[elliekelly]

> and most societies at most times in most places in history seem to have done just fine managing “the commons” as a shared resource through social compact and peer pressure.

What? Clean water, clean air, deforestation, overfishing, noise pollution. There are infinite externalities that have been shifted onto the commons that social compact and peer pressure haven’t (and arguably won’t) solve.

[bscphil]

I think your parent comment is thinking about the world before privatization, where most resources are understood to be the collective property (and responsibility) of the community, and the community itself enforced rules intended to make sure that the resources were well managed.

Once you start talking about the modern, post-privatization world, things are different of course. Resources like water may be in theory community managed, but in practice private for-profit entities acquire the right to extract as much as they can. Think Nestle and water for example.

That said, I think privatization was inevitable. I don't think it makes sense to long for the days where community management was possible, because that was probably always limited to rather local resources and not to handling global problems like climate change. (Maybe a "global community" is possible in some utopian future, but thinking about that doesn't seem like a way to solve the problems we have now.)

[roughly]

> I think your parent comment is thinking about the world before privatization, where most resources are understood to be the collective property (and responsibility) of the community, and the community itself enforced rules intended to make sure that the resources were well managed.

Yeah, and I understand what we've got right now ain't that.

I think the two requirements for that kind of community governance are 1) relatively stable long-term relationships - ie, stakeholders are well known to each other and expect to bear the long-term costs of their decisions - and 2) relatively evenly distributed power, such that no one actor can ignore the will of the overall group.

Broadly, I think there are two changes in the modern world that put an end to that, both technological - 1) transportation technology increased to the point where it's no longer a given that people will effectively stay in one place for their entire lives, which affects both how people see their surroundings and what they can assume of others, and 2) mechanization increased both the scale of resource extraction we're capable of and the power disparity we can bring to bear if, say, the Crown agrees with us.

> That said, I think privatization was inevitable.

Broadly I agree. I'm not sure privatization as we have it was inevitable, but I think given technology progressing to even trains and rifles is sufficient to disrupt the social and psychological world in which most resources were held in common.

> I don't think it makes sense to long for the days where community management was possible, because that was probably always limited to rather local resources and not to handling global problems like climate change. (Maybe a "global community" is possible in some utopian future, but thinking about that doesn't seem like a way to solve the problems we have now.)

Part of why I push back on the idea of "the tragedy of the commons" is because it fosters a narrative of human beings as inescapably greedy and incapable of acting communally at any scale, and that's simply incorrect. I don't know what a "global community" would look like, but I think if we've any hope of achieving some kind of headway against climate change, we need more narratives encouraging us to be members of a community and fewer telling us we're "rational actors."

[freeone3000]

Because one side clearly isn't a peer. If, say, Microsoft decided to go full renewable, then there'd be pressure for everyone else to. If it's a bunch of unimportant people against a corporation with the money to obtain its rights, well!