Tragedy of the commons - a problem and a solution
While watching the latest news on the passage of the health reform bill, I am having a conversation about a traveller community in southwest England. Some of the stories are about personalities, others about the institutional "structures" that have grown up - without the recognition of specific rules or laws, but simply the emergence of ways of doing things that are "enforced" by social norms. This is very reminiscent of Elinor Ostrom's Nobel-winning work on the emergence of self-managing rules and structures within communities. These rules are most obvious in the management of common-pool resources such as fish stocks - where it's hard to establish, enforce or even design the classical economic solution of property rights. Without them, the tragedy of the commons soon destroys the fish stocks permanently. Communities in practice are surprisingly successful at establishing such norms for themselves. But ironically, there's another level of tragedy of...