THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS REVISITED: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

The paper presents the seminal proposal of Hardin in “The tragedy of the commons”, published in the Science magazine in December of 1968, that excessive population growth combined with the common property of goods leads to problems of social nature, without a viable technical solution to the question. For the author, the problem can only be overcome by reducing individual freedoms and by coercion, adopting the arrangement of private or public property, with restrictions for the last one. From Hardin's thesis, followed by the formalization of his model according to the conventional manuals of economics, a critical analysis of this approach is elaborated, showing that nothing systematically indicates that the arrangement of private property is the more appropriated. The private appropriation of a collective common good can deplete the available stock. Besides, there are other ways to regulate the system as well as different situations depending on the nature of the common good.