Interestingly, The Tragedy of the Commons really does work with psychopaths, so once you move from a person to person level to corporations interacting the Tragedy of the Commons problem becomes a serious issue. Take a minimum wage, it necessary for the population as a whole to have surplus wealth to spend to keep an economy going. Individual companies, on the other hand, have an incentive to pay their own employees a pittance. If every company does that then there’s no surplus wealth for people to purchase most goods and slowly the economy grinds to a halt. Hence it’s in society’s best interest to have a healthy and large minimum wage (or better yet a UBI system) which will have to be enforced on companies by an outside force.
Yup. Once you go from a community of lasting relationships to a spot market of one-off, arms length transactions between strangers, the commons disappears. The Commons is not a place, it’s a set of relationships.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/governing-the-commons/A8BB63BC4A1433A50A3FB92EDBBB97D5
Elinor Ostrom knew
Interestingly, The Tragedy of the Commons really does work with psychopaths, so once you move from a person to person level to corporations interacting the Tragedy of the Commons problem becomes a serious issue. Take a minimum wage, it necessary for the population as a whole to have surplus wealth to spend to keep an economy going. Individual companies, on the other hand, have an incentive to pay their own employees a pittance. If every company does that then there’s no surplus wealth for people to purchase most goods and slowly the economy grinds to a halt. Hence it’s in society’s best interest to have a healthy and large minimum wage (or better yet a UBI system) which will have to be enforced on companies by an outside force.
Yup. Once you go from a community of lasting relationships to a spot market of one-off, arms length transactions between strangers, the commons disappears. The Commons is not a place, it’s a set of relationships.