The Tragedy of the Commons

by Dennis Green

Listening to Melinda Gates, whose foundation fights disease and especially childhood deaths in African nations, it’s obvious she doesn’t understand the implications and consequences of what she’s doing. Delivering malaria, smallpox and HIV vaccines, teaching mothers about the importance of breast-feeding, keeping a baby warm, etc. sounds fine and noble, but comes from a very narrow perspective.

She expresses a lot of guilt, as a citizen of the First World, of a developed country, that somewhere in the world people are going hungry, or living in poverty and suffering. She is as geeky as her husband, in a sort of delightful way, wearing a hairdo I haven’t seen since 1989.

She says she wishes she had earned a “biology degree, when we’re working with the science and stuff.” So do I. If only she had met and studied with Garrett Hardin, Professor of Human Ecology at UC Santa Barbara, who understood far better than the Gates do, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” He wrote an article with that title way back in 1968 that had an enormous impact on such do-gooders.

And a few years later, Hardin published an essay called “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor” in 1974 in Psychology Today that had even more impact, and created a great controversy at the time. What Hardin said, basically, was that shipping food to Africa that would simply get turned into more babies who would grow up in poverty and distress was less than enlightened.

Hardin was the world’s foremost advocate of population control. He saw how the proliferation of human life impacts the whole of the ecology wherever it occurs. In Stalking the Wild Taboo, he championed abortion as a last resort form of birth control, long before it was ruled legal in Roe v. Wade. He was not sentimental about “saving the lives” of unwanted children.

Gates sees the world as a mother would, one child at a time. Keeping that child alive is her only concern. “We can save a child’s life for ten dollars!” she says. But there’s an arrogance there under the surface, masquerading as charity and generosity. It shows now and then in her eyes.

Hardin, on the other hand, thinks globally, was one of the first and the best to do so. His book, Exploring new ethics for survival: the voyage of the spaceship Beagle, sees the planet as a closed system of limited resources that cannot afford to take everyone who ever existed on board. Those growing populations have already de-nuded the American Prairie, shrunk the savannah and the tropical rain forest so severely whole species have gone extinct. If humans never died, the planet soon would.

Hardin’s core genius is best expressed in “The Tragedy of the Commons.” He uses “tragedy” in its philosophic sense, as “the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.” The commons is the village commons where everyone is allowed to graze his cows. The incentive to each herdsman to add another cow to his herd is obvious. The benefit of adding one animal to his herd is greater than the overgrazing that results, because the costs of overgrazing are shared with all the other herdsmen, whereas the profits from the sale of that one animal are not.

“Therein is the tragedy,” Hardin writes. “Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

For all their wealth and wisdom, Bill & Melinda Gates do not comprehend this most basic and elemental scientific truth. They are doing far more harm than good.

©2009 Dennis Green