. But that's like when
(14:52):
the government comes in with a regulation. Let's say to
cap whatever in this case, like let's say they're capping
emissions on.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
On baseball caps.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Baseball cap, I need to get rid of some baseball caps.
So that's great.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
You have too many? Do you have any good Hawks ones?
I'm on the I'm on the lookout for those.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
I have one Hawks cap that I wear.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
I gotcha.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
I just gave away a second one because it was
too big. But your your head is too small for
this thing.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
It's a really tiny head. I'm like that that one
Safari hunter and beetle juice.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Do you know what your hat size is?
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Uh? Like point six point six?
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Okay, that's good. So let's say it's fisheries, because we're
going to talk about the fisheries a lot. So yeah,
you know, the government will come in and say, hey,
you're overfishing, so we're going to cap how many fish
you can harvest or make it a certain size and
a certain area or something like that. And then here's
your permit Fishery A, and here's your permit fishery B
and fishery C. And they grant these permits. But and
(15:53):
this is the key to the etm's environmental trading markets.
The word trade you can trade as i e. Buy
and sell these permits, which and this is something that
I don't fully understand, or maybe I do understand, And
that's the whole point. But if company A is let's
say it's an environmental like, hey, you're a factory and
(16:17):
we're incentivizing you to clean up your pollution and here's
your permit or whatever. If Company A does a really
good job and does the right thing and comes in
like way under the amount of emissions that they're supposed
to hit, by simply selling that to Company B, who's like, man,
we're not too good at that. I mean, is it creating?
Like doesn't that kind of defeat the whole purpose?
Speaker 2 (16:39):
No, it doesn't. And we talked about this in the
acid rain episode. Do you remember whatever happened to acid rain?
That thing?
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yeah, it can work, and it does work. We actually
reduced sulfur dioxide emissions that we were associated with acid
rain so much. The acid rain went away and it
was like the ozone layer of like the early eighties,
I think in seventies, like it was a big scary
thing and we took care of it because of cap
(17:08):
and trade schemes. So it can work.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
But how That's what I don't get. If one company
is lowering their output but another one is increasing theirs
because they just bought the other companies, then how is
that a net loss.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Because of the cap? Because you put the cap at
something close to a target that you want to reduce
things to, so you don't make like some sky high
cap that's more than what you're at now. You make
it less and then maybe a couple of years later,
you make it less than that. So those caps, those
those little shares or whatever, those allowances that they can trade,
(17:43):
they get more and more valuable the less and less
they represent because the law is kind of bringing these
emissions down further and further. So ultimately you're rewarding a
company by reducing their emissions because they can make money
selling that to another company, and that other company is
actually technically be punished because they're having to shell out
more money than they budgeted for because they're omitting more
(18:04):
than they are supposed to. So ultimately you're penalizing and
rewarding through this cap and trade scheme, but you're also
creating an artificial cap. All these companies could just pollute
as much as they want, but this government is saying no,
you actually can't. Here's your level. Here it is divided
among the ten companies go to town. But does that
(18:26):
make sense?
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Well? Yeah. The thing I still don't get though, is
the company that's, you know, buying extra emissions whatever output
from the company that's like really good at it, are
they allowed to go over the cap?
Speaker 2 (18:41):
They know they But let's say they have a cap
to put out ten pounds of CO two, right, yeah,
and they're going to they know they're putting out fifteen
that year. Well, this other company that's putting out five
pounds of CO two that year, they can sell their
other five pounds, So no one goes over the cap
total cap, but different companies can contribute different amounts based
(19:05):
on how much of those allowance shares they can purchase
or sell. Does that make sense?
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I promise it works. It worked for sulfur dioxide. It
does work. The problem is is it's also like it
requires a lot of buy in from industry or really
heavy handed government regulation.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
Well, either way. It became a big deal in the eighties,
and by the end of the eighties, the World Bank
referred to tragedy of the commons as quote the dominant
paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues. So
I mean you can't like there's a bunch of different
policies in a bunch of different areas, so you can't
(19:46):
just look at the entire thing as a whole and
say like, well it's been a huge success, Like you
can pick out something like acid rain or say it
was success in this case, but there's humans involved, so
you never can tell. Well, it's not like you never
can't tell like I say, can forecast, but there's not
just one big blanket like nope, this is the exact solution.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Right for sure, And it depends on the on the industry,
right like you said, acid rain, that was a great
success story. Fisheries are another example. If you take a
fishery like you were saying, and you divide up the
total catch between companies, those companies can actually go around
and buy you know, huge portions of the other company shares, right,
(20:30):
and so all of a sudden, they're basically one company
with all of the rights to catch all of the
fish in that fishery because they managed to consolidate the
shares over time. And that's a huge problem that's not
at all what you want. Like, yeah, that that fishing
company is still staying within the total number of fish
that can be caught annually, but they ran all the
(20:52):
other people out of business. That's so that's not at
all what you want with it. So there's there's pluses
and minuses. There's a situation. The thing is is the
tragedy of the commons has largely been overblown and the
idea that you can come out on top just by
privatizing things like natural resources has been a lesson learned
(21:13):
the hard way. That's just overall, that's not necessarily the
best way to do it, and it can really really
harm some groups while enriching others tremendously.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
Well. Yeah, and like in the case of a fishery,
like if you're a small fishing crew or something, good
luck kind of working your way up and maybe establishing
yourself as one of the larger companies, especially if the
people that are buying these things up are people that
don't live around. There are these corporations that right that
don't have necessarily a local interest. And again, while they
(21:45):
might be like hitting you know, staying under the threshold environmentally,
it might be working out, but you're consolidating the wealth.
Sometimes there's regulations on that where they say you have
to be you know, like on the fishing boat, and like,
you know, like Chick fil A. If you're going to
buy Chick fil A franchise, you gotta manage that.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Thing exactly right. You want that Chick fil A Cadillac.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
Exactly But sometimes there aren't regulations like that. And what's
been proven over and over, especially with etms, if there's
a way for a system to be exploited for profit,
then a company will come along and do it no
matter what.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
That's basically the neoliberalism tea shirt what you just said
to you know exactly.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Here's the thing, if you look at the actual try
tragedy of the commons, Harden sort of just leaves conveniently
leaves a lot of stuff out. Like he's assuming in
this argument that like the people that the farmers that
are sharing this grazing spot aren't talking to each other
at all about what's going on and saying like, hey,
we're ruining this land. By the way, maybe we should
(22:48):
dial it back, like everybody get rid of two cows.
And it also assumes that their only interest is to
maximize profit and do not care for the land, and
that's just not always the case.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
No. I mean that's really a tough sell to a
neoliberal policy maker, Like they're just like, you're crazy, you're
so naive for even thinking that. Of course their goal
is to maximize profits. But what's really cool is we'll
see a little later on real world examples prove that
that's not true. They disprove the tragedy of the commons
(23:22):
by themselves. It wasn't like, oh, let's set up this crazy,
really kind of rickety experiment and see if we can
disprove the tragedy of the commons. Now, people went out
and looked at real world, for example, indigenous treatment of
common resources, and they're like, these people have been managing
and not depleting these things for thousands of years now
because they came up with their own sensible rules that
(23:46):
aren't neoliberal in nature.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Yeah, for sure, if you look at the original sort
of like it's not just a theoretical thing. If you
look at the paper by William Forrester. I think he
said Forster earlier, not Forrester Lloyd, that this is the
one hardened would you say, hijacked to begin with, he did.
He was talking about actual English commons, which was how
(24:09):
it used to work in medieval England. Was the lord
would own all this land, but there were people that
lived on it. It wasn't like, hey, this is my
private land, no one can be here at first. So
the people that lived there, they you know, they had
to graze their animals and fish out of the streams
and ponds and things like that, and they were allowed
to with you know, through certain age old customs. Sometimes
(24:32):
the local government would step in and kind of help
manage this stuff and limit grazing and things like that.
But it wasn't like this set codified system in place
all over England. It was just they had been working
it out for centuries like this. It wasn't perfect, but
it was sustainable and they didn't like just destroy their
land because they all had self interest to keep it sustainable.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Right, And then they were enclosed. And enclosure was this
huge mass as have overlooked world changing event, and we
need to do an episode on the fencing of the
Commons someday because it's just it changed the entire mentality.
Remember our episode on the Luddites and how they emerged
(25:16):
from a world that was just it just completely turned
everything on its head. That's what happened with enclosure. When
they fenced the commons, it changed everything, and the concept
of private property like really kind of developed out of that,
at least in the West, right. So we'll do a
whole separate episode on that, but suffice to say that
it seems to be once the commons were fenced and
(25:37):
we're no longer a shared resource, that's when the issue
started to come up. If you ask Karl Marx, he
would have said that this is where we came up
with the landless proletariat, the working class who had to
work for wages because they no longer owned anything. It
created the very, very wealthy class that didn't actually have
(25:59):
to do anything because because all they had to do
was start renting this private property of theirs to the
people who needed to work. It created a whole system
of problems. And in fact, some people are like, whether,
however you feel about capitalism, you can kind of trace
us back to the beginning of capitalism, the fencing of
(26:19):
the commons. The irony of all this is that William
Forrester or Lloyd was arguing against Adam Smith's capitalist idea
that the invisible hand of the market will always guide
things to a good outcome. He created, ultimately the Tragedy
of the Commons as a thought experiment to show like, no, actually,
(26:41):
people don't. People aren't guided to this bottom good. Instead,
they are going to act in their own self interest
and destroy this stuff. So Harden actually took it and
turned it around as an argument for capitalism, for private
enterprise advertising stuff. This argument that was originally used to
(27:03):
disprove that.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Yeah, and if you were enclosing your own comments or
arguing in that favor at the time, you were saying, hey,
everything has been chaos up into this point. It's very
inefficient and there's got to be a more organized way
to do this. And that was you know, it wasn't
a guys, I guess, but what they were really saying
(27:25):
was is we want this area, right, it's ours. Yeah,
I mean, let's just oversell the chaos, maybe because it
was actually working out okay for many centuries, but we're
going to just sell it as this this chaotic mess
that needs to be cleaned up and organized.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Right, That's how it's done. It seems like, isn't it.
Charles Like people people come along and create a problem
that's not actually there for their own benefit. Ultimately.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
Yeah, I have a friend who ever since college, he
was just one of those guys that while we were
just like what over, he was about what about everything
about the world, about politics, about you know that that
period of college would you just kind of check out
and all you care about is like where you're going
that night? All that to say, he was a very
smart guy back then, and he used to just say
stuff that used to shake all of us to our
(28:15):
core about what's coming about this, that or the other
with a government. And he would always say, but here's
how they're going to sell it to you, And I, oh, yeah.
That always stuck with me, and he's totally right, like
they'll sell it to you as this, but then it
becomes this.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Right, Yeah, that's really interesting. I love stuff like that
about how just massive sweeping changes come from just a
change in an idea, change in yeah, in perspective, And
that's a really great That's what the tragedy of the
Commons was. It was an idea, it was a perspective.
He'd like Garrett Harden, didn't undertake a bunch of different
(28:51):
experiments or field studies or anything like that. In his paper,
which was published in Science by the way, it was
an essay at his own thoughts on something that he
presented so reasonably that people who were again neoliberals, who
were in favor of privatizing everything, including common resources, could
(29:12):
go to government policymakers and be like, here's how it works.
Doesn't that make sense? And the government said, yes, that
makes sense, let's start privatizing everything. And it was just
because this guy took this idea and made it approachable,
that's it. Yeah, it's not. It became fact even though
it was never faced. I just find that fascinating how
(29:35):
something like that can just change the world.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
Well, you know, I think there were so many people
licking their chops. They were like, oh, here's a great
opportunity for us to jump on this bandwagon to take
more for ourselves.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Right, But what if the bandwagon had never been there?
Would anyone have figured out how to manipulate things so thoroughly,
especially so quickly too? Without this one paper, this one biologist.
Speaker 3 (29:58):
Wrote, Yeah, someone would have.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Yeah, but it would have happened piecemeal. I think, I
don't know, it's questionable that it would have happened like
it had.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Yeah, maybe let's.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Take a break.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
All right, we'll be right back. We're going to contemplate
that and come back with the definitive answer. Right for this,
(30:48):
we don't have a definitive answer.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
I was just kidding, You got me.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
We should talk about Eleanor Ostrom though. This is a
woman who wrote a book in nineteen ninety called Governing
the Commons colon the Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action,
and she's probably like at the top of the list
for really bringing this to the upper echelons of the
(31:13):
political world worldwide. I guess she took a bunch of
examples all over the world of controlled cprs, like grazing
areas it's always a good one in Switzerland in this case,
forests in Japan, meadows in Japan, and of course fisheries
(31:33):
and things like that in this case in the Philippines.
So kind of really kind of picking different spots all
over the world and examining these and how they've worked out,
and basically argued that like, hey, these things are had
been working out for centuries and it worked out pretty
good because everybody lived there who was involved. And when
(31:55):
you have local people that have long term interest in
the well being of their land and their area and
keeping that up. Then the economic side of things, it
is not going to go away, but it's going to
take a back seat to ensuring that this land that
they live in stays as close to as it is
as possible.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Yes, And so she was the one who went out
and actually did those field studies that Garrett Harden didn't like.
She had the receipts to back up what she was saying,
which was the tragedy of the Commons isn't actually true.
It's certainly not in every case. And what's the ironic
thing is this Chuck the tragedy of the Commons played out.
(32:42):
I feel like for the most part, when things were
privatized and outside industry were allowed to come in and
have a share of the Commons, that's when it was
that's when the problems really began.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
So I want to say one other thing too, because
I know I'm kind of known for having a very
hard nos certain opinion about things and its lants, you know,
in this particular direction. Typically, I don't know, in the
last like years, so I've kind of lost my taste
for brigidity like that, or black and white thinking. So
(33:22):
I don't want anybody to think that I'm just like
neoliberalism equals bad alternatives to neoliberalism all good. Like, I
just don't see the world like that anymore. So I
don't want anybody to think that I'm just like I'm
bashing neoliberalism as if there's no redeemable quality to it whatsoever.
I just don't believe that. But in the case of
(33:45):
the tragedy of the commons, I feel like more often
than not, neoliberal policies again, privatizing shared resources or taking
oversight away from the government and just putting it in
the hands of the market has been disastrous for the
world over the last it's like forty fifty years. It's
been really good for wealthy people and helping other people
(34:07):
get wealthier, but that ignores the expense on the backs
of other people that it's created too. I just wanted
to put that out there, yeah, that I don't want
anybody think I'm just bashing neoliberalism because it does help
in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
No, And I know you well, and I can tell
everybody that you are a very varied person who looks
at things from all angles and is very considerate of
you don't just shut anything down outright. You like to
consider things now. Okay, So back to Austrom though, she
(34:42):
argues that, hey, this we've shown time and time again.
I show in these real world examples in my books
in Japan and in Switzerland and the Philippines with the
fisheries that this can work. But there's some parameters that
have been shown to ensure that it works, and you
got to follow these or it's not going to work.
(35:03):
And she had narrowed it down to eight principles of
like a successful you know, regulation of a commons, which
is clearly defined boundaries. So who can use this area,
what is this area? Rules that fit local needs. And
this is something we've been kind of hammering on. It's
got to be the local parties that come up with
these rules. The addition of outside people stepping in it
(35:29):
seems to be when all of the problems start because
their interests are not the same as local interests.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Yeah, history kind of tells us that when outside groups
come in and start pushing the people who've been using
this thing for a thousand years, pushing them around. Yeah,
it just doesn't go very wellpeatly because the outside groups
don't necessarily understand this. And as we'll see, that doesn't
mean that there shouldn't be the involvement of any outside groups.
What Ostrom was saying that she found from these studies
(35:56):
is that you have to begin the base the the
people who are really laying the groundwork and setting the
rules for this. They have to be the people who
are actually using this resource.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Yeah, for sure. The third one is group decision making,
so it's not just a couple of people or a
small board deciding these things, like get as many people
in there as possible, local people monitoring. You have to
have people monitoring, and you know, she used her forest
land example in Japan was one where she was like, hey,
they had locals monitoring the stuff and levying fines. So
(36:30):
you've got to know that someone is out there doing this,
so people, you know, know they're going to be held accountable.
And then the next one ties into that. And then
when you do that, you've got to start out small
with these sanctions. It's got to be like a warning
first and then a small fine. You can't just come
in there with the billy club and say you're out.
It's you've got to encourage people to stick around and like,
(36:54):
all right, here's a warning, but you can't keep letting
this happen. That kind of thing I was.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Really curious with the ultimate punishment is for repeat offenders,
And the only example I could find was among a
group in Bali. And ostracism is what the person ultimately faces, which, yeah,
and that's bad enough in like like a Western society,
you know, but also you can make do you know,
(37:21):
there's the internet. If you go into a store, the
person basically has to take your money for food. In
a more traditional culture, ostracisms like you're in big trouble
because groups rely on one another for help. And the
example they gave was if one of your relatives dies,
there's certain rights you have to perform, and if you're ostracized,
you have to figure that out all by yourself because
(37:43):
the community is not going to show up and help
you for these death rights that your ancestors demand of you,
because that's just tradition.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
Yeah, yeah, for sure. The last three of the eighth
easy dispute resolution, so just something on the on the
cheap that's pretty informal and not some big, drawn out
expensive you know, tribunal or something like that.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
Yeah, no wigs, no powdered wigs.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
No potter wigs at all. You have to have support
from authorities. And it may be a local thing, but
you've got to have the blessing of a larger government
body to at the very least not get in there
and mucket up themselves and just sort of let you
do your thing, but maybe also support and then finally
building up to a larger system. So again, keep it local,
(38:31):
but if it's a system that connects to a larger system,
like a creek that connects to a larger watershed, you're
going to have to start linking up with other local
groups and make it a larger thing.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Right. But the point that she made too is that
that works, that's actually scalable, which is good because, like
you said, you know, a creek is one thing, but
it depends on a watershed. And so if you can
get together with other people who are managing their own creeks,
you can manage the watershed based on the individual common
(39:05):
I guess rules that that groups have come up with,
and that you can scale that into more modern systems too. Right, So,
like say a city has somehow created a cap on
how much emissions that the factories in the cities can create.
You can combine that with other cities, and now you're
starting to manage a larger part of the atmosphere. And
(39:26):
then that the state can come in and work with
all of those cities, and then the state can work
with other states, and all of a sudden, now you
have regional air quality being controlled from the rules that
are based on the actual stakeholders in each individual community.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
That's right, And did she win something for this work?
Speaker 2 (39:44):
She won the Nobel which Livia foot in parentheses fake
Nobel Prize and economic science is because that's not one
that the no that was actually organized originally.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
She meant by that, but what one of the things
that that came out of the book. There's a University
of Chicago legal scholar name named lee Ann Fennel who
points to that book and says, you know, this is
sort of a corrects these legal theories that say property
is all or nothing, like you either own it or
and have total control over it, or you don't. And
(40:19):
it's actually possible. You can have a common you can
have an area that people share and the example that
and still have some autonomy. And the example that Livia
gave was like a house and if you got a
family in the house, you know, let's say you know
two people that have coupled up and have children. You know,
(40:40):
it's a collective. But like you know, generally speaking, unless
you live in a in a terrible house with an
authoritarian dictator as the head of the household.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
Or a stepdad, that makes you feel stupid.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
Yeah stepdad and makes you feel dumb. You've got you know,
your kid has your room, and you know what you
can This is your room. You know, you have a
right to your room and you can basically decorate it
how you want, within within reason, and do what you
want in here. But it's still part of the.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
House, right and technically your parents own that room. Yeah,
but because of custom, custom and tradition, they probably respect
that room as your private space.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
Yeah. And that's something as a parent I found is
super important because at a certain age, and this has
been the last couple of years with Ruby, like you know,
I'm gonna go into my room and shut the.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Door, yeah, and you're like, no, you're not, well.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
I'll open the door because I just like and it's
not in a spy way. I just like peeking in
and seeing the fun stuff she's doing. And Emily's like,
you know, leave the door shut. You get she's got
to have that autonomy.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
And I'm like, good for Emily, that's really sweet. When
you open the door, do you suddenly open and go
what are you doing?
Speaker 3 (41:49):
I'll give it you. I'll give a little knock now,
you know. And you know she's usually in their drawing
pictures of cats and listening.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
To music, reading Team Beat.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Man, do you remember? So was your room your own
private sanctuary? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (42:03):
I mean Scott and I shared a room until I
was I feel like I was probably ten or eleven.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
That's the that's the room age right there.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Yeah, and that's when we split. But we were upstairs
at our house. It was just two bedrooms and separated
by a joined bathroom. And my sweet brother, he I
was so sad about moving out of his room. At first,
he agreed to keep his bathroom door open so I
could lay in bed and see through the bathroom to
(42:34):
him and his work.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
God, he is such a he'd be the rancher that
would be like, I'm not overgrazing all.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
I know. He's one of the best. But yeah, so
I had my own room and it was like my
sports posters and I went through a Marylyn and Roe
phez for some reason, where I had a bunch of
hard posters up.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
I went through a James phase that was similar.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
Yeah, exactly, But yeah, it was my room. I took
a lot of pride in decorating it and doing my thing.
And my parents my father literally did not come upstairs.
That's a whole other story, and my mom did for
a while, but basically, I mean that was our zone
for the most part.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
That's awesome, you know. I remember they're not being anything
more satisfying than undertaking a total remodeling of your room,
moving stuff around, furniture all of a sudden, the beds
over here, and like doing that, it was it was
so it just changed everything. I'd love that so much.
I have so many great memories of my room.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
Yeah, me too, And I used to do that two
apartments I lived in, uh and I had ironically recently
had a thought about how much I used to enjoy
that and how like our house there, you can't really
do that, Like it's set up in a in a
way that I can't be like, hey, let's rearrange our
living room. It's like, well, you can't because.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Let's move the built ins outside.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
Yeah, exactly, So those days are over for me unfortunately. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
Same here. That's just how it goes as you get older.
It's one more thing that brings you joy or brought
you joy that's now dead, old leaf.
Speaker 3 (44:06):
All right, Well, let's finish up on tragedy of the commons,
because we can use an example of Maine lobster fisheries
as a pretty good example of how people can start
to do the wrong thing but correct course on their own. Yeah,
And that was the case in the nineteenth century when
the state of Maine started setting legal minimum sizes for
(44:29):
catching lobsters, and they couldn't enforce it that well at first,
and people broke the rules and we're like, you know,
trying to make extra money or keep more lobsters than
they should for a while. But eventually they were like, hey,
wait a minute, we're not doing ourselves any favors here,
and if we're going to all continue this to sustain
our living doing this, we got to work together. So
(44:50):
they form harbor gangs to start self policing.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Basically, so main lobsterman harbor gangs. Is there anything scared
than the sound of that? Just seeing them kind of
slowly come up on your boat and they're all like
they have chains in their hands.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Don't go over that. That's where the Hobba gangs are
very nice.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Boy, you just took me to cabit Coat.
Speaker 3 (45:13):
So they started self policing, and everyone bought into this
idea that let's not ruin all of our livelihood here.
And one thing that gets pointed out is you can
do this in a case like that because lobsters are
close to shore. It's a small, small community. It's local
people in the case of cod. And at some point
(45:33):
we should do one on the Cod Wars because that's
where this factors in cod travel long distances and so
it's hard to regulate something like that that's widespread and
there's different countries involved.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
So yeah, I guess tragedy of the Comments has been
largely debunked, even though it completely altered the world for
decades and decades and still does.
Speaker 3 (45:56):
Yeah, I mean either blamed or credited with the birth
of capitalism.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
This no small thing, it's pretty big. Yeah, yeah, Yeah,
So we're gonna do one on fencing of the commons
one day, and then we're also going to do one
on neoliberalism.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
Someday and the cod Wars.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Yeah, and the cod Wars. There you go. Well, since
Chuck corrected me and added cod Wars, of course, that
means it's time everybody for listening to mail.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
Uh. First of all, quick correction to a correction. When
we got written in about the hodgepodge, I kept saying
modgepodge right, it is modpodge, and the corrector got it right.
I just kept saying it wrong, wow, And I played
it off to myself as his joke, but it was not.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
Modgepodge is better. I think the inventor of mod podge
is just like, oh, why didn't I call it mogepodge?
Speaker 3 (46:47):
Mister vote?
Speaker 2 (46:48):
That rhymes even I wonder if it was from the
time when mod squad was out, because it does have
kind of like a hippie dippy flower look to it,
doesn't it.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Well. Decoupage is a very old thing, and I suppose
that meant a modern des coupage, is my guess.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
Okay, don't you think I don't know? I didn't ever
think about it more than I have in the last
couple of weeks. I know, right, we should never brought
it up.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Oh man, how do you go?
Speaker 2 (47:18):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (47:19):
I remember now we mentioned Martha Stewart and I said,
there's the Hodgepodge everywhere. M all right. So this is
from a friend in the Netherlands who said, good luck
pronouncing the name. But I think I've nailed it, so
we're going to see.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
Okay, stay tuned for the end.
Speaker 3 (47:34):
Hey, guys, just finished finished the episode on automats, and
I felt I needed to write in I'm from the
Netherlands and believe it or not, automats are still a
big thing there. And I remember now after I got
a couple of emails about these of being in Amsterdam,
Amsterdam and seeing these feebos.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
F e b o places I've not heard of that.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
Well, it's an automat basically, except instead of a huge restaurant,
it's just like a you know, a smallish room. We
refer to it as eating out of the wall. These
places mostly just sort of deep pried food, but in
general is quite fresh. Not sure why they're still so
popular though. Maybe it's because the Dutch aren't really known
for they're fine dining, as we just want our meals
(48:14):
to be efficient and cheap. Nevertheless, if you ever around
and invite you to take one of our famous croquettes
or bitter balls out of the wall, which are especially
good after a night of heavy drinking, I love the
show best regards, and that is from Hez.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
Nice. Will you spell that for us non Dutch speakers?
Speaker 3 (48:35):
At least that's how I was told to say it.
It is pronounced or as I'm sorry spelled, Gijs said, Hes.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
That is fantastic. That looks like I just like brushed
up against the keyboard.
Speaker 3 (48:49):
It really does.
Speaker 2 (48:50):
Can you pronounce it one more time?
Speaker 3 (48:52):
What I've gotten and what I'm sticking with is Hez.
Speaker 2 (48:55):
That is great. I hope you nailed it, Chuck, you
deserve too of them. I will say thanks a lot, Hes.
Speaker 3 (49:03):
The name you're trying to pronounce is Hez.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
We appreciate the email. Thanks for filling us in. I
had no idea about bitter balls and eating from the
wall through out of the wall in Amsterdam, So thank you.
And if you want to be like the name is Hes,
then you can send us an email to send it
off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (49:32):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
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