Live Your Lives

To be clear, I agree with you like 95% of the way, it’s that last 5% that I still think you are overselling and would like you to be more careful with.

The problem is that Hardin’s argument simply isn’t much of a scientific one in the first place and is instead much more of a logical one. (I was being sloppy when I asked for direct evidence, so sorry about that.) Hardin made the massive assumption that people are wholly self-interested. If people are only trying to maximize their own share of the resources regardless of what it might cost others, then it is impossible to escape the competition that creates for the limited amount of resources that the commons provides. All of the examples and articles you’ve brought up attack that assumption and/or focus on the conclusions Hardin made based on those assumptions, but do nothing to actually disprove the fundamental argument behind the tragedy of the commons.

I think you are overselling it’s incorrectness and so horseshoeing back around to being like the people who oversell it’s truthfulness. Yes, the tragedy of the commons is misleading if taken in isolation, but something being misleading does not automatically make it scientifically incorrect. Do you have direct evidence or an argument for why the tragedy of the commons isn’t the most likely outcome if the circumstances just so happen to match the assumptions Hardin made?