[Nettime-bold] RE: <nettime> Don't Fuck with Democracy.

["Kermit Snelson" <ksnelson@subjectivity.com>]

> 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