Archive

Archive for the ‘Grist’ Category

Tragedy of the panicked enviro IV: not capitalism, but intensive use of unowned resources is the problem

August 28th, 2009 No comments

This is my third follow-up post to “Grist and the tragedy of the panicked enviro“,
where I try to clarify the institutional frameworks for understanding
and addressing resource problems, in response to confusion in comments
by others.

cyberfarer
Posted 9:26 pm
27 Aug 2009

… [addressed to T Worstall]

In fact I do
understand what Hardin was saying. Hardin sets up a hypothetcial
situation and then sets about knocking it down. We call that a strawman
argument.

But you didn’t address my salient point. We live in an
era of the ascendency of private property and yet we have witnessed an
acceleration of the destruction of our natural heritage. Under the
management and control of private interests, we can witness the
remaining rain forests of south east Asia being raised for palm oil
plantations. Under the control and and management of private interests
we can witness boreal forests being decimated. In fact, over the past
fifty years as control and managenment of resources to pass to private
interests, we witness the acceleration of the their destruction.

The reality puts the lie to Hardin’s strawman argument.

The
issue of sustainability is not one of private or public ownership as
The Church and its followers would prefer to frame it. The issue is the
central role of profit above all else in our culture.

The free
market economy generates wealth by converting a living planet to a dead
planet; that is, by converting living ecosystems into commodities for
trade and profit. To the free market and its economists, a forest which
provides erosion control, flood control, climate and water
conditioning, habitat, sustenance, and any number of other services not
only to humans but all other species is only valuable in our free
market system when it has been converted to lumber or pulverized for
paper or some other use. That is the true tragedy of the commons. Not
ownership, but the short-sighted stupidity of people and especially of
those worship wealth without understanding its source.

 

TokyoTom
Posted 2:29 am

29 Aug 2009

cyberfarer, I`m sorry, but this couldn`t be more wrong in its
understanding of WHY messes happen (and they undeniably do); the result
is that you (and Sacks) have no clue where to start in trying to solve
problems:

The free market economy generates wealth by converting a living planet
to a dead planet; that is, by converting living ecosystems into
commodities for trade and profit.

The
free market system is really simply people trading what they have to
others for what they want, and it works quite well where resources are
owned (either privately or by communities).  It can, however, be a
powerful engine of destruction for resources that are not owned – such
as for resources sourced where property rights are not protected or the
government (elites) “own” too much.  Thus our continued political
struggles over giveaways of public resources, the destruction of the
Amazon/Indonesian forests (and Philippine under Marcos), and the
collapse of fisheries that fishermen – often just guys trying to make a
living – have no rights to actually protect the resource.

To the free market and its
economists, a forest which provides erosion control, flood control,
climate and water conditioning, habitat, sustenance, and any number of
other services not only to humans but all other species is only
valuable in our free market system when it has been converted to lumber
or pulverized for paper or some other use. That is the true tragedy of
the commons.

You
are only right in part, as all of these things have obvious value, and
people protect them privately or band together as groups to manage them
wherever they desire and can (and are not prevented by the government).
There is an awful lot of private and community conservation going on
around the world.  The absolute worst cases are where the resources are
owned by governments, with rights to exploit being leased to companies
that have no property rights and thus no longer-term rights or obligations. 

Not ownership, but the short-sighted stupidity of people
and especially of those worship wealth without understanding its source.

No,
absolutely ownership; people and groups compete for resources, and can
preserve valuable ones only when they can PROTECT them by excluding
others (i.e., owning) them

You, like Sacks, think that the only
way to solve problems is to radically change either capitalism (while
ignoring worse destruction takes place outside of free market regimes)
or human nature.  Sorry, but this is blind and stupid, and ignores the
fact that local traction is available for most problems.

See the case of the Amazon, for example:

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/05/24/capitalism-the-destructive-exploitation-of-the-amazon-and-the-tragedy-of-the-government-owned-commons.aspx

I
highly recommend you start studying (not simply free thinking), which
will make your very legitimate concerns much more effective.  I mean,
even the environmental groups are calling for better property
rights/protection for fisheries, species, forests and water.  Are they
stupid and evil too?

Tragedy of the panicked enviro III: learning from Elinor Ostrom about cooperative action

August 28th, 2009 No comments

This is the second follow-up to my post “Grist and the tragedy of the panicked enviro“,
where I try to clarify the institutional frameworks for understanding
and addressing resource problems, in response to confusion in comments
by others.

T Worstall
Posted 5:27 pm
27 Aug 2009

TokyoTom makes most of the points I would wish to make. Except for this
one: you clearly do not understand what Hardin was saying about the
tragedy of the commons. For example, he made very clear that there are
two possible solutions to the degradation of an open access resource.
We can have social (socialist) regulations and limitations or we can
have private (capitalist) property solutions. Those are his
descriptions BTW. Which works best depends upon the society and the
resource. He emphatically did NOT say that pricvate property sultions
were the only ones possible. And nor does any economist say that
private property solutions are the only ones either possible or
desirable. Try reading some Ronald Coase on transaction costs to see
why.

 

TokyoTom
Posted 10:03 pm

27 Aug 2009

Let me add some further nuance to Mr. Worstall`s comment by saying
that Hardin`s fertile observations have fuelled extensive further
research on common property problems, with Elinor Ostrom being recognized as a leading light.

Here is one general bibliography on commons research: http://www.indiana.edu/~workshop/wsl/tragedy.htm

Ostrom
has refined Hardin`s work in the following way (quoting from a review
of Ostrom`s 1990 ground-breaking and extensively researched book
, GOVERNING THE COMMONS, The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action):

Ostrom uses the term “common pool resources” to denote natural
resources used by many individuals in common, such as fisheries,
groundwater basins, and irrigation systems. Such resources have long
been subject to overexploitation and misuse by individuals acting in
their own best interests. Conventional solutions typically involve
either centralized governmental regulation or privatization of the
resource. But, according to Ostrom, there is a third approach to
resolving the problem of the commons: the design of durable cooperative
institutions that are organized and governed by the resource users
themselves.

“The central question in this
study,” she writes, “is how a group of principals who are in an
interdependent situation can organize and govern themselves to obtain
continuing joint benefits when all face temptations to free-ride,
shirk, or otherwise act opportunistically.”

The
heart of this study is an in-depth analysis of several long-standing
and viable common property regimes, including Swiss grazing pastures,
Japanese forests, and irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines.
Although Ostrom insists that each of these situations must be evaluated
on its own terms, she delineates a set of eight “design principles”
common to each of the cases. These include clearly defined boundaries,
monitors who are either resource users or accountable to them,
graduated sanctions, and mechanisms dominated by the users themselves
to resolve conflicts and to alter the rules. The challenge, she
observes, is to foster contingent self-commitment among the members ….

Throughout the book, she stresses the dangers of overly
generalized theories of collective action, particularly when used
“metaphorically” as the foundation for public policy. The three
dominant models — the tragedy of the commons, the prisoners’s dilemma,
and the logic of collective action — are all inadequate,
she says, for
they are based on the free-rider problem where individual, rational,
resource users act against the best interest of the users collectively.
These models are not necessarily wrong, Ostrom states, rather the
conditions under which they hold are very particular. They apply only
when the many, independently acting individuals involved have high
discount rates and little mutual trust, no capacity to communicate or
to enter into binding agreements, and when they do not arrange for
monitoring and enforcing mechanisms to avoid overinvestment and overuse.

Ostrom
concludes that “if this study does nothing more than shatter the
convictions of many policy analysts that the only way to solve common
pool resource problems is for external authorities to impose full
private property rights or centralized regulation, it will have
accomplished one major purpose.”

A
profile of Ostrom, who is a member of the National Academies of Science
and and Editor of its Proceedings, is here:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1748208

Her work can be found here: http://scholar.google.co.jp/scholar?q=Ostrom,+Elinor&hl=en&btnG=Search and

here: http://de.scientificcommons.org/elinor_ostrom

One
thing worth noting is that the historical and ongoing records are rife
with examples – such as our crashing local fisheries – where government
intervention has done more harm than good.
  In these cases and in
others, Ostrom introduces an analytical approach that is acceptable
widely across the political spectrum, even if differences in opinion
will remain.  See, for example, this discussion at libertarian-leaning
George Mason U:  http://www.theihs.org/bunnygame/

Categories: Adam Sacks, commons, Elinor Ostrom, Grist Tags:

The tragedy of the panicked enviro II; understanding the "tragedy of the commons"

August 28th, 2009 No comments

This is the first of several follow-up posts to my post “Grist and the tragedy of the panicked enviro“, where I try to clarify the institutional frameworks for understanding and addressing resource problems, in response to confusion in comments by others.

cyberfarer
Posted 2:58 am
27 Aug 2009

I’m sorry, but the “tragedy of the commons” is utter B.S. The Western
world has pursued a course of private property and has managed to leave
ecological catastrophe in its wake. The “tragedy of the commons” and
other simplistic market morality fail to understand the essence of that
which it seeks to moderate, the capitalist consumer market premised on
profit and only profit.

The rate of exploitation and the decline
of resources, water, energy, fisheries, soil, minerals, etc., all
occured under a free market, private property paradigm. That is the
facts and the reality. Pretending it isn’t true and wishing for a
morality that doesn’t exist within the free market is juvenile and
counter-productive.

The “tragedy of the commons” represents a
hypothetical situation that does not occur in real life. In real life,
corporations own, or vie to own, resources or access to them for the
purpose of extraction and profit and they seek to maximize profits
through economies of scale, that is industrial extraction methods,
drift netting, blowing up mountains, tossing mining waste into clear,
pristine lakes. The money is in the resource and when the resource is
exhausted they will move on to the next one.

 

TokyoTom
Posted 1:38 pm

27 Aug 2009

Cyberfarer,

Thanks for your comments on the “tragedy of the
commons”. Though you are way off base, you provide an opportunity for
deeper discussion.

The tragedy of the unmanaged commons paradigm
is BS?  My flip response?  Go tell it to Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate,
who posted a perceptive essay in May on the tragedy of the commons
dynamics that are affecting climate
and global climate policy
coordination. 
Did you miss this and the relatively productive discussion thread?

Sure,
the Western
world has managed to create many environmental problems, but we`ve
largely cleaned up our own messes, haven`t we?  While it by no means
excuses our own faults, far worse environmental problems have been
created and are still stewing in Russia and other state-directed
economies, and it`s no coincidence that the vast pollution being
created in China and India are tied to governement-owned enterprise and
an inability of injured people to sue for damages or to stop harmful
activities.  And the great waves of extinctions created as man spread
around the globe tens of thousands of years ago can hardly be laid at
the foot of either the Western world or of private property rights (nor
can the collapse of earlier civilizations).

The
“tragedy of the commons” is NOT a “simplistic market morality”, but a
description of cooperation problems and incentives relating to shared.
open-access resources.  The tragedy of the commons and problems of
cooperation – and theft – are not even limited to mankind, but permeate
nature.  This perceptive article by Bruce Yandle touches on competition
in nature, and links the ascendance of man to our evolution of
relatively enhanced cooperation:
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-commons-tragedy-or-triumph/

The
“tragedy of the commons” paradigm is useful to analyze, but the
paradigm doesn`t “seek to moderate” anything, and is just as useful in
looking at the ways Western nations still contribute to environmental
problems around the world (as I point out here:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2007/09/28/too-many-or-too-few-people-does-the-market-provide-an-answer.aspx) as it is in examining:

– environmental devastation in Haiti (which has little or no property rights, and vast free-for-all “government” holdings),


deforestation in Indonesia and the Amazon:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/05/24/capitalism-the-destructive-exploitation-of-the-amazon-and-the-tragedy-of-the-government-owned-commons.aspx,

– pollution in China: http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=china, and


crashing fisheries around the world as a result of government of marine
resources (producing free-for-alls and fleet subsidies) and a
free-for-all for other unowned or unprotected resources:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=fish.

On fish, you might note what the organization Defying Ocean’s End (cofounded by Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy,
Natural Resources Defense Council, The Ocean Conservancy, Wildlife
Conservation Society, The World Conservation Union, and World Wildlife
Fund) recently said:

http://www.defyingoceansend.org…

“Overfishing,
high bycatch rates, the use of gear types that damage habitat (like
trawls and dredges), and the large subsidies supporting fisheries
(totally over $15 billion per year) are all symptoms of an underlying
problem. In most fisheries that are exhibiting declines in
landings and revenues, overfishing, bycatch, and habitat damage,
actions that result in the symptoms are actually rational given the way
the fisheries are managed. In these fisheries, secure privileges to
catch certain amounts of fish are not specified, so naturally
individual fishermen compete to maximize their individual shares of the
catch. No incentives for conservation exist in this situation, because
every fish conserved can be caught by another fisherman. The
competition to maximize catch often results in a fishery “arms race”,
resulting in the purchase of multiple vessels, the use of powerful
engines and large vessels, and the use of highly efficient gear like
trawls.

“Most of the solutions that have been implemented or proposed to fix the world’s fisheries center on command-and-control
measures: regulators or courts telling fishermen how to fish through
the imposition of controls on effort (e.g., fishing vessel length,
engine horsepower, gear restrictions, etc.). Prescriptions like these
work against strong economic incentives for maximizing catch, which are
not addressed by such measures, and are of course usually resisted by
fishermen. Often, prescriptions create incentives for “work-arounds”
and set up a cat-and-mouse game between fishermen and regulators
– for example, if regulators impose a restriction on vessel size,
fishermen may purchase two vessels to maintain high catch levels.

As
in most natural resource problems, more effective solutions will
address the fundamental drivers of unsustainable fisheries. In this
case, the key necessary reform will be to designate secure catch
privileges.”

You
say: “The rate of exploitation and the decline
of resources, water, energy, fisheries, soil, minerals, etc., all
occured under a free market, private property paradigm.”  This is
clearly demonstrably wrong, and draws entirely the wrong lessons. While
private property is certainly no panacea, neither are they what is
wrong.  Very often, is is governments that have been and are wrong,
though there is certainly some learning going on.

While
Garrett Hardin`s “The Tragedy of the Commons” certainly represents a
hypothetical situation, it is actually a very powerful analytical tool
for understanding and fashioning solutions to countless “real life”
problems. See Elinor Ostrom et al., Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges, Science, 04/09/99 http://conservationcommons.org/media/document/docu-wyycyz.pdf

“In real life,
corporations own, or vie to own, resources or access to them for the
purpose of extraction and profit and they seek to maximize profits
through economies of scale, that is industrial extraction methods,
drift netting, blowing up mountains, tossing mining waste into clear,
pristine lakes.

What
you describe here is a conflict between preferences over how resources
are used.  Do you prefer a free-for-all, or a situation where those who
use a resource can protect it, negotiate with others who wish to see
other values preserved, and who are responsible for negative
consequences caused to others (not always a part of some property
rights systems), or perhaps a situation where governments make all
resource exploitation decisions?”

“The money is in the resource and when the resource is
exhausted they will move on to the next one.”

The
money is never in the “resource”, but in the ways that people can use
it or otherwise value it (and of course people also value pristine
environments).

 

Categories: Adam Sacks, commons, Grist Tags:

Grist and the tragedy of the panicked enviro: stop and think, about whether resources are OWNED and protected

August 28th, 2009 No comments

The Grist online environmental magazine lent its pages this week to a pessimistic climate change activist, Adam D. Sacks, former director of the Center for Democracy and the Constitution.  Mr. Sacks, echoing a despairing piece (“Beyond the point of no return”) by Ross Gelbspan in Grist in Novermber 2007, in a piece entitled “The fallacy of climate activism” paints a remarkably grim and obviously heart-felt picture about the prospect of unstoppable climate change and other environmental challenges. 

While we may indeed be irretrievably embarked on what prove to be a very bumpy climate voyage, it`s Sack`s policy prescriptions that are most startling. Here are excerpts of the chief points:

In the 20 years since we climate activists began our work in earnest,
the state of the climate has become dramatically worse, and the change
is accelerating—this despite all of our best efforts.  Clearly
something is deeply wrong with this picture. …

Climate activists are obsessed with greenhouse-gas emissions and
concentrations.  Since global climate disruption is an effect of
greenhouse gases, and a disastrous one, this is understandable.  But it
is also a mistake. …

The first error is our failure to understand that greenhouse gases
are not a cause but a symptom, and addressing the symptom will do
little but leave us with a devil’s sack full of many other symptoms,
possibly somewhat less rapidly lethal but lethal nonetheless.

The root cause, the source of the symptoms, is 300 years of our
relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing
technoculture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical
and colonial civilizations.
This should be no news flash, but the seductive promise of endless
growth has grasped all of us civilized folk by the collective throat,
led us to expand our population in numbers beyond all reason and to
commit genocide of indigenous cultures and destruction of other life on
Earth.

To be sure, global climate disruption is the No. 1 symptom.  But if
planetary warming were to vanish tomorrow, we would still be left with
ample catastrophic potential to extinguish many life forms in fairly
short order: deforestation; desertification; poisoning of soil, water,
air; habitat destruction; overfishing and general decimation of oceans;
nuclear waste, depleted uranium, and nuclear weaponry—to name just a
few. 
(While these symptoms exist independently, many are intensified
by global warming.)

We will not change course by addressing each of these as separate issues; we have to address root cultural cause. …

The second error is our stubborn unwillingness to understand that
the battle against greenhouse-gas emissions, as we have currently
framed it, is over.

It is absolutely over and we have lost.

We have to say so.

There are three primary components of escalating greenhouse-gas concentrations that are out of our control …

The most expert scientific investigators have been blindsided by the
velocity and extent of recent developments, and the climate models have
likewise proved far more conservative than nature itself.  Given that
scientists have underestimated impacts of even small changes in global
temperature, it is understandably difficult to elicit an appropriate
public and governmental response….

Bitter climate truths are fundamentally bitter cultural truths. 
Endless growth is an impossibility in the physical world, always—but always—ending
in overshot and collapse.  Collapse: with a bang or a whimper, most
likely both.  We are already witnessing it, whether we choose to
acknowledge it or not.

Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is
100 percent predictable.  We simply cannot go on living this way. Our
version of life on earth has come to an end.

Moreover, there are no “free market” or “economic” solutions.  And
since corporations must have physically impossible endless growth in
order to survive, corporate social responsibility is a myth.  The only
socially responsible act that corporations can take is to dissolve.

Some of our most important thinking happens while developing the
problem statement, and the better the problem statement the richer our
responses. 
That’s why framing the global warming problem as
greenhouse-gas concentrations has proved to be such a dead end.

Here is the problem statement as it is beginning to unfold for me. 
We are all a part of struggling to develop this thinking together:

We must leave behind 10,000 years of civilization; this may be the
hardest collective task we’ve ever faced.  It has given us the
intoxicating power to create planetary changes in 200 years that under
natural cycles require hundreds of thousands or millions of years—but
none of the wisdom necessary to keep this Pandora’s Box tightly shut. 
We have to discover and re-discover other ways of living on earth.

We love our cars, our electricity, our iPods, our theme parks, our
bananas, our Nikes, and our nukes, but we behave as if we understand
nothing of the land and water and air that gives us life.  It is past
time to think and act differently.

If we live at all, we will have to figure out how to live locally
and sustainably.  Living locally means we are able get everything we
need within walking (or animal riding) distance.
We may eventually
figure out sustainable ways of moving beyond those small circles to
bring things home, but our track record isn’t good and we’d better
think it through very carefully.

Likewise, any technology has to be locally based, using local
resources and accessible tools, renewable and non-toxic.  We have much
re-thinking to do, and re-learning from our hunter-gatherer forebears
who managed to survive for a couple of hundred thousand years in ways
that we with our civilized blinders we can barely imagine or understand

Desperate hopes notwithstanding, there are no high-tech solutions
here, only wishful thinking—the tools that got us into this mess are
incapable of getting us out.

All that being said, we needn’t discard all that we’ve learned, far from it. But we must use our knowledge with great discretion, and lock much of it away as so much nuclear weaponry and waste.

Time is running very short, but the forgiveness of this little blue
orb in a vast lonely universe will continue to astonish and nourish
us—if we only give it the chance.

Our obligation as activists, the first step, the essence, is to part the cultural veil at long last, and to tell the truth.

 

Wow.  It strikes me that though Sacks might very well be right the we have irreversibly embarked on a bumpy climate ride, are we to conclude not only that the best solution is to abandon civilization as we know it and live as hunter-gathers, but that we can actually persuade anyone to abandon the use of energy?  Not only does Sacks offer no prescription from getting here to where he thinks we need to go, but he completely ignores the institutional setting of the problems that concern him (tragedy of the commons), and thus any discussion of potential solutions (fprivate or community property institutions). Certainly environmentalists may wish to start experiments in alternative living – this might provide useful knowledge or even necessary in dire situations – but unless such experiments prove that they can provide shelter and sustenance for the world`s population, they will not address the needs of others who will make their own choices, based on modern civilization and technology.

I left a short message on the Grist comment thread, as follows:

ATokyoTom
Posted 2:32 am
27 Aug 2009

I`m with Dave, and more so.  There are no useful takeaways from
thise piece, because the author, while showing an understanding of
climate science, evinces no understanding of the institutional factors
that are driving climate change and other resource problems.

Garrett Hardin largely nailed the problem decades ago – the “Tragedy of the Commmons” that results when there are no clear or enforceable property rights (private or communmity) that enable users to protect resources from destructive exploitation.

(Examining
the environmental nightmare of the formerly communist countries, the
resource abuse in kleptocratic developing countries, and incompetent
bureaucracies, sweet insider deals and poorly managed “public” lands
and fisheries have subsequently informed us of the corollary problem –
the tragedy of the government commons.)

We understand both the nature of our problems, and the directions in which solutions lie.  Let`s have at at `em.

BTW, I realize that we have barely begun to scratch the surface on addressing climate change; this is a tragedy of the commons problem on which it appears we can have only marginal impacts at best.

Categories: Adam Sacks, commons, Grist Tags: