I've asked many of my friends about if Communism would fail due to Tragedy of the Commons, but they wouldn't answer. This is why I made this thread. Here's an example of Tragedy of the Commons: An individual with some number of sheep is faced with the following choices. If the land has less than one sheep per acre, they will put theirs on (clearly). If the land already has more than one sheep per acre, it is clearly going to be grazed out, but they can't stop this anyway - so they might as well put their own sheep on the land and get some of the feed before this happens. Helping themselves to more reduces the total pool, but they still get more of it. Wouldn't Communism fail due to Tragedy of the Commons? :shrug: You mean deficit.
Yes, in the abstract. In reality it's not too difficult to police that. But the real problem with communism is the one that causes people to create the tragedy of the commons in the first place. Remember that people are not as stupid as the Marxists believed them to be. Most people would not be motivated to overgraze the commons, if they were prosperous enough with the standard allocation of sheep. The problem is that centrally planned economies are so inefficient that they do not produce a surplus (capital)--which was (economically) the main reason for creating cities in the first place. Not only does it not generate a surplus, it actually generates a "negative surplus," which is another way of saying that it dissipates the capital that the previous society had created. When that is all gone its standard of living drops precipitously. People can no longer maintain a minimal level of prosperity by keeping the standard allocation of sheep. Notice that the Tragedy of the Commons is a sympton of the underlying problem. It is not the problem itself. People have no practical reason to cooperate with their neighbors if this cooperation does not elevate the prosperity level of everyone, although they may feel a spiritual desire to cooperate. That vanishes rapidly when the pre-existing capital that created an artificial prosperity vanishes, and the people find themselves dropping to a lower step on Maslow's Hierarchy. The communist states in eastern Europe endured for two or three generations, so long as their economies were able to limp along by dissipating somebody else's capital. The Soviet Union had to acquire its satellites at the end of WWII, because its capital was gone and it had to help itself to theirs to keep its population quiescent with a minimal level of prosperity. Despite the industry of the Slovaks, the technology of the Bohemians, the stoicism of the Poles, the grunt work of the Bulgarians, the pragmatism of the Hungarians, the law-bending of the Romanians and the natural resources of the whole region, the whole region's capital began to run out and everyone's prosperity began to dwindle--just at the time when technology made the greener grass on the other side of the fence so much more visible to the entire population. At that point on Maslow's Hierarchy they had nothing to lose by risking their safety to confront their leaders, and the whole contraption collapsed on itself. The Tragedy of the Commons had very little to do with it. It was the Tragedy of Big Government, something the Western "democracies" should pay more attention to.
Tragedy of the commons is an economic problem in which every individual tries to reap the greatest benefit from a given resource. Same goes with the news about the Columbia Nutella Madness. A recent tale that basically not a soul should worry about has become news, namely that at Columbia University, students are making off with Nutella in droves. Given, that “professional” so-called “news” wires picked it up is preposterous, but it's a microcosm of a phenomenon known as a “tragedy of the commons.” Source of article: personalmoneynetwork.com
Communism certainly can have that same problem, but in most cases of interest to modern societies the "resource" is not fixed, like the size of a pasture. It can often be increased by the efforts of the society. It is difficult to make communism work as there certainly is a human tendency to improve one´s personal benefits, even at the expense of others. To counter balance this tendency a very effective educational system is needed, such as found in Scandinavia countries. Denmark, for example, has world´s highest tax rates, but consistently also leads in surveys of people´s happiness with their lives and government services. - See last part here: http://www.sciforums.com/showthread...-bad-news-is&p=3061113&viewfull=1#post3061113 I married a Norwegian elementary school teacher. At least there, and I think in other Scandinavian countries, your first grade teacher is your second grade teacher, etc. This has huge benefits. For example there is no passing a poor reader on to the next grade and all know who is responsible for Johnny’s educational development. Furthermore, education of the class is a team effort. For example, on the first day of 2nd grade the teacher knows her student´s strength and weakness. If Mary is weak in an area where John is strong, teacher may ask John to help Mary while she gives lesson to rest of the class. That lesson will have a strong dose of "social responsibly" to help others - why Scandinavians willing pay the highest taxes in the world. - They learned from first grade onward that they are their "brother’s keeper." They want ALL to have good educational opportunities, not just those who live in wealthy neighborhoods where the LOCALLY funded schools are good. They want ALL to have access to good, essentially no out of pocket cost, health care. They don´t throw trash out of car windows, etc. Thus, they are much better educated on average than Americans are. (Most speak several languages by 8th grade.) Their life expectancy is about four years greater. They care for each other. Their crime rates are low, so the cost of their prisons is too. Of course, there are exceptions where the "national team spirit" failed to "take" and the natural tendency to get all you can for yourself is dominate, and they don´t have communism´s concept of common ownership of the means of production in a "COMMAND ECONOMY". A personal note: My daughters both spent most of their summers, from age 4 till until age 12 (cheap children airfares ended after that) with their Norwegian grandmother. My youngest is quite independent minded and stressed the then older (by 13 years from my first born´s first visit) grandmother, so when a lady, visiting from Bergen, ask if she would go to Bergen to help her take care of her four year old child, grandmother said "OK." (Lady was in Oslo for special medical attention as was pregnant and bleeding - She had to go to bed and stay there or lose the baby.) At end of the summer, my 11 year old daughter was put alone on boat in Bergen, which went up Norway´s longest fiord and that boat met two others, to exchange mail and passengers in middle of fiord. Daughter transferred to the correct other boat. Then at its port (Flam) took the cog wheel train up to the main rail line, where she switched to the Oslo train. When in Oslo she got the correct electric street car to get close to Grand mother´s apartment and finally walked to it. (All this with help from various adult strangers.) In the US, I would never allow her to go alone by bus to a movie a few miles from home. Norwegians help one another, even pretty little American girls who are fluent in Norwegian were quite safe there in a crowd of several Norwegians. She did all this alone, but she had been to Bergen from Oslo some years earlier with her mother and me. That was about 40 years ago. Even Norway may have changed, by now.
How come a pre-litrate, mostly naked African tribe can manage common resources equitably for thousands of years (before European incursion), and no modern industrial nation can manage either communism or capitalism without catastrophic cycles? Maybe it's not so much a question of economics as of mind-set.
Communism succeeds, to the extent that it does (and below the State level, examples abound), because it specifically addresses the Tragedy of the Commons - as a system, communism is one of the few proposed systematic solutions to that central problem. Other solutions are found among the standard religions (Christianity was founded as a communal, communist social structure). That might even be the central role of institutional religion, its value to human life. Capitalism, on the other hand, requires major and calculated modification - fundamental and continually reinforced restriction and regulation and control - to avoid wrecking its host society's commons in a very short time. And note that the entire natural environment and resource base of human life is a commons, in the first place, and so is much of human social life and culture and so forth. The OP would be an example of that - privately owned sheep, returning private profit to their owners, exploiting a commons. Edit in: so would the recent plant explosion in West Texas - for ten points and a lottery shot at the bonus round, identify the commons involved. So the OP is a bit odd - the worry seems misdirected.
Because the tribe you postulate makes no progress - in economic terms there is no growth. They are content to follow a traditional, unchanging pattern of existence, from one generation to the next. This unchanging state either reaches a stable equilibrium with its surroundings, or, if it doesn't, or if the surroundings change so as to disturb the stability, they die. Whereas civilisation is all about progressive improvement of the lot of the people through specialisation, innovation and communication with other groups. This is a condition of change, evidently not one of stable equilibrium with the surroundings. So in this case, the relationship with the surroundings has to be managed in some way. The faster the change, the more of a challenge this management becomes.
I agree with this. But when the management destroys the only source of whatever it needs in an area, they leave and that area can never be reused again due to the destruction of the environment there.
True. But growth without limit or planning isn't really progress; it's just rushing to extinction. The other, and probably more relevant in the current application, reason is that the members of that tribe were related to one another, as well as their common habitat. Not invariably improvement, and not for all of the people. And this is the crux of the matter. We have managers of every kind of specialized activity, yet we still can't manage greed as well as people did before they invented managers. Perhaps they taught their young a different way of thinking. Perhaps we should try that.
Well yes and no. I think just about all of us is better off than we were as Stone Age tribesmen - and that has to be due to genuine progress. As Dawkins famously observed, "Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000ft and I'll show you a hypocrite." But I do entirely take your point that untrammelled greedy materialism is not a recipe for a stable and well-adjusted society. I think we manage greed reasonably well at the macro level, via anti-monopoly laws and all the rafts of regulation of business activities etc - though we mess it up from time to time of course, the recent banking crisis being the latest example. I do suspect, though, that the mobility and sheer pace of modern societies leads to a fragmentation and loss of social cohesion, which weakens those forces other than individual materialism which used to help shape society and people's actions within it. How we address this I do not know, but going back to live like African tribesmen is obviously not a practical answer, and nor is old-style socialism.
Providing good, essentially free education and health care to all, after primary schools have stressed the need for mutual assistance, like in Scandinavia is worth trying. More discussion and details in post 4 here: http://www.sciforums.com/showthread...mp-Communism&p=3061808&viewfull=1#post3061808
Yes maybe that helps. Though we sort of have both of these already in most of W Europe and we still have plenty of problems. I think the Scandinavians have the additional advantages (from this viewpoint - disadvantages in other ways of course) of a being small, speaking an unpopular language, and not being favourite destinations for immigrants who are culturally very different. So they are sort of where the UK was in about 1950, in this respect.
Yes, most of W.Europe has nearly zero out of pocket cost for quality education and health care, but I have my own index measuring how well a country is doing in developing good, responsible citizens: How far along city sidewalks (or along country roads) can you go without seeing significant amounts of trash publicly discarded? Only the people, not the government, can make their national rank in this index. By this index Scandinavian countries rank high and US is near the bottom.
What kind of problems? I have long thought that higher education should be available for those that desire it. Most American young adults can expect to be in considerable debt just for a Bachelor of Arts degree. We go into adulthood with this unneeded stress along with a myriad of others, which includes the fact that you may or may not get a job and now you are $40,000 dollars in debt. What a way to get started. If we want a better educated, progressive population with the ability for critical thinking we must as Americans' find a way to overhaul the current system of higher education. I realize given our size, and cultural / ethnic diversity this would be difficult but doable.
Hmm, with litter I suspect there are other cultural factors at work, not least the consumption of so much fast food in the US, which must generate a lot of unwanted packaging for people on the move. But I take your point.
US has some very good higher eduction centers, but the majority of elementary schoold are locally financed often with even the police being laid off and not able to attract the well qualified teachers that rich neiborhood schools can. One simple, zero cost, improvement could be borrowed from Scandinavian elementary school - fix clearly who is responsible if "Johnny can´t read." End the common policy of teachers passing to next grade student doing poorly. In that system, no one knows who is responsible for his/her failures. Move the first grade teacher to 2nd grade with the students - all the way to the end of elementary school, as in Norway at least. See post 4 for how much this helps, even years later.
Two problems there: the US does not have a reliable supply of good teachers for making that kind of commitment, or even willing to among certain student populations; and turnover in the student population is too high, especially in the schools msot in need of improvement here, to create the necessary continuity. Personally, I would have hated to have been stuck with any of my elementary school teachers for six consecutive years.
