In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote an influential paper named “The Tragedy of the Commons”. It was published in Science and was kind of a big deal. The paper was about the problem of common resources that can be rationally over-used by individuals such that the resources are destroyed – making everyone worse off. The general idea is a great insight and we can see examples everywhere. People being loud in public spaces, odiferous foods microwaved in the breakroom, spoiled food that remains in the refrigerator. These are relatively innocuous. But more substantial parallels include dumping waste into common water sources, overfishing/hunting, or over-harvesting trees or scavenging in common forests.
The Original Problem
Harden was specifically concerned with human overpopulation. He wrote in the same vein as Paul Ehrlich, who published “The Population Bomb” in the same year. Harden explains that the universe, and earth specifically, only has so much matter and carrying capacity for humans. He left the limiting constraint open. Maybe there would be inadequate clean air, water, nutritious food, etc. The specific inadequacy doesn’t matter, they are all due to the finiteness of our world.
From Hardin’s perspective, there was no natural prophylactic that would prevent us from bumping into the natural and horrifying constraint that inadequate resources would impose. He thought that people would continue to reproduce at greater than replacement rates and death would ensue. He also astutely pointed out that if good people agree to limit their number of offspring, then we will be left with only bad people reproducing. They’d place everyone at risk with their irresponsible, though entirely rational, folly. He concludes that the only hope for humanity is a mutual consent to a coercive entity that would prevent this commons problem of over-reproduction.
The Typical Response and its Shortcoming
The most popular argument against Harden comes from Julian Simon, who argued that humans are the source of innovation and ingenuity and that more humans implies more innovation. Against Paul Ehrlich, Simon famously bet that commodity prices would fall over the course of the 1980s, asserting that human ingenuity would increase abundance.
Putting the wager aside, Simon’s idea that humans figure out ways to make resources more accessible is entirely correct – except for when it isn’t. The Malthusian booms and busts in population and persistent subsistent income levels did occur historically. But it’s been a long time since then. For a few hundred years we’ve had increasing standards of living *and* an increasing population. There are exceptions. There’s been starvation in Venezuela, Cuba, Ethiopia, China, North Korea, and Ukraine. These countries were plenty populous with plenty of human minds to tackle the challenges of scarcity. More people = more abundance isn’t exactly what Julian Simon said, but it’s how a lot of people answer Hardin and Ehrlich’s predictions.
