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This cogent­ly argued book deals with the prob­lem of how peo­ple man­age com­monly held prop­erty where dis­crete sub­di­vi­sion into indi­vid­ual own­er­ship or man­age­ment is not prac­ti­cal, or not desired. Exam­ples of such sit­u­a­tions are fish­ing grounds, joint pas­turage, rota­tional usufruct, and pro­duc­tive forests, but there are numer­ous oth­ers. Much non­sense has been writ­ten on this sub­ject, and Ostrom clears the air with a dis­ci­plined analy­sis. Unlike most of the peo­ple who have pon­tif­i­cated on the top­ic, she has stud­ied spe­cific, real-life instances in great detail. She begins by describ­ing how var­i­ous dubi­ous and unproven notions, such as Gar­rett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Com­mons” [see above], have been used to advance a vari­ety of ide­o­log­i­cal agen­das, almost always end­ing up jus­ti­fy­ing mas­sive inter­fer­ence and expro­pri­a­tion by the big and pow­er­ful. For exam­ple, the “Tragedy of the Com­mons” gim­mick was used by bureau­cratic cen­tral­ists to jus­tify state con­trol of all resources, and by Neo­con­ser­v­a­tives to jus­tify “pri­va­ti­za­tion” (the seizure and hand­ing over of local­ly owned resources to vast, baro­nial cor­po­rate bod­ies). I live in a coun­try that was pop­u­lated, in great num­bers, by immi­grant Scot­tish high­landers who had been dri­ven off their own lands by Enclo­sure, an ear­ly incar­na­tion of this kind of clap­trap, so it’s easy for me to appre­ci­ate her insights. Ostrom points out that there is no evi­dence that there is any nec­es­sary “tragedy of the com­mons”, that the world abounds with exam­ples of effec­tive col­lab­o­ra­tive con­trol of resources on the local lev­el, and that the argu­ments pre­sented have lit­tle basis in expe­ri­ence, are full of self-con­tra­dic­tion and over­look fun­da­men­tal eco­nomic facts. The book is an impor­tant intel­lec­tual resource for all of us involved in the bat­tle against Big Power.

It’s hard to account for the wide­spread influ­ence of this arti­cle, pub­lished inSci­encein 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). Read more »

A few years ago, while stay­ing in Prague, my friend Fil­ip Marek hand­ed me a copy of Philip Pullman’s North­ern Lights(the orig­i­nal British title, which was changed to The Gold­en Com­passin North Amer­ica). He asked if it was good enough to trans­late into Czech. I was delight­ed with it. It was fresh in its approach and imagery, ele­gantly writ­ten, and would fas­ci­nate both chil­dren and adults. How­ever, I fool­ishly put off read­ing the two oth­er books in the tril­ogy until see­ing the recent film remind­ed me to. Read more »