Tragedy of the Commons

That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual.

-Aristotle, Politics Book II

Ever have roommates? They can be necessary, but also beyond frustrating.

I’ve had my share, though not for about 15 years, thankfully. In having roommates, I noticed that the shared resources were pretty much always a source of contention for us. I’m talking about how much water or electricity is used, along with whose turn it is to do the dishes.

Food was sacred, not usually shared—but if there were shared meals, there was a race to the bottom to calculate how much had been spent. Not all roommate situations were this extreme, but all of them had this central struggle at play in one form or other.

At some point, you start playing a little game with one another, where you see how much you can get away with not doing. It’s definitely in your best interest to just wash those dishes and not think about how your roommate was supposed to do them for the next four hours, but that’s not what ends up happening.

This clip from the office is consistent with many of my experiences, but sometimes both roommates were Jim:

This is a miniature version of the tragedy of the commons, a phrase coined by an ecologist named Garrett Hardin, writing in Science in 1968. Hardin borrowed an observation made earlier by British economist William Foster Lloyd all the way back in 1833, when Lloyd pointed out that individual owners of individual cattle (cows) would be better served as a group if overgrazing was prohibited, but nobody much would want to do that on an individual basis.

The tragedy of the commons is like everyone fighting over getting a slightly bigger slice of the pie, but everyone works at a pie bakery, so they could just go make another pie. Instead, we’re all hovering over the one pie and nobody wants to abandon it before everyone else just ravages it.

In my imaginary pie-based scenario, we have to have some reason why you can’t just walk away all by yourself to make another pie. Maybe you need several folks to pitch in to make a pie, so nobody wants to risk leaving on their own—and the shop closes in an hour; you could easily make a new pie with five others, but definitely not by yourself in such a short time.

Now, the only pie shop I worked in was a pizza parlor in a mall. It seemed like we had unlimited pizzas and I didn’t really understand how businesses worked, so I didn’t really run into the tragedy of the commons as much there. However, I ran face-first into it when I moved out of my folks’ house and got my first roommate.

I told this story—of my own tragedy of the commons—back in January, and you can read that next if you’re so inclined: