The tragedy of common assumption
It's Jazzonomics, stupid! (spout-shout no.1)
Hello.
Sorry to interrupt your usual programming. Don’t panic, we will be continuing our chat about Artificial Intelligence in the next newsletter but, occasionally, I get a little steamed up and want to shout about something.
Sometimes, I want to comment about something-somewhere and can’t, because I refuse to give away my precious details to log into, or pay a subscription to, some platform. And sometimes I want to flesh ideas out more deeply than a comments section allows, or run off on a tangent. And sometimes comments sections are closed because the sub-editor just has this sense that the article might contain pretty-questionable ideas and so will be magnetically-attractive to bad-takes. And sometimes I just do some thinking IRL, or some talking with IRL people, and just want to put that down somewhere…
So, occasionally, I’m going to interrupt some bigger thought with a little thought.
And, with that, welcome to the first edition of The Thing I Just Explained Above.
This morning I was reading a piece about some slow-moving legislation in New Zealand that aims to consolidate our national water services.
Previously it was being called Three Waters, and that led to all manner of hilarious-incoherent signs, put up by opponents of the legislation, up and down the country, calling for highway drivers to immediately slam on the brakes, to avoid something presumably tri-torrential right up ahead!
Anyway, the government renamed it ‘Affordable Water Reforms’ or some other silliness. I’m actually not going to discuss the relative merits of water reform (or picking good names for things) here. I want to instead talk about the economics profession and their love of historical apparent truisms.
Here’s the article if you’re so inclined. But, honestly, all that you really need to know from it is it assumes two old ideas are valid ways of describing action in the world, because they sound sensible. Basically, then, they assume we neither socially evolve across the decades, or have free will. So that’s fun!
The first of these ideas is something called the Tragedy of the Commons. You’ve undoubtably heard of this; it’s an idea for which the framing went up in the 1830s, so it’s been around a while, but it was popularised by Garrett Hardin in the 1960s. This idea is essentially the assumption that:
If you make an accessible thing free for everyone, some dick is going to come in and take it all—ruining it for everyone else—to their exclusive benefit.
It tends to get talked about a lot in terms of public spaces (‘commons’ are just what spaces were called before we paved them and turned them into freeways and carparks). The general premise then goes that, if you make a nice juicy-green paddock available to all the villagers for their cows to graze in, some fuck-knuckle will inevitably spoil it by playing sultry music in his cowshed until the cows get busy breeding, and then he’ll send out his enlarged herd to take over the whole commons, eating all the grass that the various village herds should have been sharing.
The piece does point out the ideas were a little simplistic in the first pass, and were further refined by Elinor Ostrom, who went on to win a Nobel Prize in economics for her work. But that really buries the lede; failing to mention Hardin’s was really fucking racist, and also Ostrom’s work was done on the basis of her believing the entire thing was dogshit.
Unfortunately, despite Ostrom’s good work, Hardin’s original thesis remains a far more familiar piece of work to most people because of its simplicity and, hence, still surfaces like this as a way to justify crappy policies and critiques, rather than actually accepting the status quo might need adjusting.
I don’t want to put the boot in here too much, because Ostrom was undoubtably far smarter than me, but even she was up against it from the start, for the reason that her work was subtle, but not simple.
But to explain why this is such a problem, I need to point out that Nobel Prizes—awards given to even the very best operators in a field—were originally designed as science prizes. Economics was not included until around 70 years later, because economics is not science; it is analysis and guesswork.
In a previous life, I was a mediocre jazz musician so I tend to think of economics as being like a musical improvisation: You go into an improvised solo knowing the chord progression, genre and timing you’re working with; so you are somewhat limited in the ideas you can play off. But you’ve still got multiple scales and modes to pick notes out of, and different rhythmic routes to head down: Millions of potential combinations. The result is, a good jazz musician can take the music in nearly any direction they choose to – while still working from apparently established frameworks.
To be clear, this is not how science works. Science is about observation. It’s more like sitting in the audience of a classical [sic]1 music performance—the notes are already written out, and will be played, you just haven’t heard them yet. Your goal as a scientist is to nut out which already-written-note comes next.
Economists—the good and the bad ones—look at data and interpret it using a range of techniques and biases. I’m not saying economics as a field shouldn’t exist, or that economists don’t provide some valuable insight in our society. But economists are closer in that respect to philosophers than to physicists.
I’ve gone well off-track, but it’s worth finally noting that the Nobel Prize in Economics didn’t exist until right about when economists started sticking their nose into politics to raise their profile. That all, coincidentally, happened right around the time the Bretton Woods global financial system was done away with, and alongside the end of the historically most peaceful, low-unemployment, economically-stable and low-debt period in the history of humanity.
I can’t say for sure what the relationship between these things is.
So Ostrom’s work, as important as it was (and built out of actual observation) is still based on the same core improvisation, just with more ‘feeling’.
Which brings me back to the Tragedy of the Commons. The thing about it is—to our neoliberalism-addled ears—it does sound about right. Like pretty-much all enduring economics ideas, it has an inherent logic to it; the feel of a historical truism.
After all, the world certainly seems to be chock-full of fuck-knuckles.
But is it?
The truth is, the TotC has been debunked multiple times, even since Ostrom’s work, so I don’t need to relitigate all the detail—that’s what Google is for: I just want you to think about private property.
You presumably have neighbours; and sometimes they go out. How often do you break into their house when they’re out, and steal milk out of their fridge?
Let’s be honest, it wouldn’t be that hard. You probably have a reasonable idea of their schedule. Wait for them to leave, break a window, climb in, grab milk, pop it into your fridge. Winning! Who’s going to know? Unless they have paranoid security cameras everywhere, or somehow catch you in the act, you’ll almost certainly get away with it.
You might be thinking “this is ridiculous”, but that’s likely just your ‘private property tingle’ tingling.
“I’m not a thief!” you say.
And you’re probably right. Statistically-speaking, virtually none of us are. The ones of us that are thieves are driven to it by a sense of desperation, or a sense of injustice, or a dearth of community. Yet, simplistically-appealing ideas like the TotC make it seem like being a thief is a rational choice for any of us.
The truth is, essentially all the reasons why someone might be a thief are basically private-property related. The real tragedy of the commons is the fact we don’t have more commons! The one thing that would absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, stop you stealing milk from your neighbour’s fridge is a free milk stall at the bottom of your road.
[Just to jump in here, in case you’re wondering. This is not my Anarchist Manifesto.]
Now you might say, “it’s different when there’s a limited amount of something”—like herding land—but it’s still only different if there’s a compelling benefit to being a greedy fuck-knuckle. That is a mindset thing, not a biologically-human thing. This is just economics doing its thing again: The way we behave is not necessarily because of some scientific truth, but because we’ve made ‘being a greedy fuck-knuckle’ a good thing.
What this all amounts to is we choose to turn commons into tragedy. There’s countless examples of things we share very happily—including those freeways we made a bunch of commons into. There’s countless examples that call “bullshit” on humans naturally being selfish, horrible cretins—we don’t even need to drill very deep into the historical and tribal examples, because we share stuff with each other all the time (that was both Ostrom’s work in a nutshell, and also a hint!). There’s loads of things people could take advantage of but don’t. The dominant reason for selfishness is being forced into it by unnatural individualised-property-wealth brain worms. The Tragedy of the Commons is a myth only made real by bad policy, not actual human behaviour.
To be fair, I think the writer of that piece knows much of this—that’s why Ostrom was even mentioned at all—but, as many people do when they mention the TotC, they still go on to represent it as an ‘all things being equal’ axiom on the collected behaviour of humans.
‘All things being equal’ is as useful to understanding human behaviour as the Lock Ness Monster is to understanding fresh-water aquatic life.
Which brings me to the other old economic idea referenced in this piece: The Prisoners Dilemma. The basic concept, from 1950-odd, was a thought experiment that placed criminal co-conspirators in separate interrogation rooms and proposed three possible outcomes: They could blame the other for the crime (thus possibly getting themselves freedom at the cost of the other); they could take joint blame (thus both facing equal punishment); or they could both claim innocence (potentially giving them both freedom, or both a lessor punishment).
If you’ve managed this far, the good news is this largely taps into the same sort of thing. It assumes that humans operate in a rational way—that they would choose the option that benefits them most. Economists love ‘rational human’ shit, because it’s the only way their ‘science’ works: A rational human is the fully-scored classical performance that never strays from the notes written on the page.
But, an actual human is fucking-dorian-pentatonic-diatonic-ing all over the show like a hot-stuff jazz improvisor. As much as we’d like to believe a human will make a rational decision, they don’t. A remarkably large portion of the time. Again, this is largely based on their social conditioning, which is already subtly-different for every human. And there’s also more immediate considerations: A prisoner with a family at home (reliant on their income) is going to be weighted towards a very different decision from that of a prisoner who believes they have ‘nothing to lose’, or one whose only real community has been found in previous prison stays. For the time-being, we cannot know all the permutations that come together to make up the human decision-making machine, so we just need to stop pretending there are valid way to explain them.
To be super-clear, I don’t want you to take this as an explicit criticism or agreement with any points made in the original piece that set this off. It should be obvious that I’m not even engaging with that piece; I’m engaging with the mindset, because this historical truism stuff comes up all the time in economics.
Not all economists fall back on it and, increasingly, they are aware of it as a failed approach to their field. But all economists have to rely—to some degree—on the idea of a ‘rational and predictable human’; and that naturally leads one to turn towards simple analogies that can validate the existence of that fabled being.
My point is, we always need to take any convincing-sounding argument built around the assumption of a classical performance, with a heavy mixolydian of salt! (that one’s for the music nerds)
-T
The term ‘Classical music’ is used generically to refer to virtually all Western-tradition music from the 1600s until 20th Century popular music came along. That’s how I’m using it here. But, technically, Classical refers to the string-heavy music period between roughly 1750 and 1820 - typified by rock-stars like Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart.