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Marty Rowland Talk
Mar. 5th, 2022 04:37 amBack on Tuesday, February 22, Marty Rowland of the Henry George School of Social Science in New York gave a lecture online.
He said that people talk about the Tragedy of the Commons, but that should really be called the tragedy of the open access resources. There is also the Tragedy of the Uncommons: people do not prepare for rare, catastrophic events, because they do not see reminders that these can and do actually happen. There is also the Tragedy of the Anticommons, where resources are underused because there are too many owners. Michael Heller has taught about the Tragedy of the Anticommons, but that is only part of Elinor Ostrom’s more thorough view. Elinor Ostrom, who died in 2012, was a Nobel laureate in economics, who wrote about four different regimes for control of resources: private, common pool, open access, and state/public management. Different regimes make sense in different circumstances.
Mr. Rowland talked about what happens when the state fails or is captured by private interests, leading to privatization. There were the 2007-2008 bank bailouts, when banks used the money they were given to buy up their own stock. The money should have gone to homeowners, he said.
He mentioned Henry Clay Frick and the Johnson flood of May 31, 1889, in which 2209 people were killed; there was a problem with a dam on the land where Frick and his rich friends had a private club. After the disaster, they formed the Pittsburgh Relief Committee, and made some donations; they escaped being held liable for appalling negligence. Frick also had a prominent role in the Homestead Strike, on the anti-union side, of course.
He said that after Hurricane Katrina, public housing was torn down, although it was not water-damaged.
Mr. Rowland had more to say, but my memory and notes do not enable me to reconstruct it all.
He said that people talk about the Tragedy of the Commons, but that should really be called the tragedy of the open access resources. There is also the Tragedy of the Uncommons: people do not prepare for rare, catastrophic events, because they do not see reminders that these can and do actually happen. There is also the Tragedy of the Anticommons, where resources are underused because there are too many owners. Michael Heller has taught about the Tragedy of the Anticommons, but that is only part of Elinor Ostrom’s more thorough view. Elinor Ostrom, who died in 2012, was a Nobel laureate in economics, who wrote about four different regimes for control of resources: private, common pool, open access, and state/public management. Different regimes make sense in different circumstances.
Mr. Rowland talked about what happens when the state fails or is captured by private interests, leading to privatization. There were the 2007-2008 bank bailouts, when banks used the money they were given to buy up their own stock. The money should have gone to homeowners, he said.
He mentioned Henry Clay Frick and the Johnson flood of May 31, 1889, in which 2209 people were killed; there was a problem with a dam on the land where Frick and his rich friends had a private club. After the disaster, they formed the Pittsburgh Relief Committee, and made some donations; they escaped being held liable for appalling negligence. Frick also had a prominent role in the Homestead Strike, on the anti-union side, of course.
He said that after Hurricane Katrina, public housing was torn down, although it was not water-damaged.
Mr. Rowland had more to say, but my memory and notes do not enable me to reconstruct it all.
