Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

David Sirota’s most recent column is a mostly unobjectionable exploration of how individuals will pollute a common resource (the air) since there is no price attached to putting CO2 in the atmosphere.  As a consequence, people continue polluting despite its negative consequences.  He uses the analogy of reclining your seat on a crowded plane:

Looking out over the rows, I saw that almost all aboard had pushed their seats back, invading the space of those behind them. This was bad for everyone. As any flier knows, the benefit of reclining is more than offset by the inconvenience of having a stranger in your lap. And yet, most passengers — including me — had contributed to the problem.

The seat recliner uses the public domain — in this case, space — and we have gotten used to using as much of that domain as we can, not just on planes but everywhere.

If this analogy rings any bells, it’s because Garret Hardin wrote a longer, more rigorous form of this very argument in 1968 with his seminal piece, The Tragedy of the Commons, which was actually inspired by British mathematician William Foster Lloyd’s statement of the problem in 1883.   While I won’t be surprised if the average reader of David Sirota’s columns isn’t aware of Hardin’s work, I’m relatively confident that Sirota himself is.  So does Hardin or his essay get a shout out? Of course not.  This all raises an interesting question, can one become a nationally syndicated columnist by just recyling the ideas of more impressive thinkers without attribution?  If so, that’s a pretty good gig.

If you want some good writing that’s also inspired by Garret Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons, and explicitly acknowledges the influence, the blog Common Tragedies, written by four environmental economic think tankers, is the place to go.