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It’s hard to account for the wide­spread influ­ence of this arti­cle, pub­lished in Sci­ence in 1968. It’s a poor­ly argued jum­ble of unques­tioned clichés and slip­shod rea­son­ing. Few, now, seem to be aware of the orig­i­nal intent of the arti­cle, which was to jus­tify coer­cive state con­trol of child­birth. With such spe­cious premis­es as “the moral­ity of an act is a func­tion of the state of the sys­tem at the time it is per­formed’ [p.1245 — he took it from Joseph Fletcher’s Sit­u­a­tion Ethics, then mis­ap­plied it], Hardin urged over­whelm­ing state pow­er to reg­u­late breed­ing, cit­ing the threat of “the fam­ily, the reli­gion, the race, or the class… that adopts over­breed­ing as a pol­icy to secure its own aggran­dize­ment”. This is just the old “yel­low per­il” and ter­ror of the low­er class­es of the Vic­to­rian age, dust­ed off and restat­ed in 1960’s pseu­do­sci­en­tific guise. Hardin assert­ed that the pres­ence of “the wel­fare state” and devel­oped economies would ensure an unstop­pable fecun­dity among such unde­sir­ables. Yet, in 1968, it was already evi­dent to all pro­fes­sional demog­ra­phers that that devel­oped economies with infra­struc­tures of social ser­vices invari­ably lev­eled off their birthrates (this is why Europe and Amer­ica now can­not replace their pop­u­la­tions with­out immigration).

The key to his argu­ment was what he called “the tragedy of the com­mons”, a phrase which sub­se­quently found its way into jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for a vari­ety of ide­o­log­i­cal trends. He claimed that there was a unal­ter­able prin­ci­ple by which a “ratio­nal herds­man” would auto­mat­i­cally seek to max­i­mize his own graz­ing, thus inevitably lead­ing to over­graz­ing of the whole pas­ture. He takes it for grant­ed that medieval com­mon pas­turage was over­grazed — though I know of no evi­dence show­ing this. If medieval com­mons had been made so worth­less, why were the rich so eager to expro­pri­ate them for them­selves, in the bru­tally vio­lent process known as “enclo­sure”?

Per­haps the key to the article’s suc­cess is Hardin’s con­stant use of the word “ratio­nal”, bor­rowed in a spe­cial usage from game the­ory, and then employed in an arbi­trary way which bears no resem­blance to any com­mon-sense use of the word “ratio­nal”. Peo­ple are always intrigued and delight­ed by what they inter­pret as “ironies” or “para­doxes” in eco­nom­ics, soci­ol­ogy, or psy­chol­ogy. It seems espe­cially deli­cious to con­tem­plate a “para­dox” where “ratio­nal­ity” cre­ates chaos or dis­as­ter by some sup­posed neces­sity, and that is prob­a­bly why the essay’s argu­ments have been repli­cated in so many oth­er con­texts. But the appear­ance of such “para­doxes” does not indi­cate sophis­ti­ca­tion — it sim­ply marks the pres­ence of slop­py think­ing. Para­doxes are the result of con­fu­sion, inat­ten­tion, or inad­e­quacy in the observ­er. They do not exist in the real world. Hardin’s fic­tional shep­herds exhib­it only the “ratio­nal­ity” of a hero­in addict decid­ing on a sec­ond-by-sec­ond basis whether to inject him­self. No real shep­herd ever thought or behaved in the way that Hardin con­sid­ers “inevitable”. Trust me in this: I was trained pro­fes­sion­ally as a shep­herd. No real life shep­herd was ever as stu­pid as Hardin’s imag­i­nary ones.

To see how “the tragedy of the com­mons” has been employed by a vari­ety of ide­o­logues to advance their par­tic­u­lar polit­i­cal agen­das, I refer you to a bril­liant piece of analy­sis of the eco­nom­ics of “com­mons” by Eli­nor Ostrom [item 15500].