"The Tragedy of the Commons"

This is a last minute posting of a short article - Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons". This opinion piece ran in Science in 1968, and has been widely discussed and debated (and deprecated and despised!) ever since.

To get a sense of just how influential it has been, consider that the Wikipedia entry on the article is longer than the essay itself and that much of the work of the 2009 Nobelist in economics, Elinor Ostrom, can be seen as a refutation of Hardin's thesis.

For this meetup, please read the original article (all 9½ pages in the large print version), and also the Wikipedia entry. The Wikipedia page is a mixed bag, but provides some context and interesting links (the "comedy" of the commons; TotC explained using smurfs).

I've also attached a short NotebookLM summary of Ostrom's relevant work.

https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/tragedy_of_the_commons.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11r_QC5s8PG0mZ6r51Hd8BOX4ichclnxf/view?usp=sharing

See you Saturday - thanks to Kenn for the new location!