“Tragedy of the Commons” — What It Is and How To Solve It
A system is an interconnected set of people/things/ideas that is organized in a way that achieves something. We are surrounded by systems: our digestive systems, our bodies overall, schools, our democracy, international trade, a forest ecosystem, global climate.
When systems stop working, there are a handful of predictable ways in which they breakdown. Fortunately, because these breakdowns are so common, there are well-known strategies for addressing them. Thus, if you can learn to spot the underlying systemic pattern, you’ll immediately have a set of powerful tools at your disposal.
Tragedy of the Commons
At the beginning of the 1800s, England was still a rural, agricultural society. Most Britains depended on the land — either through farming or raising animals — for their livelihood.
Over hundreds of years, English villages had gradually developed a custom whereby herders could graze their cows on shared parcels of land called “commons.” The term “tragedy of the commons” originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who was interested in how herders shared this common land.
As with any scarce and finite resource, Lloyd reasoned that a given amount of land could only support a certain…
