The Village That Counted Its Cows

00:00A pasture open to all

Picture a pasture open to all. That's the instruction, almost word for word, in one of the most cited essays of the twentieth century. A handful of herders share it. Each one asks himself a simple question: should I add one more cow? If he does, he gets all the milk and meat from that cow. The cost, a little less grass for everyone, gets split among all of them. So the math always says yes. And it says yes to every herder, at the same time, until there's no grass left. [pause] The essay is Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons," published in *Science* in December 1968, and its most famous lines go like this: "Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all." [pause] [casually] Morning, it's Qing. If you've ever heard someone explain overfishing, or traffic, or why the office fridge is a disaster, you've probably heard this pasture, even if nobody said Hardin's name. It has become one of those ideas that feels less like a claim and more like a law of nature. So today I want to do two things. Read what Hardin's essay actually argues, which is not quite what people remember. And then go to a real pasture, in a real village in the Swiss Alps, where people had been grazing cows on common land for more than four hundred years by the time Hardin wrote that it couldn't be done.

01:53What the essay was really about

The first surprise is that the essay is barely about cows. Hardin was a biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his real subject was population. The summary printed at the top says it plainly: the population problem has no technical solution, and it requires a fundamental extension in morality. The pasture is a parable, and he didn't invent it. He borrowed it, with credit, from an Oxford economist named William Forster Lloyd, who used grazing on common land to make a point about population in 1833. [pause] Once you know that, the rest of the essay reads differently. Hardin's commons isn't just grass, or the ocean, or the air. It's the right to have children, in a world where, as he saw it, families didn't bear the full cost of their size. One of his section headings is four words long: "Freedom to Breed Is Intolerable." And his answer to any commons is blunt. Either you turn it into private property, or you need what he called "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon." He knew this would sound harsh. He wrote that the alternative was "too horrifying to contemplate," and then: "Injustice is preferable to total ruin." [pause] So the essay most people know as a neutral piece of economics was, in its own time, an argument for coercive population control, built on a story about cows. That doesn't make the cow story wrong by itself. A bad conclusion can sit on top of a good model. But it does raise a question nobody asked for a long time: is the cow story true? Did shared pastures actually end the way Hardin said they had to?

03:49Törbel

Törbel is a village of a few hundred people on a steep slope in the Valais, in southern Switzerland. In the 1970s an American anthropologist named Robert Netting spent years there going through village records, some of them centuries old, and the picture he found is almost exactly Hardin's setup. The villagers own their small hay meadows and gardens privately. But the high summer pasture, the alp, and the forests above the village, are held in common. Every family sends cows up there in summer. By Hardin's logic, that alp should have been grazed to dirt long ago. [pause] It wasn't. The village records show the boundaries of the common land being fixed as early as 1507. And in 1517 the community adopted a rule that's so simple you could miss how clever it is: no one may send more cows to the alp than he can feed through the winter. [pause] [slowly, thoughtfully] Think about what that rule does. The danger in Hardin's pasture is the cow you add because the grass looks free. In Törbel, the limit on the free summer grass is tied to something private and hard to fake: the hay in your own barn. If you want another cow on the common pasture, you need the meadow and the work to keep her alive through a Valais winter, and everyone in a village that size can see roughly how much hay you've got. The rule checks itself. And it wasn't left to good intentions. The village had officials to enforce the grazing rules and could fine people who broke them, and the community met to set how many cows the alp could carry. [pause] Netting's work became the opening case in a book that, twenty-two years after Hardin, changed how economists talk about all of this.

05:45Thursday at noon

That book is *Governing the Commons*, published in 1990 by Elinor Ostrom. She wasn't trained as an economist. She was a political scientist at Indiana University, and her method was the opposite of Hardin's. He started with a model and reasoned about where it had to lead. She started with cases, hundreds of them, and asked which shared resources had lasted a long time and which had collapsed, and what separated the two. [pause] Some of her cases are old enough to be startling. In Japan, villages like Hirano, Nagaike and Yamanaka managed their common mountain forests and meadows for centuries, with rules about who could cut what, and when, and with village patrols to catch people breaking them. And in Valencia, in Spain, the farmers of the irrigated plain around the city share water from a set of old canals. Disputes about that water go to a court that still meets every Thursday at noon, outside the Apostles' Door of the cathedral. Eight judges, one for each main canal, elected by the farmers themselves. Cases are heard out loud, in Valencian, usually in a few minutes. No lawyers, no written record, and no appeal. Historians argue about exactly how old it is, but it already shows up in the city's laws in the thirteenth century. [pause] These aren't stories of saintly people. Ostrom's cases are full of people taking more water than their turn, or cutting wood they're not supposed to. That's why the rules exist. What these places have is not trust. They have a way of making cheating visible, and cheap to deal with, and of letting the people who live with the rules be the ones who change them.

07:43What the lasting ones had in common

When Ostrom lined up the commons that lasted against the ones that failed, she found a short list of features the survivors tended to share. I'll give you the gist, because the list itself is the most portable thing in this whole story. The boundaries are clear: you know who's in and who's out. The rules fit the place, like the winter hay rule fits an Alpine village. The people who use the resource get a say in making and changing the rules. Someone watches, and the watchers answer to the users. Punishments start small and grow, so a first slip doesn't end in exile. There's a quick, cheap way to settle fights, like a court that meets on Thursday. And the outside authorities, the state, the king, the province, leave the arrangement alone, or at least don't wreck it. [pause] She also tested the idea in the lab. In 1992, with James Walker and Roy Gardner, she published a set of experiments with a title borrowed from Thomas Hobbes, "Covenants With and Without a Sword." Groups played a game where each person could take from a shared pool, and taking too much ruined it for everyone, exactly like Hardin's pasture. When people couldn't talk to each other, they overused the pool, the way the model predicts. When they could talk, even with no way of enforcing anything, they did much better. And when they could talk and also had a way to punish each other, they did better still. [pause] In 2009 she shared the Nobel Prize in economics, the first woman ever to win it. And the line of research she'd built pointed at a hidden assumption inside Hardin's parable. His herders never speak. They each sit alone with their arithmetic. Real herders live in the same village, go to the same church, and see each other's barns.

09:48Hardin's own phrase

Here's the part I like most. Go back to Hardin's solution: "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon." He seems to have pictured that as either private property or a government stepping in. But read the phrase again, and then think about Törbel in 1517, or the farmers in Valencia electing their own water judges. That is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon. Those villages did exactly what Hardin said had to be done. They just did it themselves, without a central government and without dividing up the pasture. His error wasn't in the phrase. It was in assuming the people inside the commons couldn't be the ones to agree. [pause] Hardin came close to saying this himself. Thirty years later, in 1998, he wrote a follow-up in *Science*, and he admitted that the biggest flaw in the original essay was a missing word. The title, he said, should have been about the *unmanaged* commons. A pasture that truly is "open to all," with no rules and no one counting, can be ruined. A managed commons is another story. [pause] There's a historical irony underneath this too. The English common pastures that Lloyd and Hardin had in mind were mostly not open to all. Historians like Susan Jane Buck Cox pointed out in the 1980s that rights to graze on them were limited to particular households, often with set numbers of animals. In other words, the real English commons looked a lot more like Törbel than like the parable.

11:33Can they see each other?

None of this means Hardin's logic is useless. Ostrom herself warned against treating her findings as a cure-all. Her design features work best where a group is small enough to know each other, the resource has edges, and cheating can be seen. The hardest commons today don't look like that. The atmosphere has no boundary. The open ocean has no village. You can't see the hay in a stranger's barn on the other side of the planet. When people use the tragedy of the commons to talk about climate or fisheries in international waters, they're on firmer ground than when they use it to talk about a neighborhood garden. [pause] So here's what I'd carry away from rereading both of them. When someone says "tragedy of the commons" as if it ends the conversation, it's worth asking a few concrete questions. Can the people using this thing see each other? Can they talk? Do they get a say in the rules? Is there a cheap way to catch and settle cheating? If the answers are mostly yes, the tragedy isn't a law of nature. It's a sign that one of those pieces is missing, and pieces can be built. [pause] In Valencia, on Thursday at noon, eight farmers in black smocks still sit down in front of the cathedral door, and a bailiff calls out for anyone with a complaint about the water. Many weeks, no one comes forward. [casually] That's today's reading. Have a good morning, and talk soon.