Communal Property and the Tragedy of the Commons
This paper examines human behavior toward communal property through the lens of Hardin's (1968) tragedy of the commons. It argues that individuals, acting as rational profit-maximizers, systematically deplete shared resources because the true costs of their actions are not reflected in market prices or personal decision-making. Drawing on Feeny et al. (1990) and Durham (1991), the paper analyzes how externalities, lack of governance, and short-term thinking combine to accelerate the destruction of common resources such as clean air, ocean fisheries, and arable land. Case studies of automobile use and the Atlantic Bluefin tuna illustrate how both individual consumers and international bodies fail to act as effective stewards of the commons.
- Introduction: Human Behavior and Communal Property: Framing the problem of eroding common resources
- The Tragedy of the Commons Explained: Hardin's theory, rationality, and externalities
- Externalities and the Automobile: Car use as a case study in hidden costs
- Governance Failures and the Commons: Why international bodies fail to protect shared resources
- Short-Term Thinking and Irrational Behavior: How ignorance and short-termism accelerate depletion
- Finite Resources and the Failure of Constraint: The cognitive inability to imagine resource scarcity
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What makes this paper effective
- It grounds abstract economic concepts — externalities, rational choice, subtractability — in concrete, relatable examples such as driving an automobile and the Atlantic Bluefin tuna fishery, making the argument accessible without sacrificing analytical depth.
- It integrates multiple scholarly sources (Hardin, Feeny et al., Durham) coherently rather than treating them as isolated points, building a layered explanation of why commons tragedies persist.
- The paper identifies two distinct cognitive failures driving the problem — failure to internalize true costs and failure to conceive of finite resources — giving the argument a clear structural payoff at the end.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of theoretical framing followed by applied case analysis. Each theoretical claim (rational self-interest, excludability, short-termism) is immediately illustrated with a real-world case, showing how to move fluidly between concept and evidence without losing argumentative momentum.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by establishing the central problem and theoretical framework (Hardin's tragedy of the commons), then expands the theory using Feeny et al.'s concepts of excludability and subtractability. It applies the framework to two case studies — automobile use and the Atlantic Bluefin tuna — before concluding with a two-part diagnosis of the psychological and cognitive failures that perpetuate commons tragedies.
Introduction: Human Behavior and Communal Property
Human behavior with respect to communal property is a critical issue of our time. The individual profit-maximizing activities of each person all contribute to the erosion of critical common resources. There are a number of perspectives that help to explain why this occurs.
The Tragedy of the Commons Explained
The tragedy of the commons explains this phenomenon. Hardin (1968) notes that individuals seek to maximize their outcomes — whether wealth or utility. In either case, such behavior is strictly oriented to one's own personal well-being. The concept of perfect rationality is applied only in a narcissistic context. This is true even in collectivist societies, because such societies seldom view the human race as the collective unit. Thus, nobody makes their decisions with the good of the entire species in mind.
The tragedy is that the true cost of things is not reflected in our decision-making. In economics, the relevant concept is externalities, which includes phenomena such as pollution. Pollution results from individual decisions but affects everybody, perfectly illustrating the tragedy of the commons. Where the cost of some outcome is not priced into the action — or is priced in a way that people do not understand — humans will be unable to make the fully rational, informed decision.
Externalities and the Automobile
Consider the case of the automobile. People decide to drive because it is the most cost-effective means of transportation in many situations. It is so cheap that most people rarely stop to consider whether using their car even makes sense for a given trip. The price of gasoline does not account for pollution to the planet, and the cost of roads has been absorbed into taxes. Thus, people are not making a rational decision based on a full understanding of all costs when they choose to drive. Many of those costs are externalities — commons that we are all consuming at a much faster rate than we should be.
References
Durham, W. H. (1991). Neutrality and opposition: From cultural reason to cannibalism. In possession of the author.
Feeny, D., Berkes, F., McCay, B., & Acheson, J. (1990). The tragedy of the commons: Twenty-two years later. Human Ecology, 18(1), 1–19.
Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162, 1243–1248.
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