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The Wisdom of Our Ancestors Wins the Big One
A remarkable thing happened this October. Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist at Indiana University, was named one of the winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics. Mainstream economics, already reeling from the financial collapse of 2008, had just been dealt another blow: a political scientist—and an “alternative” one at that—was eating their lunch.
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/nobel-laureate-elinor-ostrom-economics.html
During her career, Ostrom has studied how people manage natural resources they hold in common, everything from fisheries, forests, and pasture lands to high-tech resources like mainframe computers. She has many books to her credit, but the one that best embodies her contribution to the study of political economy is Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
To fully appreciate Ostrom’s achievement, you have to know how we’ve arrived at this point in the field of economics. Until recently, Ostrom’s views on cooperation would have been dismissed as “idealistic.” The old paradigm of economics had held that humans, while basically rational, are also selfish, so any attempt by groups of people acting together to share resources fairly among themselves would ultimately fail. In “The Tragedy of the Commons,” a landmark 1968 article published in Science magazine, author Garrett Hardin purported to show how collective management of resources would always lead to disaster. As an example, Hardin took a hypothetical pasture shared by all the residents of a village. Other things being equal, it would be a selfish (but rational) choice for each villager to graze as many of his own cattle on the pasture as he could. But if everyone in the village did that, eventually the pasture land would soon be overgrazed, and the whole village would be poorer for it. In Hardin’s words, “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.”
The tragedy of the commons soon became a mantra for the American supporters of “free-market” capitalism, who used it to argue for everything from the overthrow of Communism abroad to the dismantling of environmental regulations at home. According to the capitalist view, sharing things freely is always bad and will always lead to ruin. Selfishness, on the other hand, is actually a good and necessary thing—as long as society is organized on a money-based free market system. The “invisible hand” of the market will coordinate the division of labor and distribution of goods most efficiently, thereby producing the greatest possible wealth and happiness for all. Or that’s the theory, anyway. Millions of people who’ve been robbed and starved by that same invisible hand might beg to differ.
It’s ironic that Hardin’s article should have been used as a justification for privatizing shared resources, for, looked at another way, the tragedy of the commons could easily be used as an argument against capitalism; it all depends on who’s in the commons and who’s doing the taking. The Native Americans who were living sustainably on this continent when European colonists arrived were usually glad to share the bounty of Nature with the newcomers. The Indians thought of the land they farmed and hunted on as something no one could buy or sell. That is, until the acquisitiveness (and the muskets) of the colonists proved them wrong. Similarly, millions of English and Irish peasants thought the pasture land they’d shared for generations would be theirs to share forever. That is, until the robber barons of the Industrial Revolution put fences around it. Even today, people are astonished to learn that things they once thought of as inalienable social property (human DNA, plant seeds) are now being patented, trademarked, and sold for a profit by pharmaceutical and agribusiness companies.
The lesson here is this: that if everyone sharing the pasture is a bona fide “villager,” then there doesn’t have to be any tragedy. But if a guy in a business suit shows up, talking about selling hamburgers and making everybody rich—watch out!
Under capitalism, especially in its early phases of development, almost everything that was formerly held by either the people or the state is up for grabs, and any one capitalist is free to grab as much of that resource as he can buy and sell. Thus, in capitalist societies, business tycoons like Bill Gates and Sam Walton are often held up as models for the rest of us to emulate. But the truth is that such rational, self-interested—and powerful—individuals will much sooner appropriate and deplete the world’s resources than the most heedless mob of subsistence farmers. That is, if we let them.
http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/sotp/commons.dtl
In the face of limited resources, conventional wisdom says that we have but two choices. One is to privatize the common resource so that each user will have an incentive not to damage it. This approach might work with pasture or forest land, for example, but only under ideal conditions, where the land was not part of a larger ecosystem. Moreover, the privatization solution clearly could not work with indivisible resources like fisheries or air.
The second choice is for people who share something precious to ask a third party, like the government, to police that resource to make sure it’s not depleted or abused. Like the privatization model, the regulation model can also work in theory, but only when the regulator acts as a perfectly neutral and disinterested party. Yet we know from our own (American) experience with public lands how very far that theory can be from the reality. In this country, precious and irreplaceable national resources often end up on the auction block or given away for a song to politically well-connected insiders.
What Elinor Ostrom has done is to describe a third, more just, and infinitely more sustainable alternative. Ostrom studied a variety of collectivist organizations from around the world that have successfully managed property held in common by their members. In these groups, all of those same rational, self-interested actors come together in one place. Only this time, instead of each taking his own in disregard to the rest, they all agree to restrain their selfishness and work together to sustain both the well-being of the group and the resource its members depend upon. From shepherds in the high meadows of Switzerland, to Filipino paddy farmers who share irrigation canals, to Japanese villagers working lands they’ve held in common for millennia, the ordinary people in Ostrom’s study have been able to organize themselves to use and sustain their resources indefinitely. They meet together democratically to iron out policies that protect the group and its property, basing their decisions on their local knowledge.
The operations of these collectives can be dynamic, like a living organism, and often involve the minutest regulation of resource use. One collective might control irrigation water use with a revolving lottery system. Another might involve a harvest schedule regulated down to the day, or even hour. The collective itself is responsible for monitoring the members’ compliance with the rules, sanctioning rule breakers and freeloaders, and resolving conflicts, all without the interference of outside power. Do they sometimes make mistakes? Certainly. Are they able to correct these mistakes before the resource is destroyed? Usually. Can we say the same for the free market’s ability to limit carbon emissions? –No. By the time the market “adjusts” the “price” of clean air to what all those Wal-Mart shoppers want to “pay” for it, it will be far, far too late.
Scale is an important consideration, of course, and it should be noted that Ostrom’s examples were small, local operations. However, the point is that our ancestors knew how to take care of the land and the environment, and they did it successfully for tens of thousands of years using common sense and something that we today might call participatory democratic planning. Could we resurrect some of the age-old principles and techniques Ostrom discusses and scale them up for our needs? Or maybe scale our own system down a little to fit?
The relevance of Ostrom’s work to the problems of peak oil and global climate change is evident, and in recognizing that, the Nobel’s economics prize committee might well have been trying to send a message to the world. The mainstream economists will eventually have to admit that the free market paradigm is broken. Just as broken, in fact, as the central planning paradigm that went down with the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, neither of these paradigms is going to get us out of our ecological crisis. We’re going to need some fresh new insights to do that, but instead of leaving the problem to the experts or trying to jerry-rig some new techno fix, why don’t we do what Elinor Ostrom did and take a closer look at models that have already proven their success?
We need look no further than the the wisdom of our ancestors.
–John Repp and David Preston
Members, West Seattle Neighbors for Peace and Justice
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