There is a theory, called, “the tragedy of the commons” that if no one owns something, it will be overused.
You can see this in pollution. No one owns the air, so assholes over-pollute it because they get the profits and bear only a tiny part of the costs. When I was young the BC coasts had tons of clam and oyster beds. In the 90s people with no connection to local communities (Vietnamese) came along and stripped them clean. Made a lot of money, but destroyed most of the beds.
The problem is that these aren’t “commons”.
Commons are resources a community or group in the community manages together. The air and oyster beds weren’t managed.
The commons, in England and elsewhere, lasted for well over a 1,000 years. They were managed well, were over 90% as productive as enclosed fields and produced a far better standard of living for more people than enclosed fields, which were associated with throwing people off the land they had lived on for over a thousand years, so they could work over 80 hours a week in factories with horrific rates of dismemberment, in cities rife with disease where people died far younger and were ill far more often.
There is no tragedy of the commons.
What we call commons, aren’t. To be a commons, a group of people which benefit more from the continued existence of something than its destruction or degradation have to be charge in it. No short-termers or outsiders (people who don’t need it to continue in their lifetime and beyond) need apply. In the terms of Carse’s “Finite and Infinite Games” no one playing a finite game can ever be allowed close to a commons.
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It does make a difference.
The tragedy of the commons is that people who didn’t benefit from them continuing used the power of the state to break them up (enclose) them for their private profit, thus improverishing millions of people.
The modern tragedy of shared resources (which are NOT commons) is that the people in charge of them are playing finite games. My friend Stirling Newberry called this the death-bet. Simply put, the people fucking the world up with massive pollution and over-using resources, will be dead when the bet comes due. Nancy Pelosi, clinging grimly to power, is 80 years old.
The people you want in charge are people who are young and people who care about their great-grandchildren. Or, in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) phrase, for the next seven generations.
As for old people, the problem is twofold: first they think their money will help their kids, second they don’t /really/ care about their children or grandchildren. (Based on the behaviour I see, I assume most Americans don’t actually care much about their kids, especially once they’re adults. They scream that they do, but their actions show otherwise.)
They also have to be, for types of commons which are not global, locals, so that they can’t leave when things go bad. People who aren’t committed to the local area can’t be in charge of the long-term sustainability of a local area.
Put crudely, people who don’t have to eat where they shit can’t be in charge of anything.
Because this isn’t always possible, with global resources, you need to put people in artificial boxes. They need to experience the consequences of their failures. If they have both authority and power to act, after a certain time in office (and when out of office for a certain amount of time, so they don’t dodge their failures) they need to eat their own dogfood, to use the business expression. Make them live in the place with the worst pollution. If there are people there without a mask, then they don’t get to have one either. Make them drink the water. Make them eat the fish from the river.
This sort of personal responsibility, if combined with actual power, will clear problems up fast. If you want to make it really potent, give them a bit of time then make their non-adult children do the same.
In India there is a longstanding problem, not primarily environmental, but similiar, called manual scavenging. Simply put, untouchable (Dalit) caste members clean sewers and so on manually. No other jobs are available to them.
If you simply made it so that the governor and police chief and Prime Minister all had to do a day of manual scavenging every week till there was no manual scavenging (or so close to none as to unmeasurable) I guarantee this problem would be solved so fast your head would spin.
As for heads of industry, making the Shell CEO and every executive and all major shareholders eat fish from the Gulf oil spill for a year would be laudatory.
No wealth or power without responsibility for results. None. No scapegoats. If you have power, you’re in charge, no saying someone is responsible without giving them necessary authority.
The Ganges, in India, is horribly polluted and Indian politicians constantly wail, promise to do something and do nothing. Make them drink it every day, in front of witnesses, and the problem will resolve itself. (Sure, there can be some time lag. But perhaps make them drink one glass at the start of their term of office. Concentrate the mind a bit.)
No one gets to be in charge of anything unless they are affected by the results of their actions. Nothing.
This may seem similar to “Skin in the Game” by Taleb, but it is an ancient idea. Even in modern thinking, before Taleb, Jared Diamond made the same point in his book Collapse. But the idea is as old as civilization, and I am quite sure older.
As for the generational altruism idea, the ancient Greek saying was “a society is great when old men plant trees in whose shades they will never sit.”
We know all this, but in the modern era bunch of people who were either fools or evil or both, starting with Adam Smith (who was, admittedly, not quite as bad as his idea’s misuse would lead one to believe), created the idea that governing the world based on short term greed would lead to good results.
It did, for some people, and for a larger group for a while (that while is coming to an end.) It was based on genocide, enclosure (aka the violent removal of property rights from peasants) and the conquest of 70%+ of the world.
Or, if you want another authority, Keynes,
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
Put that way, it’s pretty obviously nonsense.
The Tragedy of the Commons is that we don’t have properly constituted Commons, that is all.
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