Tragedy of the Commons... wrong?

[Formless]

So one of the blogs I read recently linked to this article in The New York Times:

The Non-Tragedy of the Commons
By John Tierney

The 2009 Nobel Prize for economics is a useful reminder of how easy it is for scientists to go wrong, especially when their mistake jibes with popular beliefs or political agendas.

Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University shared the prize for her research into the management of “commons,” which has been a buzzword among ecologists since Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” His fable about a common pasture that is ruined by overgrazing became one of the most-quoted articles ever published by that journal, and it served as a fundamental rationale for the expansion of national and international regulation of the environment. His fable was a useful illustration of a genuine public-policy problem — how do you manage a resource that doesn’t belong to anyone? — but there were a couple of big problems with the essay and its application.

First, Dr. Hardin himself misapplied the fable. Declaring that “overpopulation” was a tragedy of the commons, he warned that “freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.” He and others advocated a “lifeboat ethic” of denying food aid, even during emergencies, to poor countries with rapidly growing populations. But “overpopulation” was not even a theoretical example of the tragedy of the commons. Parents are not like the cattle owners who profit individually by adding cows to the pasture (while collectively destroying it). Parents, unlike the cattle owners, have to pay to feed and house and educate their children, and the high economic costs of children are one reason that birth rates have declined around the world — without any of the coercion discussed by Dr. Hardin and some other ecologists (like Paul Ehrlich).

The second problem arising from Dr. Hardin’s fable was the presumption that a commons needed to be regulated by national and international agencies. Dr. Hardin didn’t explicitly make that generalization in the essay — he noted that the tragedy could be avoided either by regulating the commons or by converting it to private property — but others in the environmental movement essentially drew that conclusion. Although some greens talked about the virtue of “acting locally,” major environmental groups lobbied in Washington for expanded federal authority, and they urged the rest of the world to follow the American and European example by creating national rules governing commons like forests and fisheries.

But too often those commons ended up in worse shape once they were put under the control of distant bureaucrats who lacked the expertise or the incentives to do the job properly. Dr. Hardin and his disciples had failed to appreciate how often the tragedy of the commons had been averted thanks to ingenious local institutions and customs. Dr. Ostrom won the Nobel for her work analyzing those local institutions. In an interview at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Dr. Ostrom discussed the damage that had been done by those who had supplanted the local institutions:

International donors and nongovernmental organizations, as well as national governments and charities, have often acted, under the banner of environmental conservation, in a way that has unwittingly destroyed the very social capital — shared relationship, norms, knowledge and understanding — that has been used by resource users to sustain the productivity of natural capital over the ages. The effort to preserve biodiversity should not lead to the destruction of institutional diversity. . . . These institutions are most in jeopardy when central government officials assume that they do not exist (or are not effective) simply because the government has not put them in place.

Another Nobel laureate economist, Vernon Smith, described her work in an interview with Ivan Osorio for the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

She’s looked at a huge number of commons problems in fisheries, grazing, water, fishing water rights, and stuff like that. She finds that the commons problem is solved by many of these institutions, but not all of them. Some of them cannot make it work. She’s interested in why some of them work and some of them don’t.

One example is the Swiss alpine cheese makers. They had a commons problem. They live very high, and they have a grazing commons for their cattle. They solved that problem in the year 1200 A.D. For about 800 years, these guys have had that problem solved. They have a simple rule: If you’ve got three cows, you can pasture those three cows in the commons if you carried them over from last winter. But you can’t bring new cows in just for the summer. It’s very costly to carry cows over to the winter—they need to be in barns and be heated, they have to be fed. [The cheese makers] tie the right to the commons to a private property right with the cows.

Letting cheese makers set their own rules is an example of what Dr. Ostrom calls polycentric governance. In the interview at the Mercatus Center, she explained the advantages of trusting locals:

The strength of polycentric governance systems is each of the subunits has considerable autonomy to experiment with diverse rules for a particular type of resource system and with different response capabilities to external shock. In experimenting with rule combinations within the smaller-scale units of a polycentric system, citizens and officials have access to local knowledge, obtain rapid feedback from their own policy changes, and can learn from the experience of other parallel units.

Here’s a paper by Dr. Ostrom on fisheries. Here’s a a report for PERC by Donald Leal that summarizes Dr. Ostrom’s research: “Her studies of well-managed, commonly-owned property show that well-defined boundaries, a strong community tradition, and absence of government interference can preserve resources.”

You read more about Dr. Ostrom’s work in these posts from David Bollier at Forbes.com, J.P. Freire at the Washington Examiner, Daniel and my colleague Catherine Rampell.

As Catherine notes, the comedian Larry David explains one way to avoid the tragedy of the commons in an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Mr. David discusses the tradition requiring guests at a party to refrain from eating too many hors d’oeuvres at once. After your first helping, he says, you have to wait 20 minutes and make sure that the food isn’t disappearing too quickly before you go back for seconds. Does that qualify as polycentric governance?

I was suspicious from the very instant I saw the title, if for no other reason than I'm sure there are a lot of Libertarian and Right wing assholes who would love to see us Greens and other environmentalists shut up and go away for ideological reasons. When they started talking about overpopulation my warning bells went off for real. While I can't agree with Dr. Hardin's solution for overpopulation on moral grounds, the blanket statement that it doesn't count as a valid example made me furious. Has the writer of this horseshit ever seen the numbers? Like it or not, the human population has skyrocketed in the last century, and is continuing to do so. His objection is based on essentially nitpicking a minor difference between the two situations compared by the analogy and hoping no one spots the fallacy.

The next thing that made me raise my eyebrows was the "small government" overtones when describing environmentalist lobbying. He never supports his claim that "often those commons ended up in worse shape once they were put under the control of distant bureaucrats" with specific examples or evidence, and he relies on us taking his appeal to authority for granted, even though the only specific evidence cited by either of those experts that local customs/traditions/policies are a superior solution is Swiss cheese makers from 1200 AD. How is this relevant to modern day Tragedies like overfishing and deforestation? Especially in places where there are no local customs or traditions to call upon, such as most of the United States? Also, it does not take into account fundamental changes in the nature of how the commons are now being exploited, namely the industrial scale at which resources are now being used. And even if they can be made to work, what prevents the federal government from being involved to ensure standards are met? That's quite a false dichotomy they've painted. I'm reminded of the health care debate where most on the Right seem to fear us going down the path the British went where the doctors are government employees rather than following the Canadian system where the government simply foots the bill and has a federal law that ensures that the setup chosen by the province follows a minimum standard of care.

Comfortingly though, reading the comments section seems to indicate that I'm not the only one who saw through this BS.

[Rawtooth]

Tierny is a moron. Economists readily accept that the Tragedy of the Commons can occur, I mean for fuck's sake, we run experiments to prove that point to classes of students. The entire point of Ostrom's work is that each situation has it's own best solution, which includes local traditions as well as government intervention. The Swiss are remarkable in that they made their cattle/grazing situation last for hundreds of years by themselves.

His discounting of environmental concerns is also brazenly stupid. Pollution is a well-known externality that is rarely, if ever, self-managed by those who produce the pollution.

In short, Tierny is an idiot who waves away the concerns of the Tragedy in a whole-sale manner, just like he accused his opposition of doing so by broadly applying it to every location.

[TheKwas]

I'm not sure who Tierny is or if he's an economist or journalist, but the main fault in the article is simply a misunderstanding of what the 'Tradegy of the Commons' is. The point of the fable isn't that everything must come under federal government control or privatised, but that the commons must have rules in place that prevent people acting on the perverse incentive to consume without considering the negative external on other people's consumption or the sustainability of the commons. This can be done by the federal government or by putting in place private property rules, but it doesn't always have to. Sometimes, the best way to regulate the commons are the ways that small communities have been regulating the commons for centuries according to their customs.

What Ostrom studied was basically how local and small communities have managed to set into place informal regulations that protected the commons, but without those informal regulations we would still have the Tragedy of the Commons. His own quote betrays him since it talks about her 'solving' the problem using polycentric governmence, not talking about how the problem doesn't exist.

He also strawman's the environmental movement, as many in the environmental movement will gladly rain praises on native peoples and their respect for the environment (David Suzuki for example).

[Samuel]

Parents are not like the cattle owners who profit individually by adding cows to the pasture (while collectively destroying it). Parents, unlike the cattle owners, have to pay to feed and house and educate their children, and the high economic costs of children are one reason that birth rates have declined around the world — without any of the coercion discussed by Dr. Hardin and some other ecologists (like Paul Ehrlich).

I might be a little sheltered, but I'm pretty sure people who are dirt poor don't get much of an education, get jammed together in small housing and send the kids to work. Birth rates have declined, but so have death rates (but even faster) meaning that population still increases. Personally, I am curious about how many people Earth can support, but most people object to emperically testing that so we try to get population growth to slow. Even a low growth rate gets to be a problem due to exponential growth.

[Junghalli]

I might be a little sheltered, but I'm pretty sure people who are dirt poor don't get much of an education, get jammed together in small housing and send the kids to work. Birth rates have declined, but so have death rates (but even faster) meaning that population still increases. Personally, I am curious about how many people Earth can support, but most people object to emperically testing that so we try to get population growth to slow. Even a low growth rate gets to be a problem due to exponential growth.

List of countries by population growth

There are quite a few that are in the zero or negative percentages, and the ones with the most growth look like mostly poor countries to me, or at least they're mostly in parts of the world I don't associate with high general wealth. The negative to zero population growth category is dominated by European countries.

Immigration and emigration could distort the list of course (I don't know whether they corrected for it).

[Surlethe]

The really neat thing about what Ostrom calls polygovernance, I think, is that it's essentially a form of government. I'll bet there's some insight there into how governing structures evolved in human social organizations - for instance, in some native American tribes, land and various items were considered private property, but large public works like irrigation were publicly organized. I'm sure the same was true in all proto-civilizations, and it has its roots (it would seem) in how bodies of people came up with agreements for regulating commons.

[K. A. Pital]

Community tradition can be a strong factor for small enterprises and small communes, but for modern industrial mega-capitalism? Are the journos trying to kid me or are they just spouting bullshit without even understanding the papers they reference? The authors never intended to say that absence of government regulation of large industrial capitalist organizations is the way to go.

Oh wait, the New York Times. Sorry I even posted.

[Vehrec]

Has the writer of this horseshit ever seen the numbers? Like it or not, the human population has skyrocketed in the last century, and is continuing to do so.

The population growth rate is declining - take a look at Surlethe's sig image where he mentions Malthus, and note that the line is leveling off near the top. Or this table from the UN ( http://esa.un.org/UNPP/index.asp?panel=2 select total fertility on left and world on right):

Code: Select all

Period     Total fertility
  1950-1955  4.92
  1955-1960  4.81
  1960-1965  4.91
  1965-1970  4.78
  1970-1975  4.32
  1975-1980  3.83
  1980-1985  3.61
  1985-1990  3.43
  1990-1995  3.08
  1995-2000  2.82
  2000-2005  2.67
  2005-2010  2.56
  2010-2015  2.49
  2015-2020  2.40
  2020-2025  2.30
  2025-2030  2.21
  2030-2035  2.15
  2035-2040  2.10
  2040-2045  2.06
  2045-2050  2.02

By the end of this century, the world population will be falling, just like how Europe, Canada, and even arguably America would all be falling right now if it wasn't for immigration. (The actual replacement rate is a little above 2.0, due to early death.)

Keep in mind, these projections assume that some nations will continue their trajectory of transition despite limitations of resources, money and education. Wars, lack of resources or educators and the actions of other nations may all delay or prevent this.
Additionally, there will still be significant lagging growth of the population as it ages and the third World's pyramid shaped age structures become more like those of the first world. Today's children will themselves have children, and their parents will become grandparents, so population growth would continue for decades even if every nation in the world enforced an absolute two child limit.

This obviously doesn't dispute that overpopulation would be a humanitarian disaster or that The New York Times is a worthless rag, but if you look at the numbers, it is hard to get really concerned about it in the long term. Indeed, looking at the numbers, the bigger long term problem will be keeping our populations high enough to maintain our high technology economies! (Which Europe is facing today.)

Well, those societies can crib intelligent members of less advanced ones like the US is doing, or maybe invest in artificial population stabilization measures such as state sponsored reproduction. This might be a large impetuous to develop methods to bring a fetus to term without the involvement of women. Japan certainly would be interested in such technology, because of their extreme attitudes towards outsiders and their rapidly aging population.

[Axiomatic]

Now I'm wondering what the Tragedy of the...what would be the inverse of the commons? I guess I'm wondering what a Tragedy of the Aristos would look like.

[Darth Wong]

Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University shared the prize for her research into the management of “commons,” which has been a buzzword among ecologists since Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” His fable about a common pasture that is ruined by overgrazing became one of the most-quoted articles ever published by that journal, and it served as a fundamental rationale for the expansion of national and international regulation of the environment. His fable was a useful illustration of a genuine public-policy problem — how do you manage a resource that doesn’t belong to anyone? — but there were a couple of big problems with the essay and its application.

First, Dr. Hardin himself misapplied the fable. Declaring that “overpopulation” was a tragedy of the commons, he warned that “freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.” He and others advocated a “lifeboat ethic” of denying food aid, even during emergencies, to poor countries with rapidly growing populations. But “overpopulation” was not even a theoretical example of the tragedy of the commons. Parents are not like the cattle owners who profit individually by adding cows to the pasture (while collectively destroying it). Parents, unlike the cattle owners, have to pay to feed and house and educate their children, and the high economic costs of children are one reason that birth rates have declined around the world — without any of the coercion discussed by Dr. Hardin and some other ecologists (like Paul Ehrlich).

Is this guy completely deluded? The Congo has five times the birth rate of Canada. Yes, birth rates have declined around the world ... in wealthy nations. In poor nations, birth rates are as high as ever. Population growth rates are declining, but that's not because of declining birth rates. It's because of increasing death rates, due to spiraling poverty and violence. That is hardly a rebuttal of the idea that overpopulation can be considered a tragedy of the commons. People are overbreeding in precisely the parts of the world which can least bear it.

The second problem arising from Dr. Hardin’s fable was the presumption that a commons needed to be regulated by national and international agencies. Dr. Hardin didn’t explicitly make that generalization in the essay — he noted that the tragedy could be avoided either by regulating the commons or by converting it to private property — but others in the environmental movement essentially drew that conclusion. Although some greens talked about the virtue of “acting locally,” major environmental groups lobbied in Washington for expanded federal authority, and they urged the rest of the world to follow the American and European example by creating national rules governing commons like forests and fisheries.

So Dr. Hardin's argument is broken because of something he never actually said, but which "others in the environmental movement" have said? This is exactly the same type of argument which is used against global warming, where they try to attack scientific organizations by attacking falsehoods or exaggerations in what other people (such as ill-informed reporters or activists) have been saying. It's a classic "guilt by association" fallacy.

But too often those commons ended up in worse shape once they were put under the control of distant bureaucrats who lacked the expertise or the incentives to do the job properly. Dr. Hardin and his disciples had failed to appreciate how often the tragedy of the commons had been averted thanks to ingenious local institutions and customs. Dr. Ostrom won the Nobel for her work analyzing those local institutions. In an interview at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Dr. Ostrom discussed the damage that had been done by those who had supplanted the local institutions:

International donors and nongovernmental organizations, as well as national governments and charities, have often acted, under the banner of environmental conservation, in a way that has unwittingly destroyed the very social capital — shared relationship, norms, knowledge and understanding — that has been used by resource users to sustain the productivity of natural capital over the ages. The effort to preserve biodiversity should not lead to the destruction of institutional diversity. . . . These institutions are most in jeopardy when central government officials assume that they do not exist (or are not effective) simply because the government has not put them in place.

So it's possible for the people in charge of solving a problem to mismanage it. How the hell does this disprove the idea of the tragedy of the commons? It's completely irrelevant! The people at FEMA horribly mismanaged the reaction to Hurricane Katrina. Does this mean that the tragedy of natural disasters is also a myth? Or that hurricanes are not real? This argument is not just bad; it's horrifically bad. It's mostly composed of red herrings. I can smell the stench of rotting fish from here.

Another Nobel laureate economist, Vernon Smith, described her work in an interview with Ivan Osorio for the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

She’s looked at a huge number of commons problems in fisheries, grazing, water, fishing water rights, and stuff like that. She finds that the commons problem is solved by many of these institutions, but not all of them. Some of them cannot make it work. She’s interested in why some of them work and some of them don’t.

One example is the Swiss alpine cheese makers. They had a commons problem. They live very high, and they have a grazing commons for their cattle. They solved that problem in the year 1200 A.D. For about 800 years, these guys have had that problem solved. They have a simple rule: If you’ve got three cows, you can pasture those three cows in the commons if you carried them over from last winter. But you can’t bring new cows in just for the summer. It’s very costly to carry cows over to the winter—they need to be in barns and be heated, they have to be fed. [The cheese makers] tie the right to the commons to a private property right with the cows.

Letting cheese makers set their own rules is an example of what Dr. Ostrom calls polycentric governance.

And since the "tragedy of the commons" argument does not claim that such schemes would not work, this does not disprove anything. Government must step in where such schemes are not working, or where nobody is even trying them. Nothing about the effectiveness of self-regulation acts as a rebuttal to government regulation. Government wouldn't have to step into a lot of areas if self-regulation proved effective. You take that on a case by case basis, rather than preposterously attacking the whole idea of government regulation by holding up examples of successful self-regulation and ignoring examples of failures.

In the interview at the Mercatus Center, she explained the advantages of trusting locals:

The strength of polycentric governance systems is each of the subunits has considerable autonomy to experiment with diverse rules for a particular type of resource system and with different response capabilities to external shock. In experimenting with rule combinations within the smaller-scale units of a polycentric system, citizens and officials have access to local knowledge, obtain rapid feedback from their own policy changes, and can learn from the experience of other parallel units.

Here’s a paper by Dr. Ostrom on fisheries. Here’s a a report for PERC by Donald Leal that summarizes Dr. Ostrom’s research: “Her studies of well-managed, commonly-owned property show that well-defined boundaries, a strong community tradition, and absence of government interference can preserve resources.”

You read more about Dr. Ostrom’s work in these posts from David Bollier at Forbes.com, J.P. Freire at the Washington Examiner, Daniel and my colleague Catherine Rampell.

It's easy to find strengths of that system. It's also ridiculously easy to find a weakness: some people might simply choose to ignore those self-regulated rules. And who do you turn to when confronted with someone who ignores rules? Someone who is authorized to use coercive violent force to compel obedience. And who is that? Oh yeah ... the government.

As Catherine notes, the comedian Larry David explains one way to avoid the tragedy of the commons in an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Mr. David discusses the tradition requiring guests at a party to refrain from eating too many hors d’oeuvres at once. After your first helping, he says, you have to wait 20 minutes and make sure that the food isn’t disappearing too quickly before you go back for seconds. Does that qualify as polycentric governance?

Not if somebody barges in and steals all of your food. Then you run to the cops. That qualifies as real governance.

[K. A. Pital]

And who is that? Oh yeah ... the government.

Surlethe already nailed it. Asking for a "other type of government than THE government" is essentially just asking for a weaker government. The commune will act as a government of sorts, dispatching and ordering people around just like any government would.

Except it's tolerance bounds will be quite lower than those of a large national government, and when faced with an irresistible power from outside, like a large organization or simply a powerful and armed thuggish individual, the commune will fail where a normal government wouldn't have folded.

Like I said, its amazing this can even pass as journalism. The claim that birth rates have declined "around the world" is really funny. It's kinda like that claim I read in a Stalin-era textbook that said "The population of collectivized cattle is growing along with private populations". The former was true but the latter was obviously wrong, since private cattle populations collapsed. This is a generalization that is meant to obscure the distinction and the true meaning of process, or in other words a squeamy, pathetic lie.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Period Total fertility
1950-1955 4.92
1955-1960 4.81
1960-1965 4.91
1965-1970 4.78
1970-1975 4.32
1975-1980 3.83
1980-1985 3.61
1985-1990 3.43
1990-1995 3.08
1995-2000 2.82
2000-2005 2.67
2005-2010 2.56
2010-2015 2.49
2015-2020 2.40
2020-2025 2.30
2025-2030 2.21
2030-2035 2.15
2035-2040 2.10
2040-2045 2.06
2045-2050 2.02

This is the mean. It does not incorporate variance. What this basically means is that yes, the population is leveling off at carrying capacity as per the Euler-Lotka equation. However what this will look like in an actual population is another matter. First off, we do not want to be at carrying capacity as it will mean that the entire biosphere will be suborned to our needs. There will not be Nature left.
Second: The developed world is going to experience a Death of Birth, with low mortality rates but equally low birth rates. Why? lack of resources and a sufficiently high standard of living that people have fewer children and defer reproduction until later ages, thus decreasing fecundity and increasing generation time. Birth rates will equal death rates, but people will be OK. They will however eat more of the resources that could go to forestall the awefulness of what will become the third world.

The developing countries will experience even more disease and starvation mediated attrition, as short life expectancies and high juvenile mortality rates induce early reproduction and frequent reproduction. Resources get stretched thin by the increased number of juveniles and decreased numbers of adults combined with consumption by Developed countries, the age structure will become distinctly obtuse, and the poor will be in for a world of hurt.

China is a special case. Its population will collapse under an inverted age structure.

[K. A. Pital]

So, is the disrepancy of fertility between rich and poor nations rising, or contracting? I.e. are all nations experiencing an absolute fertility decline, or are some impacting the mean more than others?

[Alyrium Denryle]

So, is the disrepancy of fertility between rich and poor nations rising, or contracting? I.e. are all nations experiencing an absolute fertility decline, or are some impacting the mean more than others?

I am not sure, I would need to look at the numbers for all nations through time, or at least a representative sample. Problem is to build a good Life Table and run the numbers to determine that, I would need data that a lot of nations dont collect.

[Seggybop]

By the end of this century, the world population will be falling, just like how Europe, Canada, and even arguably America would all be falling right now if it wasn't for immigration. (The actual replacement rate is a little above 2.0, due to early death.)

This obviously doesn't dispute that overpopulation would be a humanitarian disaster or that The New York Times is a worthless rag, but if you look at the numbers, it is hard to get really concerned about it in the long term. Indeed, looking at the numbers, the bigger long term problem will be keeping our populations high enough to maintain our high technology economies! (Which Europe is facing today.)

Forgive me for pulling this OT even more, but given that it appears world population is indeed leveling off, how can we successfully argue for space colonization initiatives like you're displaying in your signature? There's always the long term threat of a global catastrophe that will wipe out humanity without warning, but humans in general are too shortsighted to expend the vast resources necessary to actually populate space without near-term benefit.

[Junghalli]

Forgive me for pulling this OT even more, but given that it appears world population is indeed leveling off, how can we successfully argue for space colonization initiatives like you're displaying in your signature? There's always the long term threat of a global catastrophe that will wipe out humanity without warning, but humans in general are too shortsighted to expend the vast resources necessary to actually populate space without near-term benefit.

Bigger, better sattelites built with asteroid resources look to me like the surest bet for getting economic benefit from space. But really, as far as space colonization goes my bet is it won't happen in earnest until technology becomes good enough that it's feasible for private enthusiasts to do it at an economic loss. My guess is this will happen sometime around the development of human-plus AGI and the point of effective economic postscarcity.

[Vehrec]

By the end of this century, the world population will be falling, just like how Europe, Canada, and even arguably America would all be falling right now if it wasn't for immigration. (The actual replacement rate is a little above 2.0, due to early death.)

This obviously doesn't dispute that overpopulation would be a humanitarian disaster or that The New York Times is a worthless rag, but if you look at the numbers, it is hard to get really concerned about it in the long term. Indeed, looking at the numbers, the bigger long term problem will be keeping our populations high enough to maintain our high technology economies! (Which Europe is facing today.)

Forgive me for pulling this OT even more, but given that it appears world population is indeed leveling off, how can we successfully argue for space colonization initiatives like you're displaying in your signature? There's always the long term threat of a global catastrophe that will wipe out humanity without warning, but humans in general are too shortsighted to expend the vast resources necessary to actually populate space without near-term benefit.

Well, when it comes to powering and feeding the third world, this might be what we need to do. China attempting to give millk to its children results in a surge in German milk prices as demand skyrockets today. What happens when a billion Indians ask for a pork chop a week? A couple slices of bacon every day? Hot running water in every village? Or how about air conditioning for all of Africa? These are all going to be things that people will start demanding and the resources will need to come from somewhere. As Alyrium said, we don't want to hit the environment's carrying capacity-so we'll need to add onto the environment.

[Alyrium Denryle]

and the point of effective economic postscarcity.

Which will never happen on this planet. Flat out. Economic growth requires resources, resources requires land, natural processes, materials. Economic Scarcity is the concept that these things are limited, and this is by definition true. Economic post-scarcity is a nerds wet-dream.

[Junghalli]

Which will never happen on this planet. Flat out. Economic growth requires resources, resources requires land, natural processes, materials. Economic Scarcity is the concept that these things are limited, and this is by definition true. Economic post-scarcity is a nerds wet-dream.

Which is why I don't actually like the term "postscarcity", and like to amend it with "effective". Literal postscarcity is impossible without magic but society getting wealthy enough that virtually any human desire in a population the size of that of present day Earth is quite feasible with access to the resources of the solar system.

Total mass of the asteroid belt is estimated at 3.6 X 10^18 tons (ref).

Assuming elemental composition comparable to a C-type asteroid (ref)

Iron = 7.92 X 10^17 tons
Carbon (graphite) = 5.79 X 10^16 tons
Nickel = 4.68 X 10^16 tons
Aluminum = 3.528 X 10^16 tons
Manganese = 1 X 10^16 tons
Titanium = 1.98 X 10^15 tons
Copper = 3.96 X 10^14 tons
Tin = 4.32 X 10^12 tons
Platinum = 3.6 X 10^12 tons
Uranium = 3.6 X 10^10 tons

That's enough to give each person on Earth today over 50,000 tons of copper and 5 tons of uranium, for example. And unlike on Earth much of it is in the form of small rocks that can be easily disassembled and fully exploited, instead of being almost all either buried under many miles of solid crust (which we can hardly ruthlessly totally strip-mine as we sort of live on it) or totally inaccessible in a sea of molten rock and metal. This isn't counting the energy resources of being able to throw up huge constellations of power sattelites and beam the power to Earth via microwaves (see here for a description of the concept). If you have access to the resources of the solar system and robot labor that's as capable as humans you can have a large population living in ridiculous wealth. And if the resources of the solar system ever do start to run thin there are a couple of thousand more in the next 50 light years.

Of course, this is somewhat off-topic since we were discussing the question of when large space colonization would become feasible. The problem with getting into space is IIRC not so much a question of the raw resources involved so much as the R&D and manufacturing costs of the complex expensive spacecraft; a problem that should be readily receptive to assault by superhuman AGI combined with cheap robot labor (the latter would logically go hand in hand with the former) even without a massive increase in our resource base.

[Xuenay]

Now I'm wondering what the Tragedy of the...what would be the inverse of the commons? I guess I'm wondering what a Tragedy of the Aristos would look like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons