Tragedy of the commons

Yeah.

So sold all 5,000 of them and then flipped the GPS onto the car, and it's like, uh, internally [laughs] we've referred to it as Grand Theft Auto: Tragedy of the Commons.

Uh, but from a business perspective, uh, it's basically the business model of Zipcar with one asset.

Yeah.

You know, that's e- either...

That's a partner of mine, John Callahan, he wrote a great blog post about it called The Tragedy of the Commons.

When you have too much preference stack in your company that...

We want common to make a lot of money.

Talk to me a little bit about what that could look like, what that new economic model looks like.

Well, let's start with just the basic problem, which is that we have a giant potential tragedy of the commons problem, which is that you have a whole bunch of these agents that are gonna run around the internet.

And if not constrained by anything, they're gonna access as much information as possible.

So today, you know, I might say, "Where should I go to lunch?" And it might access, you know, 1,000 menus.

So I would imagine that they're working it.

Also, what I wanna say is this is an absolute example of the tragedy of the commons.

And I've talked about this a little bit in the past, But the tragedy of a commons is kind of an academic nerd circle thing.

Hashtag nerd.

It's a nerd thing, but it's about having something that's like kind of a community resource that gets absolutely destroyed because of community and selfishness.

So the whole idea, sorry, really quickly, allow me.

The whole point of the tragedy of the commons is imagine that you have a common area, like a park in the middle of a town, and your animals can graze there, right? But then instead of being responsible and only eating a little bit, people just let their animals go buck wild and eat the entire frigging park, and then now there's nothing there, and everybody's animals die because they can't eat.

That's kind of the tragedy of the commons.

That is these river systems, they represent vast systems of shared resources used by multiple stakeholders.

And when we talk about commons, I guess everyone sort of thinks about that famous argument by, you know, Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons, but you, uh, you seem to challenge that argument.

Yeah.

There's two economic welfare economics, or there are different ways in which mostly economists have been dealing with this question of commons that led to the property relations and all these very important, uh, debates have been animated by economists.

I'm going to give a very specific example as I've been loud about this.

What you described is the tragedy of the commons.

If someone is not familiar with this, I believe it was a Boston field sometime in, I don't know, centuries ago.

It was a common area where people could graze their cows.