The hard work of rebuilding a post-imperial America, as I
suggested in last week’s post, is going to require the recovery or reinvention
of many of the things this nation chucked into the dumpster with whoops of glee
as it took off running in pursuit of its imperial ambitions. The basic skills
of democratic process are among the things on that list; so, as I suggested
last month, are the even more basic skills of learning and thinking that
undergird the practice of democracy.
There are plenty of
ideas about politics and society in circulation on the fringes of today’s
American dialogue, to be sure. I’d like
to suggest, though, that there’s a point to reviving an older, pre-imperial
vision of what government can do, and ought to do, in the America of the future. A political system that envisions its role as
holding an open space in which citizens can pursue their own dreams and
experiment with their own lives is inherently likely to be better at dissensus
than more regimented alternatives, whether those come from the left or the
right—and dissensus, to return to a central theme of this blog, is the best
strategy we’ve got as we move into a future where nobody can be sure of having
the right answers.
All that remains crucial. Still, it so happens that a
remarkably large number of the other things that will need to be put back in
place are all variations of a common theme.
What’s more, it’s a straightforward theme—or, more precisely, would be
straightforward if so many people these days weren’t busy trying to pretend
that the concept at its center either doesn’t exist or doesn’t present the
specific challenges that have made it so problematic in recent years. The
concept in question? The mode of
collective participation in the use of resources, extending from the most
material to the most abstract, that goes most often these days by the name of
“the commons.”
The redoubtable green philosopher Garrett Hardin played a
central role decades ago in drawing attention to the phenomenon in question
with his essay The Tragedy of the Commons. It’s a
remarkable work, and it’s been rendered even more remarkable by the range of contortions
engaged in by thinkers across the economic and political spectrum in their
efforts to evade its conclusions. Those
maneuvers have been tolerably successful; I suspect, for example, that many of
my readers will recall the flurry of claims a few years back that the late
Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom had “disproved” Hardin with her
work on the sustainable management of resources.
In point of fact, she did no such thing. Hardin demonstrated in his essay that an
unmanaged commons faces the risk of a vicious spiral of mismanagement that ends
in the common’s destruction; Ostrom got her Nobel, and deservedly so, by
detailed and incisive analysis of the kinds of management that prevent Hardin’s
tragedy of the commons from taking place. A little later in this essay, we’ll
get to why those kinds of management are exactly what nobody in the mainstream
of American public life wants to talk about just now; the first task at hand is
to walk through the logic of Hardin’s essay and understand exactly what he was
saying and why it matters.
Hardin asks us to imagine a common pasture, of the sort that
was common in medieval villages across Europe. The pasture is owned by the
village as a whole; each of the villagers has the right to put his cattle out
to graze on the pasture. The village as
a whole, however, has no claim on the milk the cows produce; that belongs to
the villager who owns any given cow. The
pasture is a collective resource, from which individuals are allowed to extract
private profit; that’s the basic definition of a commons.
In the Middle Ages, such arrangements were common across
Europe, and they worked well because they were managed by tradition, custom,
and the immense pressure wielded by informal consensus in small and tightly knit
communities, backed up where necessary by local manorial courts and a body of
customary law that gave short shrift to the pursuit of personal advantage at
the expense of others. The commons that
Hardin asks us to envision, though, has no such protections in place. Imagine, he says, that one villager buys
additional cows and puts them out to graze on the common pasture. Any given
pasture can only support so many cows before it suffers damage; to use the
jargon of the ecologist, it has a fixed carrying capacity for milk cows, and
exceeding the carrying capacity will degrade the resource and lower its future
carrying capacity. Assume that the new cows raise the total number of cows past
what the pasture can support indefinitely, so once the new cows go onto the
pasture, the pasture starts to degrade.
Notice how the benefits and costs sort themselves out. The villager with the additional cows
receives all the benefit of the additional milk his new cows provide, and he
receives it right away. The costs of his
action, by contrast, are shared with everyone else in the village, and their
impact is delayed, since it takes time for pasture to degrade. Thus, according to today’s conventional
economic theories, the villager is doing the right thing. Since the milk he
gets is worth more right now than the fraction of the discounted future cost of
the degradation of the pasture he will eventually have to carry, he is pursuing
his own economic interest in a rational manner.
The other villagers, faced with this situation, have a
choice of their own to make. (We’ll
assume, again, that they don’t have the option of forcing the villager with the
new cows to get rid of them and return the total herd on the pasture to a level
it can support indefinitely.) They can
do nothing, in which case they bear the costs of the degradation of the pasture
but gain nothing in return, or they can buy more cows of their own, in which
case they also get more milk, but the pasture degrades even faster. According
to most of today’s economic theories, the latter choice is the right one, since
it allows them to maximize their own economic interest in exactly the same way
as the first villager. The result of the process, though, is that a pasture
that would have kept a certain number of cattle fed indefinitely is turned into
a barren area of compacted subsoil that won’t support any cattle at all. The rational pursuit of individual advantage
thus results in permanent impoverishment for everybody.
This may seem like common sense. It is common sense, but when Hardin first
published “The Tragedy of the Commons” in 1968, it went off like a bomb in the
halls of academic economics. Since Adam Smith’s time, one of the most
passionately held beliefs of capitalist economics has been the insistence that
individuals pursuing their own economic interest without interference from
government or anyone else will reliably produce the best outcome for
everybody. You’ll still hear defenders
of free market economics making that claim, as if nobody but the Communists
ever brought it into question. That’s
why very few people like to talk about Hardin’s tragedy of the commons these
days; it makes it all but impossible to uphold a certain bit of popular,
appealing, but dangerous nonsense.
Does this mean that the rational pursuit of individual
advantage always produces negative results for everyone? Not at all.
The theorists of capitalism can point to equally cogent examples in
which Adam Smith’s invisible hand passes out benefits to everyone, and a case
could probably be made that this happens more often than the opposite. The fact remains that the opposite does
happen, not merely in theory but also in the real world, and that the
consequences of the tragedy of the commons can reach far beyond the limits of a
single village.
Hardin himself pointed to the destruction of the world’s
oceanic fisheries by overharvesting as an example, and it’s a good one. If current trends continue, many of my
readers can look forward, over the next couple of decades, to tasting the last
seafood they will ever eat. A food
resource that could have been managed sustainably for millennia to come is
being annihilated in our lifetimes, and the logic behind it is that of the
tragedy of the commons: participants in
the world’s fishing industries, from giant corporations to individual boat
owners and their crews, are pursuing their own economic interests, and
exterminating one fishery after another in the process.
Another example? The
worldwide habit of treating the atmosphere as an aerial sewer into which wastes
can be dumped with impunity. Every one
of my readers who burns any fossil fuel, for any purpose, benefits directly
from being able to vent the waste CO2 directly into the atmosphere, rather than
having to cover the costs of disposing of it in some other way. As a result of this rational pursuit of
personal economic interest, there’s a very real chance that most of the world’s
coastal cities will have to be abandoned to the rising oceans over the next
century or so, imposing trillions of dollars of costs on the global economy.
Plenty of other examples of the same kind could be
cited. At this point, though, I’d like
to shift focus a bit to a different class of phenomena, and point to the
Glass-Steagall Act, a piece of federal legislation that was passed by the US
Congress in 1933 and repealed in 1999.
The Glass-Steagall Act made it illegal for banks to engage in both
consumer banking activities such as taking deposits and making loans, and
investment banking activities such as issuing securities; banks had to choose
one or the other. The firewall between consumer banking and investment banking
was put in place because in its absence, in the years leading up to the 1929
crash, most of the banks in the country had gotten over their heads in dubious
financial deals linked to stocks and securities, and the collapse of those
schemes played a massive role in bringing the national economy to the brink of
total collapse.
By the 1990s, such safeguards seemed unbearably dowdy to a
new generation of bankers, and after a great deal of lobbying the provisions of
the Glass-Steagall Act were eliminated.
Those of my readers who didn’t spend the last decade hiding under a rock
know exactly what happened thereafter:
banks went right back to the bad habits that got their predecessors into
trouble in 1929, profited mightily in the short term, and proceeded to inflict
major damage on the global economy when the inevitable crash came in 2008.
That is to say, actions performed by individuals (and those
dubious “legal persons” called corporations) in the pursuit of their own
private economic advantage garnered profits over the short term for those who
engaged in them, but imposed long-term costs on everybody. If this sounds familiar, dear reader, it
should. When individuals or corporations
profit from their involvement in an activity that imposes costs on society as a
whole, that activity functions as a commons, and if that commons is unmanaged
the tragedy of the commons is a likely result.
The American banking industry before 1933 and after 1999 functioned, and
currently functions, as an unmanaged commons; between those years, it was a
managed commons. While it was an
unmanaged commons, it suffered from exactly the outcome Hardin’s theory predicts;
when it was a managed commons, by contrast, a major cause of banking failure
was kept at bay, and the banking sector was more often a source of strength
than a source of weakness to the national economy.
It’s not hard to name other examples of what I suppose we
could call “commons-like phenomena”—that is, activities in which the pursuit of
private profit can impose serious costs on society as a whole—in contemporary
America. One that bears watching these
days is food safety. It is to the
immediate financial advantage of businesses in the various industries that
produce food for human consumption to cut costs as far as possible, even if
this occasionally results in unsafe products that cause sickness and death to
people who consume them; the benefits in increased profits are immediate and
belong entirely to the business, while the costs of increased morbidity and
mortality are borne by society as a whole, provided that your legal team is
good enough to keep the inevitable lawsuits at bay. Once again, the asymmetry between benefits
and costs produces a calculus that brings unwelcome outcomes.
The American political system, in its pre-imperial and early
imperial stages, evolved a distinctive response to these challenges. The
Declaration of Independence, the wellspring of American political thought,
defines the purpose of government as securing the rights to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. There’s more
to that often-quoted phrase than meets the eye.
In particular, it doesn’t mean that governments are supposed to provide
anybody with life, liberty, or happiness; their job is simply to secure for
their citizens certain basic rights, which may be inalienable—that is, they
can’t be legally transferred to somebody else, as they could under feudal
law—but are far from absolute. What citizens do with those rights is their own
business, at least in theory, so long as their exercise of their rights does
not interfere too drastically with the ability of others to do the same thing. The assumption, then and later, was that
citizens would use their rights to seek their own advantage, by means as
rational or irrational as they chose, while the national community as a whole
would cover the costs of securing those rights against anyone and anything that
attempted to erase them.
That is to say, the core purpose of government in the
American tradition is the maintenance of the national commons. It exists to
manage the various commons and commons-like phenomena that are inseparable from
life in a civilized society, and thus has the power to impose such limits on
people (and corporate pseudopeople) as will prevent their pursuit of personal
advantage from leading to a tragedy of the commons in one way or another. Restricting the capacity of banks to gamble with
depositors’ money is one such limit; restricting the freedom of manufacturers
to sell unsafe food is another, and so on down the list of reasonable
regulations. Beyond those necessary
limits, government has no call to intervene; how people choose to live their
lives, exercise their liberties, and pursue happiness is up to them, so long as
it doesn’t put the survival of any part of the national commons at risk.
As far as I know, you won’t find that definition taught in
any of the tiny handful of high schools that still offer civics classes to
young Americans about to reach voting age. Still, it’s a neat summary of
generations of political thought in pre-imperial and early imperial
America. These days, by contrast, it’s
rare to find this function of government even hinted at. Rather, the function of government in late
imperial America is generally seen as a matter of handing out largesse of
various kinds to any group organized or influential enough to elbow its way to
a place at the feeding trough. Even those people who insist they are against
all government entitlement programs can be counted on to scream like banshees
if anything threatens those programs from which they themselves benefit; the
famous placard reading “Government Hands Off My Medicare” is an embarrassingly
good reflection of the attitude that most American pseudoconservatives adopt in
practice, however loudly they decry government spending in theory.
A strong case can be made, though, for jettisoning the
notion of government as national sugar daddy and returning to the older notion
of government as guarantor of the national commons. The central argument in that case is simply
that in the wake of empire, the torrents of imperial tribute that made the
government largesse of the recent past possible in the first place will go
away. As the United States loses the
ability to command a quarter of the world’s energy supplies and a third of its
natural resources and industrial product, and has to make do with the much
smaller share it can expect to produce within its own borders, the feeding
trough in Washington DC—not to mention its junior equivalents in the fifty
state capitals, and so on down the pyramid of American government—is going to
run short.
In point of fact, it’s already running short. That’s the usually unmentioned factor behind
the intractable gridlock in our national politics: there isn’t enough largesse left to give
every one of the pressure groups and veto blocs its accustomed share, and the
pressure groups and veto blocs are responding to this unavoidable problem by
jamming up the machinery of government with ever more frantic efforts to get
whatever they can. That situation can
only end in crisis, and probably in a crisis big enough to shatter the existing
order of things in Washington DC; after the rubble stops bouncing, the next
order of business will be piecing together some less gaudily corrupt way of
managing the nation’s affairs.
That process of reconstruction might be furthered
substantially if the pre-imperial concept of the role of government were to get
a little more air time these days. I’ve
spoken at quite some length here and elsewhere about the very limited
contribution that grand plans and long discussions can make to an energy future
that’s less grim than the one toward which we’re hurtling at the moment, and
there’s a fair bit of irony in the fact that I’m about to suggest exactly the
opposite conclusion with regard to the political sphere. Still, the circumstances aren’t the
same. The time for talking about our
energy future was decades ago, when we still had the time and the resources to
get new and more sustainable energy and transportation systems in place before
conventional petroleum production peaked and sent us skidding down the far side
of Hubbert’s peak. That time is long
past, the options remaining to us are very narrow, and another round of
conversation won’t do anything worthwhile to change the course of events at
this point.
That’s much less true of the political situation, because
politics are subject to rules very different from the implacable mathematics of
petroleum depletion and net energy. At
some point in the not too distant future, the political system of the United
States of America is going to tip over into explosive crisis, and at that time
ideas that are simply talking points today have at least a shot at being
enacted into public policy. That’s exactly what happened at the beginning of
the three previous cycles of anacyclosis I traced out in
a previous post in this series.
In 1776, 1860, and 1933, ideas that had been on the political fringes
not that many years beforehand redefined the entire political dialogue, and in
all three cases this was possible because those once-fringe ideas had been
widely circulated and widely discussed, even though most of the people who
circulated and discussed them never imagined that they would live to see those
ideas put into practice.
