Martin Sustrik
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Any tips on other literature on the subject?
I don’t want to put words in Ostrom’s mouth but my understanding is that this has to do with scaling.
The system works if it’s not too big or volatile, in other words, if everyone knows each other. You can easily imagine how the resource would be depleted if random people just showed up and started extracting it.
To scale, there’s a different rule (the last one) which calls for hierarchical organization. In case of the irrigation system there’s a group of people using the same distributory canal. That’s a closed group, no stragers allowed. However, for problems they can’t solve themselves they can coordinate with groups in control of other distributory canals.
That reminded me of a paper where they evaluate bots with with memory (that comes at a cost): https://cse.msu.edu/~dolsonem/pdfs/prisoners_dilemma_memory.pdf
The interesting intersection here is that memory can be used as a cache, thus avoiding need for re-modeling.
As for the accuracy of the book: There’s not much quantitative data overall. The mode that Ostrom operates in is rather to show a lot of examples, then try to make some (pretty lightweight) generalizations. The last chapter introduces a model for researching coordination problems, but once again, it’s nothing quantitative, more like a set of hints about what things and relationships to look at.
All in all, the book may not be very useful to get exact numbers but it may help to generate more conceptual surface area, give more structure to the problem of coordination failures beyond the naive “tragedy of the commons” parables.
There was a relatively long chapter on that, but not much quantitative data. In many cases policing was done by the stakeholders themselves, for instance, by rotating duty for the young men from the village who could then keep the fines they’ve collected.
Isn’t it just the distinction between how facts are used in scientific discourse (you state a fact, expect it to be confirmed or challenged) vs. how they are used in political discourse (carefully select other fact to augment it and suit your political narrative)? I guess Umberto Eco would have had something to say about that.
Thanks! Fixed.
Inadequate Equilibria vs. Governance of the Commons
Soviet-era Jokes, Common Knowledge, Irony
Here’s the entire story, as recorder by Yad Vashem, nothing about food/money though:
The carpenter Jonas Paulavičius lived in Panemune, a suburb of Kaunas, just across the Niemon River, with his wife, Antanina Paulavičienė, and their children, 16-year-old Danutė and 14-year-old Kęstutis. An ardent opponent of the Nazi regime, Jonas Paulavičius had developed close ties with Lithuanian communists before the war. When a Lithuanian friend approached him one day and asked him to shelter a four-year-old Jewish boy, Paulavičius willingly agreed. After consulting his wife, Paulavičius took the child, Shimele Shames, into his home and later decided also to give shelter to his parents, Yitzhak and Lena Shames and his grandmother. Together with his son Kęstutis, Paulavičius dug a hiding place under the floor of his home, where the Shameses hid. Aware of the distress of the Jews interned in the Kaunas ghetto, Paulavičius decided to save as many as possible. He began arranging meetings with Jews in the ghetto and inviting them to hide in his home. At the same time, the Paulavičiuses expanded the room under their home, and towards the end of the German occupation, they prepared an additional hiding place. Among the 12 Jews hiding there were the four members of the Shames family, including grandmother Feinsilver; the doctors Tania and Chaim Ipp; Aharon Neimark and his wife, Mania (later Gershenman); David Rubin; Yohanan Fein; as well as Miriam Krakinowski, and Riva Katavushnik, whom Paulavičius managed to save from a labor camp just before it was liquidated. Even after the war, Paulavičius managed to obtain a large sum of money for the Neimarks, to enable them to leave Lithuania and immigrate to Israel. In 1952, Paulavičius was murdered by his antisemitic neighbor, who never forgave him helping Jews during the occupation.
I guess if cognitive dissonance would stop effecting people, they would start following different incentives, those that are currently drowned out by the dissonance, whatever they may be.
One thought that comes to mind is that the monarch has not only to appoint a credible successor, but also discredit any other potential successors. Check the story of the son of Peter the Great, who was effectively killed by his father to prevent potential succession conflicts in the future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Petrovich,_Tsarevich_of_Russia
Another related topic is preferential cross-cousin marriage which is well known from anthropology. I’ve written about it here, albeit in a bit different context: http://250bpm.com/blog:92