29 pages • 58 minutes read
Garrett James HardinThe Tragedy of the Commons
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Titling
The single most important thing to come from Hardin’s article is its title. Hardin borrowed an old, well-understood economic idea first presented by William Forster Lloyd in 1833, which shows that an unregulated common area often becomes overused to the point of failure because users each get more from abusing the resource than they pay in the cost of the abuse. Hardin’s article named this phenomenon “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which quickly was adopted by economists and environmentalists as a catchword for the overuse and pollution of common resources. The title so succinctly encapsulates Hardin’s argument that, ever after, it has brought to mind the problem of environmental misuse and the implication that the solution requires regulation of common resources.
Argument
The author essentially makes a series of arguments in support of a scientific thesis, namely, that the world’s human population is growing too quickly to be supported by an overly stressed environment, and that this growth should be halted by political means. The main points in support of that thesis are, first, that the growth rate of humanity is exponential and bound to overwhelm the Earth’s ecosystems; second, that common resources, such as air and water, when used in an unregulated manner by a growing population, will collapse and cause a mass catastrophe; third, that previous attempts to slow population growth, such as appeals to conscience, have failed or, worse, backfired; and fourth, that the proper solution in a civil society is laws that restrict family size.
Metaphor
Central to the author’s argument is the metaphor of the common pasture. Overgrazing of that “commons” by herders causes it to fail; this symbolizes the plundering of commons in general, especially the pollution and overuse of the planet’s air, water, grasslands, forests, and other large ecosystems and resources. First, the author explains overuse of an easily understandable resource like a local pasture—where individual herders cause little harm by taking a little bit more of the resource but all users doing so together cause a disaster—and extends that idea to explain environmental degradation caused when the same incentives inspire millions of people to exploit nationwide or worldwide common resources.
A second metaphor references the “invisible hand,” a concept first floated by economist Adam Smith in the late 1700s, by which individuals, doing productive work for their own accounts, also benefit society at large, as if an invisible hand were guiding all that private activity for the general good. Hardin points out that sometimes individuals discover that they can benefit personally from casual misuse of a common resource, but when everyone begins to do so, the result is a common disaster. In that case, the invisible hand collects individual benefits into a pile that collapses catastrophically. Hardin uses this counter-example to the invisible hand allegory as a metaphor for private misuse of large commons such as air, water, forests, etc., that lead to bad results in an era of overpopulation.
Moral Suasion
Though “The Tragedy of the Commons” makes scientific assertions—laying out statistical arguments in support of the inevitability of population growth and explaining why previous attempts to solve the problem have failed due to misaligned incentives and even genetic drift—it also makes a moral appeal. “The population problem cannot be solved in a technical way” (Section 1, Paragraph 5), because all attempts to ease a resource problem lead to more use of that resource until it again becomes a problem. Instead, the author steps outside his nominal role as scientist and into the role of citizen-advocate who plumps for legislation to limit overpopulation.
Hardin’s willingness to take a moral stand is an early example that was followed by increasing numbers of scientists who, in the early 21st century, foresaw the approach of environmental disasters and raised their voices to warn the world. Such acts are always risky, since they conflate research with politics and bend the tradition of scientific neutrality. Researchers must resolve the moral conundrum for themselves; Hardin’s article, deliberately controversial in its reach beyond scientific argument, was an early leader in that movement.
