June 12, 2012

Elinor Ostrom, RIP: Averting the tragedy of the commons

Political scientist Elinor Ostrom has died. In 2009, she became the first woman winner in the four decades of the Economics quasi-Nobel Prize. She worked on the question of the various ways people arrange to avoid "the tragedy of the commons" of over-exploitation of common resources, such as fisheries.

Jared Diamond notes that there are three possible solutions to what Garrett Hardin called "the tragedy of the commons," or the tendency for individuals to over-consume resources and under-invest in responsibilities held in common, leading to ecological collapse.

Government diktat.

Privatization and property rights -- but that's often impractical with some resources, such as ocean fish.

Diamond writes: "The remaining solution to the tragedy of the commons is for the consumers to recognize their common interests and to design, obey, and enforce prudent harvesting quotas themselves. That is likely to happen only if a whole series of conditions is met: the consumers form a homogeneous group; they have learned to trust and communicate with each other; they expect to share a common future and to pass on the resource to their heirs; they are capable of and permitted to organize and police themselves; and the boundaries of the resource and of its pool of consumers are well defined." 

A classic supporting case that that Diamond doesn't bring up: American shrimp fishermen in Texas were universally denounced as racists in the late 1970s when they resisted the government's efforts to encourage Vietnamese refugees to become shrimpers in their waters. French director Louis Malle made a movie, Alamo Bay, denouncing ugly Americans fighting hardworking immigrants.

What got lost in all the tsk-tsking is that fishing communities always resist newcomers, especially hardworking ones, because of the sizable chance that the outsiders who don't know the local rules or don't care about them will ruin the ecological balance and wipe out the stocks of fish.

The evidence Diamond assembles indicates, although of course he never dares to state it bluntly, that the fundamental requirement for dealing effectively with environmental danger is: start with a population that's limited in number, cohesive, educated, and affluent.

A quick Google search finds Nobel Laureate Ostrom also cautiously expressing Doubts About Diversity in her book The Drama of the Commons.
... Alesina et al. (1999) find that ethnic diversity is associated with lower public goods funding across the U.S. municipalities because different ethnic groups have different preferences over the type of public good ... In the kind of rural societies considered in this chapter ... the effectiveness of social sanctions weakens as they cross ethnic reference groups. In this vein, Miguel (2000) constructs a theoretical model where the defining characteristics of ethnic groups are the ability to impose social sanctions within the community against deviant individuals and the ability to coordinate on efficient equilibria in settings of multiple equilibria. With data from the activities of primary school committees in rural western Kenya, Miguel then shows that higher levels of ethnic diversity are associated with significantly lower parent participation in parent meetings, worse attendance at school committee meetings, and sharply lower teacher attendance and motivation. 
If social groups (not solely ethnic groups) are defined as those whose boundaries coincide with the effective monitoring and enforcement of shared social norms ... this is one way of understanding the notion cited earlier of cultural homogeneity, a variant of what many authors have called social capital or social cohesion. ... Irrigation organizations that cross village boundaries can rely less on social sanctions and norms to enforce cooperative behavior ...

There are basically two ways to get people to play nice with a common resource such as shrimp or irrigation water: violence or ostracism. The latter works most effectively regarding marriage -- if you don't play by the rules, nobody respectable will let your kid marry his daughter. But when newcomers who don't ever want their children to marry your children arrive and start exploiting your irrigation system or fishery (or whatever), then the old non-violent traditions break down, and people start turning to violence or its threat, whether anarchic or government-based (e.g., socialism and property rights are based on the threat of the government's monopoly on violence). 

9 comments:

  1. "A classic supporting case that that Diamond doesn't bring up: American shrimp fishermen in Texas were universally denounced as racists in the late 1970s when they resisted the government's efforts to encourage Vietnamese refugees to become shrimpers in their waters."

    But would the resistance have been as violent if the newcomers had been German or Norwegian fishermen?

    Race was and is a factor. If most illegal immigrants were from Europe, I wouldn't care.

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  2. When I was growing up, the foreshore along my grandfather's farm in British Columbia yielded ridiculous numbers of clams, at least by my Massachusetts cousins' standards. You could fill a bucket by digging anywhere without having to take step in any direction. They were commercially harvested (the foreshore was open to anyone), but not intensively. I worked on a few crews myself.

    In the early 1980s, the clam-picking crews very suddenly became all-Vietnamese, and they would frickin' dig every square foot of the foreshore several times a year. They also took undersized clams, which, as they told my uncle, paid several times more per bag than legal-sized ones. The companies were white-owned, as of course were the Vancouver restaurants serving "baby" clams.

    Clams are by no means wiped out, but there are far fewer today. The Vietnamese clam pickers have disappeared.

    Cennbeorc

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  3. I sometimes post on a couple of enviro boards that have mostly legal types who deal with public lands issues. There's been a thread going about speculation on the future of the West when water resources and shifting populations start accelerating ecological stress. I speculated that illegal immigration and other factors would increase pressure to sell off chunks of BLM and National Forest land in the interest of "housing justice", "sustainable development", and however else they'll package the selloff- in short, an alliance between the wise use and social justice crowd.

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  4. "But would the resistance have been as violent if the newcomers had been German or Norwegian fishermen?

    Race was and is a factor. If most illegal immigrants were from Europe, I wouldn't care."

    The quote is consistent with the remark that overfishing can be controlled by ingroup informal methods such as not allowing over-fishers to marry your daughters. So the resistance to Europeans would not be as strong because the environment would not be as threatened.

    Of course, you are right, non-environmental reasons are also important.
    Robert Hume

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  5. I'm surprised you didn't mention the story behind the refusal of the Sierra Club to even dare touch illegal immigration as damaging to the environment.

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  6. "The quote is consistent with the remark that overfishing can be controlled by ingroup informal methods such as not allowing over-fishers to marry your daughters."

    Since when do American girls ask parental permission to marry?
    And who says Viets weren't willing to marry whites?
    Rather, whites did not want to mix with Viets even they did play by the rules.
    The bigger issue is why does the damn gov dump poor refugees in struggling communities? Why not on rich folks' lawns?

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  7. "Economics quasi-Nobel Prize": brilliant - keep it up, Mr iSteve. We'll get those ruddy economists to be less economical with the truth yet.

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  8. "If most illegal immigrants were from Europe, I wouldn't care": oh I think you might. Some from the Balkans, for instance, would not be your first pick for next door neighbours.

    Not all of us Europeans are respectable 19th century Scots Presbyterians or Norwegian Lutherans. In fact, none of us are.

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  9. Iceland kind of combined property rights and social ostracism to get control of their fishing stocks.

    Now the UN evidently wants to undo this. I tend not to want to rant about globalist multiculturalism but in this case the UN has zeroed in on the one place in the world that is not destroying its fish stocks.

    Iceland fish supplies return to normal as trawler protest ends

    http://www.fishupdate.com/news/fullstory.php/aid/17761/Iceland_fish_supplies_return_to_normal_as_trawler_protest_ends.html

    UN Drops Human Rights Case Against Iceland

    http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news//UN_Drops_Human_Rights_Case_Against_Iceland_0_390751.news.aspx

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