There’s an economic concept called the Tragedy of the Commons. It’s the idea that if there’s some resource that everyone has access to well, that’s just fine. But if everyone wants to take more of that resource than there is then that resource is going to disappear. Thus, if demand rises above possible supply then someone, somehow, is going to have to limit access to the resource.
This was originally laid out in this form by Garrett Hardin and he related it to human population. Fortunately we’ve since found out that humans limit their own population very nicely without it having to be limited for them so it doesn’t apply there. Hardin also went on to point out that there seem to be two methods of limiting that access: we could make the resource private property or we could write regulatio0ns, pass laws, about access to it. Elinor Ostrom pointed out that there’s a third way: communal action and agreement amongst the users of the resource. This breaks down once you get over a few thousand who desire access though: communal agreements don’t seem robust above that sort of number of human beings.
Sadly there are those who insist that the Tragedy never actually happens: it’s all a plot (almost) to stop us from living off nature perhaps. But it really is true that it does indeed happen as events from this week in England show:
Large parts of the countryside are being left with no edible mushrooms because groups of pickers are turning up in vans in the early hours of the morning, the National Trust has warned.
Hundreds of mushrooms have been plundered from land in the New Forest after dog walkers reported seeing groups, often of Eastern Europeans, dropped off in vans in the early hours, armed with carrier bags to collect fungi.
The National Trust said there are now no edible mushrooms left in northern parts of the New Forest because they are being stripped on such a large scale, and there are fears if pickers continue to plunder stocks so regularly some species may not return.
This is exactly what the theory predicts. Wild mushrooms have become much more fashionable in recent years with restaurants being willing to pay up to $40 a lb for them. So, obviously, people go off and pick them. But there are so many picking them that the demand is rather higher than the supply and thus we face the exhaustion of the resource. To which the answer is one of the three above: either the mushrooms, the resource, must become private property, or we regulate or legislate to reduce the number picked, or the few hundred to few thousand people involved make up some voluntary agreement.
The point of this piece though is just my delight at seeing such a clear example in the real world of a sometimes disputed economic theory. There really are parts of economics where people have got things right over the years: OK, so no one can predict recessions, the values of stocks and bonds vary randomly in the short term, people still argue where government is better than markets and vice versa. But a resource where demand is greater than supply? Some restriction must be placed upon access to that resource or it will disappear.
There really are parts of economics where we do know what we’re doing, much as that might surprise some people.
from Forbes.com: Most popular stories http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/11/02/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-seen-live-in-the-wild-in-new-forest-mushroom-picking/
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