in general, this dynamic occurs when participants are able to make a claim on some scarce resource without paying the cost. then, normal supply/demand causes the resource to become massively oversubscribed.
two examples, on top of the ones from the essay:
anything where people complain about “scalpers”: concert tickets, pokemon cards, game consoles.
the proverbial commons: it’s cheap (profitable, even!) to raise a sheep. but raising a sheep is an implicit claim on productive grazing lands next year. the lands become oversubscribed.
the fix is to internalize the costs. sometimes this happens automatically (long lines for console releases), other times it may need to be coordinated (pay a georgist tax to graze).
i would love a way to do this for todo lists. my first idea is to have a hard cap on the number of items in the list, so that before adding one, you must complete or delete another. but this undercuts part of the value of a todo list, which is that ideas may occur in moments where work is impossible.
perhaps this can be overcome in the following way: allow the list to grow, but at the beginning of each month, a threshold is imposed. until the list is, at some point, under that threshold, new items cannot be added.
it occurs to me that the “bullet journaling” approach has a bit of this. the list must be copied anew each day, which forces some cost in time and effort to maintain a long list.
in general, this dynamic occurs when participants are able to make a claim on some scarce resource without paying the cost. then, normal supply/demand causes the resource to become massively oversubscribed.
two examples, on top of the ones from the essay:
anything where people complain about “scalpers”: concert tickets, pokemon cards, game consoles.
the proverbial commons: it’s cheap (profitable, even!) to raise a sheep. but raising a sheep is an implicit claim on productive grazing lands next year. the lands become oversubscribed.
the fix is to internalize the costs. sometimes this happens automatically (long lines for console releases), other times it may need to be coordinated (pay a georgist tax to graze).
i would love a way to do this for todo lists. my first idea is to have a hard cap on the number of items in the list, so that before adding one, you must complete or delete another. but this undercuts part of the value of a todo list, which is that ideas may occur in moments where work is impossible.
perhaps this can be overcome in the following way: allow the list to grow, but at the beginning of each month, a threshold is imposed. until the list is, at some point, under that threshold, new items cannot be added.
it occurs to me that the “bullet journaling” approach has a bit of this. the list must be copied anew each day, which forces some cost in time and effort to maintain a long list.