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We found 11 Reddit comments about Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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11 Reddit comments about Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions):

u/The_Old_Gentleman · 8 pointsr/neoliberal

> Wouldn't this necessitate a collapse of population back to the days when subsistence farming, disease, etc., kept populations in check?

I don't think rebuilding a commons would necessitate abandoning productive technologies or abandoning things like vaccines. A commons is simply a way to manage a shared resource, and when done right they have been shown to be pretty effective, and there are a lot of commons in the world and lot's of people involved with studying or advocating for the commons.

Take a look at all the campaigns carried out by the aforementioned social-movement Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa. Their actions consist of occupying unused government buildings to build housing collectives for the homeless, advocating for community land trusts for the homeless, they have built crèches and vegetable gardens, offerred courses and seminars on things such as learning basic computer skills or safely connecting shacks to water and electricity... All their actions are geared towards creating fair and sustainable housing by building a urban and knowledge commons, and nothing about that could in any way cause living standards to fall if you ask me.

u/spongeluke · 4 pointsr/Anarchism

a nobel price winner,

her on wiki,

one of her books,

and a book called 'the possibility of cooperation' by michael taylor which is available in torrents

u/deathpigeonx · 4 pointsr/philosophy

> I think that Rousseau misses the mark. He sees problems with society - violence and inequality (the norm for all societies) and wrongly puts the blame on consumers.

How is he blaming the consumers? He's saying that society is creating the conditions of violence and inequality through inequality, division of labor, and property rights. His finger is pointed right at society, not producers, consumers, or owners (well, a little on owners).

> inequality (the norm for all societies)

I feel I should point out that this is a part of his critique of society. To live in society is to live in a system that creates inequality. It wasn't until the introduction of society, then, that inequality was introduced, so the problem is the existence of a society.

> I do think there is some merit to the argument that property requires force - specifically the force to exclude others from whatever it is you claim as your own. I happen to think that type of force is legitimate - starting with the first claimant from nature who homesteads property.

This is simply tangential to his argument. He is not saying that property requires force, therefore it is illegitimate. What he is saying is that property creates unequal distributions and an awareness of this inequality which creates jealousy and amour-propre which itself leads to states in order to enforce their property beyond their means and to all that comes from states and property. So property comes first, and it naturally leads to states through amour-propre.

> The problem with the idea that 'the fruits of the earth belong to us all' is 2 fold. First, we live in a world of scarcity. It is impossible for both of us to eat the same food, use the same shovel, etc. etc. As soon as 2 people desire the same morsel of bread we have 'property'. To whom does the bread belong.

Yet so much of scarcity is artificial. Would we really have any scarcity at all if we didn't desire beyond what we needed for our survival? I do believe we have enough food production to sustain the entire population right now, so there isn't scarcity there without excluding people from it. We don't have enough oil to go around, though, but is that really necessary for our survival? No, it's a result of us wanting ever more stuff and greater and greater status.

> The second is the tragedy of the commons. That which belongs to all is cared for by none. Property solves these issues.

Well, no, property doesn't solve that issue. The most common interpretation of the tragedy of the commons holds that government regulation solves that issue. However, not content with simply that, I recommend you read Elinor Ostrom's book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action which examines different ways that problem has been solved in the past, most often neither using property rights nor government regulation, but, rather, through local control of resources and agreements between the people using the commons.

However, Rousseau himself would simply argue that the tragedy of the commons is a result of amore-propre because it is only through continually wanting more, rather than through the contentment with what you need to survive, as with amore do soi, that people would overwork the commons, so the problem is a psychological problem that results from the conditioning of society and the results of property norms, so you're using the very tool that created the problem to solve it.

> Division of labor allows there to be more property for less effort. This is a good thing, and is responsible for the surplus we enjoy every day.

Governments allow for both of those things too, yet governments are just as harmful to the liberty of the individual.

However, more to the point, the surplus we enjoy today is only necessary because we began to desire as much as we want and we began to wish to make ourselves always better than others, and that's precisely what division of labor creates by separating us from the results of our labor.

Also, how do we simultaneously enjoy a surplus that justifies division of labor and suffer from scarcity that necessitates property?

> Besides, most people naturally want to focus their lives in specific directions. There is enjoyment in pursuing and mastering interests. It seems as though Rousseau would hamstring those efforts.

He wouldn't, no. His critique of division of labor is not a critique of people focusing on what they enjoy. I mean, people may want to become a pin maker, and that would probably be wonderful, according to Rousseau, and they should make all the pins they wish and share those pins as they wish and keep all the pins they made that they want, taking pride in every pin they make. What shouldn't happen is for them to set up a factory in which every element of the making of the pin is repeated by every individual again and again and again with them only seeing their small part of the work in the creation of the pin, without ever getting any pin they made themselves to take home and have pride in, so they cannot take pride in the products of their labor and all they're left with is taking pride in having better things than other people and hoarding stuff. And that's division of labor creating amore-propre.

> It is the tallest flower that gets the blade is it not?

And it is governments, property, and society which are the blades, not Rousseau.

u/cristoper · 3 pointsr/Anarchism

I haven't read her, but Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for her work demonstrating how commons could be successfully managed. I think the definitive work is her Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.

There is also a section in An Anarchist FAQ (which surprisingly doesn't mention Ostrom's work): I.6 What about the "Tragedy of the Commons"?

u/Arkanin · 2 pointsr/SneerClub

I thought it was very forward thinking of Yudkowsky to roleplay as the first female economist to win a nobel prize

u/jackson720 · 1 pointr/Anarcho_Capitalism

The definitions I'm arguing for are the commonly held definitions of market. Also, historically market comes from the Latin "buy and sell." If you want to engage people, whether they work within the social sciences or not, with your ideas, you need to communicate with some sort of understanding. "Market" as synonym for "voluntary" is fairly unique to libertarian circles (not to mention the narrowness of libertarian definitions of "voluntary").

The point that I'm trying to get across is that some institutions are a little more complex and nuanced than being able to be described as "free market" or being categorized like market transactions. There's more elegant framework than just that dichotomy. Ostrom's Governing the Commons is your best resource on these institutions.

Market failure refers to undesirable outcomes created by market process. While "undesirable" is highly subjective, the most intuitive and simple example is pollution. If it is highly profitable to produce Good A and one externality of said goods is pollution, everyone capable will produce Good A and thus pollute. At the individual level, it makes perfect sense to pollute, because producing will create income, and while the benefits are concentrated, the costs are distributed(I profit from the sales of my production, but everyone is a little worse off from my pollution). However, because others will make this decision, the market will produce what is probably a harmful amount of production. If I stop producing to reduce pollution, should everyone continue to produce, my costs are concentrated, but the marginal benefits are small and distributed. This is textbook market failure (and tragedy of the commons).

Many will correctly point out that this particular failure results from the lack of clear property rights in this scenario. The problem is that it's very difficult to assign property rights to things like air and water, which aren't easily divisible. Even the "Cap and Trade" solutions have discovered that it's impossible to agree on/find the "efficient" amount and division of permits to pollute/fish etc., That's not suggesting that a gov't can do any better (it hasn't), but an acknowledgement that it ain't so simple. You have to be institutionally creative to manage the commons.

u/BecomingTesla · 1 pointr/Rad_Decentralization

> So the Standing Rock protest is really about the entire expansion west...k, sure.

Yes, the present-day colonization of indigenous land happening at Standing Rock is directly related to the history of colonialism that founded the US. Your unwillingness to recognize such a blatantly obvious connection is likely because you're white settler colonist, and a racist.

> Western culture carries around the seeds of capitalism, but it also suffers from the same dumb greedy control freak nonsense as all others.

This is literally just nonsense. You haven't said anything.

> Slavery was a huge part of human history long before the US existed, it wasn't slavery that made the US into any sort of notable society.

Chattel slavery, particularly in regards to the cash crop of cotton, was the defining institution that fueled the development and wealth of early US capitalism; in 1860 the economic value invested in slaves was more than that invested in railroads, land, manufacturing combined. Without slavery - an institution that hasn't ended, by the way - there is no United States.

> All failed socialist and communist states are actually capitalist...got it.

Communism is literally defined as a society without a state, there are no communist states, and as I said, no state in history has argued that it is communist. They have argued that they're socialist, and yes, they were in fact state capitalism, a term defined by James Connolly in 1899 in "State Monopoly vs. Socialism," written two decades before the Russian Revolution. Your understanding of history is fucking terrible...

> If I build a machine that produces useful widgets and I buy materials to make said widgets with money that I earned and I hire someone to use my machine to rearrange my materials - how does the product magically become his?

If you build a simple machine with your own hands, it's yours. If you buy the materials for the widgets, those materials are yours. Now remind me, exactly how many hospitals, apartment buildings, houses, factories, railroads, mines, or regular land, was built by one person? Answer: none of them. They were all built by workers, with materials that were harvested and manufactured by workers, that were transported by other workers. Because workers do the fucking work. Owners do not do anything but own - that's why they're the owners. Workers did the labor to build those productive resources, and they should be owned in common by said workers, because no, oligarchs don't "build" anything - they use the State to seize land, and force the now-homeless workers into wage-labor for profit. Which is literally just history.

> If you hire someone to come in and wash and fold your clothes do they get to keep the clothes? Do they get to keep your washer?

I don't make a habit of renting other human beings like farm tools to do my labor for me. That's you, the capitalist. I wash and fold my own clothing like a big boy.

> Scarcity exists, exclusive control of things prevents the tragedy of the commons and actually makes it possible for more people to have more access to things than they otherwise would.

Tell that to the indigenous communities that lived through commons-based communities for hundreds of years before colonialism came here. The "tragedy of the commons" is not a thing, as noted by the '09 Nobel Prize winner in economics, Elinor Ostrom. You may want to read her work, if you're not a racist and a sexist.

> The point is that exclusive rights to things need to be obtained voluntarily, otherwise the guy with the biggest stick always owns everything

Not only is your "voluntary exclusive rights" not a historical aspect of capitalism, as proven by every strike in the history of the global labor movement, it's not even possible. You're welcome to explain to me how people voluntarily surrender their right to grow their own food on commonly-held land so that a single community member has access to it, and uses that right to force others into exploitative labor. I'll wait...

> Cooperatives and democracy don't scale well, there still has to be a respect for property, and a means for those organizations to interact and trade in order for those things to exist at all

Property rights are theft, cooperatives scale perfectly fine, and they don't need to scale to massive sizes to begin with. The focus of socialism is building self-sustained communities, not fictional political organizations like "nations", which are so large they are forced to be centralized to operate as a part of their structure.

> There has to be a language for communicating productive efficiency vs need and scarcity and all sorts of variables - money is that language and prices communicate far more about certain economic realities than any central planner or group of central planners could possibly account for.

LMFAO! Yeah, capitalism just reeks of efficiency, never mind it's ability to take ecological and social variables into consideration! /s

> No, like the power a politician or bureaucrat has to tell others how to live their lives. Arbitrary third party authority over other people's dealings.

Yeah, so like landlords, or factory owners.

> If I grow oranges and you make knives and I want to trade 20 of my oranges for one of your knives and that sounds good to you, then no third party should be able to come in and demand some amount of knives or oranges before they will allow said trade to happen - and nothing changes if you sell your knives to others for money which you then exchange for my oranges. We don't owe anything to any uninvolved third party.

Where in this entire nonsense about trade have you addresses the relationship between the worker and the owner? I was exactly right, wasn't I? You've spent your entire life saying that people like Obama and things like nationalized healthcare are socialism, haven't you? Because you clearly have no idea what socialists are actually interested in. If you grow apples and someone makes knives, and you two want to trade that shit amongst each other, do it all you want. Know what you can't do? Seize all of the land through violence, force me into a condition of homelessness and starvation, force ME to grow the apples for YOU, take the apples, pay me a wage that is less than the value of the apples, and then trade them for knives. There is no "voluntary agreement" between workers and employers. I have to work for someone, or I don't pay rent and I don't have bread. That's not voluntary. I don't choose to work. I have to or I starve. That is the literal process that formed the industrial workforce in Britain during the emergence of industrial capitalism, and it was replicated throughout the entire colonized world. Trade whatever the fuck you want, so long as the product you're selling is actually the product of your work, not someone else who was forced to work for you to feed themselves.

> If I build a second house to rent or add an apartment to my garage, I am not obligated to give you access to my house or apartment for free. Selling access to shelter is no different than selling oranges or knives. A lot of work and money was required to create said shelter.

(a) you didn't build the house, the workers in your community who you hired did (b) you built a second house solely to deny access to it from those who need it, unless they can pay you - you're a social parasite (c) people could build their own shelter, with their own hands, if the resources to do that were held in common, which they aren't (d) the utility of the house, and the upkeep to maintain the house, are used/done entirely by the occupant; the owner does nothing, and provides nothing.

> Yes, there have been millions, even billions, of ignorant people who wanted something for nothing - that doesn't mean any of them were correct.

TIL that demanding the full value of the product you produce through your own labor, or demanding a democratically-owned and managed workplace, is "wanting something for nothing." Again, you think socialism == higher taxes, because you don't know what socialism is. Are you a worker, or a business owner?

u/[deleted] · 1 pointr/Anarcho_Capitalism

> The critique is, thought, that while Anarchists need not fear the negative consequences of centrally planning a market, they do need fear the problem of the commons. The management problem is precisely that you can't effectively manage the commons: property in common encourages unsustainable treatment and use.

Except this is not true. The issue is with unmanaged commons as the cause of tragedy (overuse of resources reducing carrying capacity). This is not unique to property systems of socialism or property systems of capitalism as either allow for managed commons capable of solving the issues of overuse through regulatory policies (not necessarily state apparatus).

I suggest reading Olstrom's work on this, or Garret Hardin himself on reflection.

Given that you talk about incentives of either system, I think the latter work is especially important as Hardin cites Forster Lloyd's observations regarding how a profit motive alone does not tame ones use of resources in a monetary market system, but may in fact incentive the exact opposite where differential advantage is the name of the game (collapse of the northern cod fishery, as one example).

>Thats the rub, socialism needs a decent answer to either the problem of the commons or the Economic Calculation Problem because the means of production is either commonly owned or the subject of a command economy (within the confines of socialism). If it fails to adequately address these problems than a consequentialist analysis of the meta-economic landscape will favour the Capitalistic Market.

I'm not really sure why people hang on this notion of centrally planned so much. Socialism does not necessitate this, for one. And secondly, it's kind of a false dichotomy as I don't believe you can summarize an economy as "centrally planned" or "decentralized" without highlighting the nuance of such a conclusion.

It is my understanding that this attribute is on a scale, rather than binary, and it is possible for anti-capitalist solutions to be less centralized than current and historical capitalist solutions by localizing production and distribution facilities to the best of our technological means. This tech is already currently available to some degree in basically any local store you go to, but the infrastructure isn't set up in a homogeneous way- or rather the logistics of the entire thing is split between every competing private firm.

>You did well to omit in your last argument that how one makes profits in a market economy is through the consent of the customer proportional to their buying power. Everyone is a customer, and therefore, the means to the end of profits are the satisfaction of human wants and needs.

This is not an omission made by me, this is an omission made by the monetary market itself (note: Not all markets are the same). This is the entire thing I am pointing out. You are only ever a customer when you pay for something which requires money in the first place. This is why rising food prices cause more people to go hungry. And currently the world makes enough food to adequately feed everyone, but 800 million go hungry every day.

And this, again, hits upon your point of incentives. The profit motive of the monetary market economy incentives creating scarcity where it is profitable (eg: having excess food and giving it away to people who need it is an economically inefficient and unsustainable practice within the context of this particular system [it isn't profitable]).

u/TheTalkingToes · 1 pointr/Anarcho_Capitalism

> Never heard of the tragegy of the commons? Did someone hack your account?

Tragedy of the commons isn't inherent to the commons but rather an issue in how it is managed. The issue is with unmanaged/mismanaged commons as the cause of tragedy (overuse of resources reducing carrying capacity). This is not unique to state management of commons or alternative management schemes as most (maybe all) allow for some form of management capable of solving the issues of overuse through regulatory policies (not necessarily state apparatus).

I suggest reading Olstrom's work on this, or Garret Hardin himself on reflection.

u/meatduck12 · 1 pointr/Libertarian

You will get a good number of right-libertarian reading materials; here is some stuff from the other standpoint of libertarians, left-libertarianism, which can be glanced over at times. Left-libertarians are opposed to all government regulations, which we see as empowering corporations over workers, opposed to the state-dominated socialism that many countries have tried and failed at, and in support of a market and mutual-aid(think of how you do favors for your friends) based approach.

Anarchist Collective

Elinor Olstrom lecture on polycentric governance

Governing Commons by Elinor Olstrom

Video series on the Cultural Commons, how government regulation can affect culture

Noam Chomsky's "On Anarchism" or any of his other books - he's somewhat of a socialist but ultimately wants an anarchistic society

Book: Manifesto for a New World Order(democratizing global systems)

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

Kevin Carson's blog. Carson is probably the top market anarchist/mutualist out there today.

C4SS and their Market Anarchism FAQ. The site seems to be down right now but it's a good resource with many articles, including some by Carson.

Books by Henry George. George isn't nesecarily a left-libertarian but has good ideas for sure.

Anarchy Works - FAQ by Peter Geldaroo

An Anarchist FAQ(This one is very in depth, highly recommend looking through it.)

Roderick T. Long article against a government-controlled military

Confiscation and the Homestead Principle

Gary Chartier - The Conscience of an Anarchist

Markets not capitalism

Clarence Lee Swartz - What is Mutualism?

u/counters · 1 pointr/politics

> How do you solve the ToC without private property? You need common property to introduce a resource to over exploit.

You're mincing terms and causing confusion. Private property allocation is not the same as introduction of a common property framework. The classic text on the latter is Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons. There are plenty of instances of hierarchical, community resource management where no "private property" rights are assigned to individuals, but through economics and organization, the common resource is managed sustainably. Of course, this doesn't necessarily scale to the commons at the heart of issues like climate change, but they're still very illustrative examples.

> If you don't choose to divide the property, then you'll have to license use of it, and the medallion becomes the privately controlled resource.

Not necessarily, and that's a severe stretch which again minces ideas. Just because you have an access right does not mean you have a property right. The law is extremely clear on that, at least in the United States. Ownership implies a completely different set of authority over something.

> Either way, you need to us private property to solve the dillema.

Not really. In some cases, disbursement of private property rights is an effective system - particularly with strong oversight, regulation, and law enforcement. Other times, its cumbersome and inefficient. It's not a necessary tool by any stretch of the imagination.