The "tragedy of the commons" is a classic collective action problem. Really, it's a short-hand term for all collective action problems. A "commons" or common-pool resource is something that is collectively owned, like a wide open range for grazing sheep or cattle. Because there is no single owner, the resource will tend to be overused. Suppose a single farmer owned the range and all the cattle grazing on it. That farmer would not overgraze. He would limit the cattle he owned to a number that the grazing land could sustain. Too many and the grass doesn't grow back fast enough and his herd begins to starve. If he is instead letting his herd graze on a communal property owned by many cattle farmers, he will tend to overgraze. "If I add a few more head of cattle" he says, "I get the benefit, but the cost is borne by many other people." Every individual farmer hits on the same solution, where the individually rational choice is irrational from the point of view of the whole group. Either the land gets overgrazed to the point where it only supports a small number of cattle (compared to the optimum), or the farmers come to some kind of agreement and enforcement mechanism to prevent overgrazing*.
There are other examples of this. The air is a commons into which we dump pollution; it can be over-polluted. The ocean is a commons from which we extract fish; it can be over-fished. As I write this, person-to-person contact is a kind of commons. Doing too much of it tends to spread infectious disease. The individually rational choice might be to socialize with abandon. But we'd all like everyone else to socialize at least a bit less than they normally would. You might be an asymptomatic spreader of covid-19, so every contact you have with other people is a tiny externality (a cost imposed on other people). If you are actively infectious, you might be tempted to take a trip to the store rather than self-quarantine. After all, you're already sick. You incur no cost by going out, assuming you're physically well enough to manage an outing. If you don't care about the costs imposed on others, your personal cost-benefit computation might lead you to spread the disease, even though the social cost-benefit analysis would have you stay at home. That's the logic stated in simple terms, anyway. And that's the basic rationale for a state-imposed "lock-down."
But wait a minute. Say everyone's basically staying at home. Can I go out? Why have all these empty streets if nobody can travel them? Why not go to the totally empty store, where the chance of contracting covid-19 is now negligible? It's like saying, "We're overgrazing the land, so everybody has to stop grazing completely." Once the grass grows back, you might as well let someone graze. A more useful way of thinking about this is that there is an optimal level of usage for any commons. There is an optimum amount of lock-down, where people are allowed to do activities provided there is enough room to avoid other people. I'm thinking specifically of the guy who was arrested for surfing. Now, maybe the police had to set an example in this case. If one person gets to flout the law, then others will start to follow. But it would have made more sense to keep the beaches open so long as they didn't get too crowded. (Or to not shut them down at all. You can maintain your distance on a beach, for crying out loud.) Likewise, stores can be opened with the condition that they follow reasonable protocols. Say you allow in one patron at a time, the risk to other patrons is minimal. (The CDC has recently downgraded its estimate of the risk of transmission on surfaces. Direct person-to-person contact seems to be the dominant means of spreading.)
My great frustration with the government response to covid-19 is that it doesn't seem to have any clear goal or any end-game in mind. State governments aren't doing the basic cost-benefit analysis that they needs to be doing. (If they are doing this behind closed doors, they're not showing their work.) Keyboard warriors and Facebook-scolds are piling on in obnoxious ways. "Why can't we go out, since we're at such low risk of being harmed by the virus?" young people quite reasonably ask. They usually get some version of this totally inadequate answer: "Because if you go out, you could get sick and infect someone else." That is technically true, but completely useless as a framework for crafting policy. That answer has no sense of numeracy or magnitudes or relative costs. It shows no comprehension of what people actually want or how much they're willing to pay to get it. Maybe terms like "cost-benefit analysis" and "optimum rate of viral spreading" sound bloodless, like we're tolerating preventable deaths based on the outcome of a spreadsheet calculation. But what's truly inhuman is declining to inform policy with this kind of consideration. You can't avoid placing a dollar value on a human life, not if you're actually serious about treating people with the respect they deserve.
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*In practice, these kinds of coordination problems get solved. See Elinor Ostrom's excellent book Governing the Commons. It has many examples of these kinds of common-pool resource problems getting solved. It turns out that people are capable of talking to each other. They don't just suffer in silence, they come up with mutually agreeable rules that fix the problem. We also all observe basic norms of fairness. Even if we are sociopaths who don't personally get the "warm fuzzies" when we think about fairness, the fair solution is a kind of focal point that can solve the coordination problem. ("Equal sharing" of a commons is a more obvious solution than "Jimmy gets first dibs on everything," even though everyone would like to impose the second rule and be Jimmy. It might also be the solution that generates optimal enforcement, with users of the commons reporting cheaters and adjudicating disputes because they all have buy-in.) Ostrom slays some left-wing tropes by showing that we don't need government to solve all externality problems. It's also fair to say she slays some right-wing tropes by showing "privatize everything" isn't always the best option. Some communal properties are best left communal, but the best solution to some particular problem might come from the individuals participating, not far-off bureaucrats or capitalist "owners".
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