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“Your corn is ripe today, mine will be so tomorrow. ‘Tis profitable for us both, that I should labour with you to-day and that you should aid me to-morrow…
…Here then I leave you to labour alone: you treat me in the same manner. The seasons change and both of us lose our harvests for want of mutual confidence and security.”
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739
“I’m not in business to be loved, but I am in business.”
Jake Foote, Chinatown
“The rich are not kind, nor the kind, rich.”
Chinese proverb
“Honor sinks where commerce long prevails.”
Oliver Goldsmith
“[The natural state of man is] continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”
Thomas Hobbes, Leviatian, 1651
“Nature, red in tooth and claw”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1850
"I’m takin from them cause for years they would take from me"
Tupac Shakur
“The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.
As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" This utility has one negative and one positive component.
1. The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly + 1.
2. The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of - 1.
Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another.... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.“
Garrett Hardin, “The tragedy of the commons”, 1977
“Whenever a communication medium lowers the cost of solving collective action dilemmas, it becomes possible for more people to pool resources. And more people pooling resources in new ways is the history of civilisation in seven words.”
Unnamed Microsoft exec, 2003
So they're building a machine to force us all to co-operate and all you can do is throw some cultural references into a blender, huh? Different devices for boiling water, similar shades of soot. |
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