Kermit Snelson on Wed, 16 Jan 2002 04:12:02 +0100 (CET) |
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[Nettime-bold] RE: <nettime> Don't Fuck with Democracy. |
> I just wondered where the phrase 'tragedy of the commons' came > from and what this phrase was doing in your conference call. > It sounds like dangerous right wing revisionism in new media > suited to the undemocratic agenda of the National Security State. Fear not. The phrase "tragedy of the commons" was introduced in 1968 by biologist Garrett Hardin in an article for the US journal _Science_, in which he argued that our current legal definition of private property encourages environmental pollution. The article was influential, and the phrase has since become somewhat of a term of art among economists. Economists, by the way, call things like pollution "negative externalities" should anyone wish to Google on the subject. A similar and related economic commonplace is Gresham's Law, which states that "bad money drives out good money." In his more recent work [2], Hardin has deployed this idea against the idea of laissez faire and demonstrates that such philosophy can lead to undesirable market failures. The "tragedy of the commons" idea has proven troublesome to arguments in favor of GPL-like software licenses, just as Gresham's Law might also pose a problem for "open money" arguments. Since the nettime community is fortunate to have experts on both subjects, I'd enjoy reading an analysis of Hardin's arguments here (but let's first rename the thread ;)) Kermit Snelson Notes: [1] http://dieoff.org/page95.htm [2] http://www.iapm.org/newsletters/april99.html _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold