The Tragedy Of The Commons

John Stossel points out a little known bit of history about the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving. The colony nearly starved in the beginning because they tried to live communally. They only began to thrive when each family began tending their own crops for their own good.

When the Pilgrims first settled the Plymouth Colony, they organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share everything equally, work and produce.

They nearly all starved.

Why? When people can get the same return with a small amount of effort as with a large amount, most people will make little effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. Some ate rats, dogs, horses and cats. This went on for two years.

"So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue the next year also, if not some way prevented," wrote Gov. William Bradford in his diary. The colonists, he said, "began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length after much debate of things, [I] (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. … And so assigned to every family a parcel of land."

The people of Plymouth moved from socialism to private farming. The results were dramatic.

Stossel links to a discussion in Wikipedia of The Tragedy of the Commons, a well understood concept of why communalism fails.

The metaphor illustrates how free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately structurally dooms the resource through over-exploitation. This occurs because the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals or groups, each of whom is motivated to maximize use of the resource to the point in which they become reliant on it, while the costs of the exploitation are distributed among all those to whom the resource is available (which may be a wider class of individuals than that which is exploiting it). This, in turn, causes demand for the resource to increase, which causes the problem to snowball to the point in which the resource is exhausted.

This idea ties back to another article I posted about from the Washington Post. Mark Winne, the former director of Connecticut's Hartford Food System and a 25-year veteran of food bank programs pointed out why food bank problems do not work. The lines never end. No matter how much you give away, the demand increases. This is exactly the same principle in action. People can share in the bounty but have to give little or nothing in return. Eventually, the system collapses.

As the Wikipedia entry discusses, there is still disagreement of the meaning of 'the tragedy of the commons', but it can be seen in action time and again through history. Even though the Amana Colonies probably flourished for a longer time than most communal experiments in America, in the end the same pressures split them.

By the 1930s, the communal system in Amana had generated stresses which it chose not to resolve. Many community members found the rules associated with communal living to be petty and overly restrictive. Regulations governed most aspects of daily life including dining, dress and leisure activities. Many young people wanted to be free to play baseball, to own musical instruments or to bob their hair in the new style. Families wanted to eat together at home rather than in the communal kitchen dining rooms. Although members received an annual spending allowance, many people felt theirs was inadequate and were frustrated by their inability to enjoy more material goods. Increasingly the elders were unable to enforce the rules.

The same dynamic was at work.