John Baden, "A Primer for the Management of Common Pool Resources", ed. Garrett Hardin and John Baden, Managing the Commons, San Fransisco, W.H. Freeman and Company, 1977.
In small groups (as in some communal situations) social pressure can induce contributions for public goods. Or, if there is a situation in which the private benefit from providing a public good is greater than its private costs, the public good will be supplied privately. [138]
[Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action]
To what degree is freedom to be sacrificed through the replacement of willing consent by coercion in order to protect or enhance an environmental resource? One of the most substantial costs of an increasing population is precisely the sacrifice in freedom necessitated by the need for maximizing production in a context of increasing interdependence and increasing demands on the resource base. In general, the world is taking on an ever-greater resemblance to a common pool [140]
As Gordon Tullock has remarked, government is nothing more than a prosaic instrument designed to coordinate human behavior through potential resort to coercion when the costs associated with reliance upon voluntary agreement are considered to be excessively high by a group of people possessing sufficient power to set and enforce the rules under which rules are made. [141]
Quite apart from the above considerations, there is a subtle and more pervasive problem inherent in reliance upon bureaucratic order to provide public goods and manage common pool resources. Every bureau has a bias toward growth beyond the point where marginal cost equals marginal benefit. [144]
1.05.1977
1.04.1977
Garrett Hardin
Garrett Hardin, "Rewards of Pejoristic Thinking", ed. Garrett Hardin and John Baden, Managing the Commons, San Fransisco, W.H. Freeman and Company, 1977.
Enthusiasts of individual freedom often acknowledge the existence of evil in the world, but they believe that the majority of mankind is basically good and that the majority is decisive in determining what happens. Sometimes this may be true; but there are many social processes that work in such a way the even the smallest minority spoils the results. [129]
Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out good. [evolution]
Note that when we are dealing with a monetary system a policy of voluntary compliance fails no matter how small the initial minority of noncooperators. Only a minority of zero would permit a voluntary system to work. Obviously, we would be fools to adopt any political or economic system that functions successfully only if literally everyone is virtuous. [129]
Pejoristic processes are easier to descry. Every pesticide, for example, selects for its own failure. (DDT, for instance, selects for DDT-resistant flies.) The rhythm method of birth control selects for arhythmic women. Voluntary population control selects for philoprogenitive instincts that mock at the system. Free competition among currencies selects for bad money. [131]
Though men have long assumed the general applicability of laissez-faire, they have not hitherto generalized from Gresham's Law to policy. In effect, they have treated this law as a special case. Had its generality been recognized earlier, we might sooner have recognized that in an unmanaged commons, greedy herdsmen drive out considerate one, grasping hunters drive out moderate ones, polluting industries drive out clean, and rapidly reproducing parents displace those who accept the limits to growth. [131]
Enthusiasts of individual freedom often acknowledge the existence of evil in the world, but they believe that the majority of mankind is basically good and that the majority is decisive in determining what happens. Sometimes this may be true; but there are many social processes that work in such a way the even the smallest minority spoils the results. [129]
Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out good. [evolution]
Note that when we are dealing with a monetary system a policy of voluntary compliance fails no matter how small the initial minority of noncooperators. Only a minority of zero would permit a voluntary system to work. Obviously, we would be fools to adopt any political or economic system that functions successfully only if literally everyone is virtuous. [129]
Pejoristic processes are easier to descry. Every pesticide, for example, selects for its own failure. (DDT, for instance, selects for DDT-resistant flies.) The rhythm method of birth control selects for arhythmic women. Voluntary population control selects for philoprogenitive instincts that mock at the system. Free competition among currencies selects for bad money. [131]
Though men have long assumed the general applicability of laissez-faire, they have not hitherto generalized from Gresham's Law to policy. In effect, they have treated this law as a special case. Had its generality been recognized earlier, we might sooner have recognized that in an unmanaged commons, greedy herdsmen drive out considerate one, grasping hunters drive out moderate ones, polluting industries drive out clean, and rapidly reproducing parents displace those who accept the limits to growth. [131]
1.03.1977
Garrett Hardin
Garrett Hardin, "Ethical Implications of Carrying Capacity", , ed. Garrett Hardin and John Baden, Managing the Commons, San Fransisco, W.H. Freeman and Company, 1977.
The theory of discounting, using commercially realistic rates of interest, virtually writes off the future. The consequences have been well described by Fife and Clark. Devotion to economic discounting in its present form is suicidal. How soon is it so? 'In the long run', an economist would say, since disaster is more than five years off. 'In the short run', according to biologists, since disaster occurs in much less than the million or so years that is the normal life expectancy of a species. [113]
The foundation of situational ethics is this: The morality of an act is determined by the state of the system at the time the act is performed. Ecology, a system-based view of the world, demands situational ethics. ...
The legislative process is a slow one. Situational ethics seems almost to demand an administrative approach; by statute, administrators can be given the power to make instant, detailed decisions within a legally defined framework. Rules promulgated by an administrative agency are called administrative law.
On paper, the system may look fine, but the general public is understandably afraid of it. Administrative law gives power to administrators, who are human and hence fallible. Their decisions may be self-serving. John Adams called for 'a government of laws, and not of men'. We rightly esteem this as a desirable ideal. The practical question we must face is how far can we safely depart from the ideal undert he pressure of ecological necessity? This is the harrowing Quis custodiet problem; it has not easy solutions. [114]
We may speculate - we can hardly know - that the long avoidance of the commons problem was due to a subconscious awareness of the intractable Quis custodiet problem, which would have been activated by any attempt to depart from the system of the commons. [115]
The theory of discounting, using commercially realistic rates of interest, virtually writes off the future. The consequences have been well described by Fife and Clark. Devotion to economic discounting in its present form is suicidal. How soon is it so? 'In the long run', an economist would say, since disaster is more than five years off. 'In the short run', according to biologists, since disaster occurs in much less than the million or so years that is the normal life expectancy of a species. [113]
The foundation of situational ethics is this: The morality of an act is determined by the state of the system at the time the act is performed. Ecology, a system-based view of the world, demands situational ethics. ...
The legislative process is a slow one. Situational ethics seems almost to demand an administrative approach; by statute, administrators can be given the power to make instant, detailed decisions within a legally defined framework. Rules promulgated by an administrative agency are called administrative law.
On paper, the system may look fine, but the general public is understandably afraid of it. Administrative law gives power to administrators, who are human and hence fallible. Their decisions may be self-serving. John Adams called for 'a government of laws, and not of men'. We rightly esteem this as a desirable ideal. The practical question we must face is how far can we safely depart from the ideal undert he pressure of ecological necessity? This is the harrowing Quis custodiet problem; it has not easy solutions. [114]
We may speculate - we can hardly know - that the long avoidance of the commons problem was due to a subconscious awareness of the intractable Quis custodiet problem, which would have been activated by any attempt to depart from the system of the commons. [115]
1.02.1977
Ilya Prigogine
Ilya Prigogine, Peter Allen, Robert Herman, "Long Term Trends and the Evolution of Complexity", ed. Ervin Laszlo, Goals in a Global Community, New York, Pergamon Press, 1977.
We find that if there is a certain 'plasticity' of the 'genetic' matter, there can only result a greater exploitation of the environment.
In this very simple system, evolution leads to the gradual filling of the available resource spectrum and to the increasing effectiveness of the exploitation of each resource. Of course, the above case has been chosen because it is especially simple. However, a mathematical criterion can be derived which is valid for the general case of n-interacting genotype populations which are perturbed by the arrival of small quantities of several mutant populations. Such considerations lead to an interpretation of the evolution of ecosystems in terms of a 'dialogue' between fluctuations leading to innovations and the deterministic response of the interacting species already existing in the ecosystem. The basic aspect is the selective advantage which is introduced through the new values of the parameters (such as K, N, d) which enter into the equations describing the populations dynamics [birthrate, carrying capacity, death rate]. Note that the exact mechanism of fluctuations is left unspecified. Briefly speaking, Darwinism supposes an origin of fluctuations based on random genetic variation, which may certainly be appropriate for many aspects of biological evolution, while Lamarckism supposes a 'learning' mechanism of the individuals trying to adapt to the environment. Socio-cultural evolution would seem to correspond more closely to this second type of interpretation. [53]
[Only if socio-cultural evolution applied to the vehicle rather than the meme]
It is further possible to deduce how many species will be found occupying a fully evolved ecosystem with a given resource spectrum. The species packing is determined by the level of environmental fluctuation, and in particular by the amount of coherence of resource fluctuation. The greater the fluctuation the greater the niche separation must be for the long term co-existence of neighboring species. Knowing the niche width from our evolution theory, we can now say that ecosystems rich in resources and not suffering large fluctuations will have the greatest number of species. Environmental fluctuations will reduce this number. A system with sparsely scattered resources, if their densities do not fluctuate greatly, will be populated by 'generalist' species with considerable niche overlap, while a poor system with fluctuating resources will be filled with a few 'generalist' species. [54]
[How does fluctuation rates or resource spectrums translate to co-existing social behavior-species in social ecosystems?]
Since the advent of quantum mechanics, many attempts have been made to relate microscopic indeterminacy, i.e., the celebrated Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, to macroscopic behavior. We now see that the situation is much simpler, for the macroscopic equations themselves contain the elements of stochasticity which leads to 'macroscopic indeterminacy'. Problems such as self-organization in non-equilibrium systems require both aspects - the deterministic one where averages represent accurately the physical state of the system and the stochastic one which is important near bifurcation points and instabilities. It is the cooperation of these two features which leads to a faithful representation of some of the basic aspects of evolving systems. [57]
Complexity is limited by stability which, in turn, is limited by the strength of the system-environment coupling. [58]
'man's particular relation to the environment is fundamentally similar to that of any other species, in that it is a continuing effort to exercise sufficient control to extract energy from the environment. Particularly typical of man, however, is his cultural mode of behavior which leads him to seek this security of control through constant redefinition of himself and his environment, permitting him to develop his society into an ever expanding system.' R.N. Adams, Energy and Structure, 1975. [59]
We find that if there is a certain 'plasticity' of the 'genetic' matter, there can only result a greater exploitation of the environment.
In this very simple system, evolution leads to the gradual filling of the available resource spectrum and to the increasing effectiveness of the exploitation of each resource. Of course, the above case has been chosen because it is especially simple. However, a mathematical criterion can be derived which is valid for the general case of n-interacting genotype populations which are perturbed by the arrival of small quantities of several mutant populations. Such considerations lead to an interpretation of the evolution of ecosystems in terms of a 'dialogue' between fluctuations leading to innovations and the deterministic response of the interacting species already existing in the ecosystem. The basic aspect is the selective advantage which is introduced through the new values of the parameters (such as K, N, d) which enter into the equations describing the populations dynamics [birthrate, carrying capacity, death rate]. Note that the exact mechanism of fluctuations is left unspecified. Briefly speaking, Darwinism supposes an origin of fluctuations based on random genetic variation, which may certainly be appropriate for many aspects of biological evolution, while Lamarckism supposes a 'learning' mechanism of the individuals trying to adapt to the environment. Socio-cultural evolution would seem to correspond more closely to this second type of interpretation. [53]
[Only if socio-cultural evolution applied to the vehicle rather than the meme]
It is further possible to deduce how many species will be found occupying a fully evolved ecosystem with a given resource spectrum. The species packing is determined by the level of environmental fluctuation, and in particular by the amount of coherence of resource fluctuation. The greater the fluctuation the greater the niche separation must be for the long term co-existence of neighboring species. Knowing the niche width from our evolution theory, we can now say that ecosystems rich in resources and not suffering large fluctuations will have the greatest number of species. Environmental fluctuations will reduce this number. A system with sparsely scattered resources, if their densities do not fluctuate greatly, will be populated by 'generalist' species with considerable niche overlap, while a poor system with fluctuating resources will be filled with a few 'generalist' species. [54]
[How does fluctuation rates or resource spectrums translate to co-existing social behavior-species in social ecosystems?]
Since the advent of quantum mechanics, many attempts have been made to relate microscopic indeterminacy, i.e., the celebrated Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, to macroscopic behavior. We now see that the situation is much simpler, for the macroscopic equations themselves contain the elements of stochasticity which leads to 'macroscopic indeterminacy'. Problems such as self-organization in non-equilibrium systems require both aspects - the deterministic one where averages represent accurately the physical state of the system and the stochastic one which is important near bifurcation points and instabilities. It is the cooperation of these two features which leads to a faithful representation of some of the basic aspects of evolving systems. [57]
Complexity is limited by stability which, in turn, is limited by the strength of the system-environment coupling. [58]
'man's particular relation to the environment is fundamentally similar to that of any other species, in that it is a continuing effort to exercise sufficient control to extract energy from the environment. Particularly typical of man, however, is his cultural mode of behavior which leads him to seek this security of control through constant redefinition of himself and his environment, permitting him to develop his society into an ever expanding system.' R.N. Adams, Energy and Structure, 1975. [59]
1.01.1977
Garrett Hardin
Garrett Hardin, "An Operational Analysis of 'Responsibility'", ed. Garrett Hardin and John Baden, Managing the Commons, San Fransisco, W.H. Freeman and Company, 1977.
The philosopher Charles Frankel has given such a definition: 'A decision is responsible when the man or group that makes it has to answer for it to those who are directly or indirectly affected by it.' [66]
[The structure of responsibility]
Contrived responsibilities can be effectively applied to the decision maker only if the community is well informed of the consequences of his decisions. But the person who makes the decisions is generally in the most favorable position to control the flow of information about the consequences of his decisions. If he makes a bad decision he is then tempted to falsify the information about the consequences. In other words, he is tempted to sabotage the information system, as the private enterpriser is not. [72]
The philosopher Charles Frankel has given such a definition: 'A decision is responsible when the man or group that makes it has to answer for it to those who are directly or indirectly affected by it.' [66]
[The structure of responsibility]
Contrived responsibilities can be effectively applied to the decision maker only if the community is well informed of the consequences of his decisions. But the person who makes the decisions is generally in the most favorable position to control the flow of information about the consequences of his decisions. If he makes a bad decision he is then tempted to falsify the information about the consequences. In other words, he is tempted to sabotage the information system, as the private enterpriser is not. [72]
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