| CC-PP is disproven directly from Elinor Ostrom's research studies in her book "Governing the Commons". Elinor literally won a Nobel Prize for disproving the tragedy of the commons. > It was long unanimously held among economists that natural resources that were collectively used by their users would be over-exploited and destroyed in the long-term. Elinor Ostrom disproved this idea by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters, and forests. She showed that when natural resources are jointly used by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2009/ost... https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/ostrom_lecture.pd... > Ostrom showed that many real-world “commons dilemmas” are not fixed one-shot prisoner’s dilemmas but repeated interactions where people can communicate, build trust, and design rules, impose retaliation to rule breakers, and redefine the rules of the underlying game structure as time goes on. |
Ostrom accepted that there's a real problem, and that historically it has led to catastrophe. Her contribution was to see that in practice these catastrophes have been relatively infrequent, and why. This turns out to be an interesting story because previous work tended toward centralized control (government takeover or privatization) as a cure (global optimization), while most real-world cases have been dealt with effectively by community organization (local optimization). In other words, Ostrom didn't disprove the problem. She found alternative solutions.
But the dynamic of the tragedy of the commons is real. The Newfoundland cod fisheries did collapse. And there are many active catastrophes playing out at different scales and speeds as we speak.