Summary
Ahead of the 2024 election, Generation Z has sparked a trend on TikTok, “canceling out” family members’ votes by voting opposite their Trump-supporting relatives. Many young women post videos showing them voting for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, contrasting with family members supporting Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Although Gen Z voters lean slightly toward Harris, a significant portion supports Trump. With over 47 million early votes cast, polls show a tight race, especially in key swing states.
Yes and/but you might be interested to know these things about the “Tragedy of the Commons”:
Elinor Ostrom, awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, fundamentally challenged the “tragedy of the commons” theory, which Garrett Hardin popularized in 1968. Hardin’s theory argued that shared resources—like grazing land or fisheries—inevitably suffer from overuse because each user, acting in self-interest, seeks to maximize personal gain. Without external regulation or privatization, Hardin claimed, such resources would degrade irreparably.
Ostrom’s work provided a different perspective based on extensive field research across diverse communities managing shared resources, such as forests in Nepal and fisheries in Turkey. Through these studies, she found that local groups often developed effective, self-governing systems to sustain and share resources equitably. Ostrom identified eight core principles, such as clear resource boundaries, community-devised rules, local monitoring, and graduated sanctions for rule violations, which contribute to sustainable communal resource management. By documenting these successful cases, she demonstrated that, under certain conditions, communities could avoid the “tragedy” without privatization or top-down control.
Ostrom’s insights reshaped economic thinking by showing that cooperation, rather than competition alone, could lead to sustainable resource use. Her findings emphasize that real-world communities often solve commons problems through trust, local knowledge, and shared governance, challenging the idea that only private ownership or government intervention can manage common resources effectively. Ostrom’s approach has since inspired policies and frameworks for resource management across environmental, urban, and even space governance contexts, as her principles underscore the potential of collective, decentralized solutions to common-pool problems.
Her work offers an empowering view of human capacity for self-organization, contradicting the inevitability of Hardin’s “tragedy” and suggesting new possibilities for addressing global commons issues like climate change and biodiversity loss. This impact has encouraged rethinking in fields ranging from political science to ecology and economics.
Sources:
• Inside Story, “The not-so-tragic commons”
• Resilience, “The Victory of the Commons”
• Space Foundation, “The Commons Solution”
Also Hardin was a white nationalist and pushed his “tragedy of the commons” theory as a justification for eugenics.
So every time someone references his pseudoscience, they’re breathing life back into a dead fascist’s racism. Yaaaaayyy…
The concept of the tragedy of the commons existed centuries before Hardin. He just uses that concept to justify an unsound conclusion and the concept would exist whether he wrote his paper or not.
Every time someone references it, they’re referencing that concept that really does affect communal resources, and probably have no idea what argument Hardin ever made based on it.
The beginning of the paper lays out the idea very well and I use it to teach people to treat shared resources respectfully, but tell them not to bother reading the conclusion.
The distinction between “government regulation” on one hand and “community-devised rules, local monitoring and graduated sanctions for rule violations” on the other seems entirely artificial to me. In both cases rules and enforcement are set up to avoid the tragedy. The latter just uses more feel-good words to describe local government.
The Tragedy of the Commons is a capitalist myth just like the Myth of Barter.
OP explained the former. David Graeber talked about the latter in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years
