this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Its not a common behaviour at all... it is what you get as the result of a hyper capitalist system with a few people taking as much as they can get away with. There are literally thousands of examples where this theory falls flat on its face, and yet somehow it is suppose to describe "common" human behaviour?
The classic example, and trope namer, comes from farmers overgrazing their livestock on the common pasture. This stretches back to way before hypercapitalism was a thing. For that matter, the concept has been discussed as far back as Aristotle, millenia before capitalism was even a concept. There is no requirement for the tragedy to be reliant on capitalism to exist, and is a standard component of game theory. Even the article itself (except for the clickbait headline) does not make the argument that it does not exist, but is entirely about how to prevent it from happening.
The classical example is non-white farmers in an setup where colonialism (= capitalism) had disrupted their regular livelihoods and this served as a justification to steal what little they had left.
Sure, you can discuss it as a theoretical concept that rarely happens outside of severely disrupted circumstances, but that is not how it is used... rather it is used as justification to do even further disruption by the same people that cause the disruption in the first place.
The classical example and trope namer is about COMMONS IN THE UK, where did you get non-white farmers into the example from?
Not in the name defining article by Garrett Hardin. It takes an purely hypothetical scenario from an earlier author from the UK and explicitly extrapolates that to the global south.
Then why are you using the term 'classical example'? And if we're not talking about Garrett, who or what are we then talking about?
Edit: Anyway, this is a pointless digression from the original assertion, which is that this is a ridiculous clickbait headline that even the article doesn't support. I'm going to sleep. Peace.
I don’t believe the tragedy of the commons is a theory that it’s a prevailing behavior, rather a description of a type of behavior that can happen. Nor that “common” is meant to mean ubiquitous, just not particularly rare.