Elon Musk and the Spiralling ‘Tragedy of the Private’
Adam Lent argues that in a permacrisis era, it is the privately owned that is proving fragile not the public and the common.
Elinor Ostrom would be fascinated by the exodus of Twitter users to Mastodon. The esteemed economist spent her long career challenging the concept of the Tragedy of the Commons – the idea, popular with economists, that unless resources are owned and run by a private body, they tend to go to rack and ruin. Ostrom showed that this is simply not true: there is extensive evidence that assets such as land, buildings and neighbourhoods can be run perfectly well by the people who use those resources, operating as a collective. So it would interest her greatly, I think, that the recent Twitterverse shenanigans have seen thousands leaving an organisation being driven into the ground by a private owner to join a network run by and for its users.
It has been public services picking up the pieces of repeated crises dealing with the extensive financial, health and social consequences of economic turmoil.
Maybe Twitter is a unique case given the rather distinct character traits of its new owner. But I wonder if it is actually a straw in a strengthening wind. Can we start to talk about a growing Tragedy of the Private?
It does seem that private organisations have faced repeated crises in recent years often requiring extensive support from public bodies. The banks during the 2008 Crash. Stock markets and large swathes of the private sector propped up by quantitative easing and ultra-low interest rates for over a decade. Millions of businesses across the world kept alive by public subsidies during the pandemic. And most recently, businesses again being bailed out to survive the energy crisis while the energy sector itself has been restructured by government to survive the turmoil.
I suspect that so many incidences of private fragility can’t be coincidental. The common factor may be that identified by the veteran economist Vito Tanzi in his recent book – Fragile Futures. He argues that we now live in an era of crises – economic, geopolitical, environmental. What some are calling the ‘permacrisis’ or ‘polycrisis’. This throws repeated external shocks at economies which make business much more prone to failure.
…it seems to be the private that is prone to tragedy not the commons.
In fact, what has proved far more resilient during these crises has been the publicly and commonly owned. It has been public services picking up the pieces of repeated crises dealing with the extensive financial, health and social consequences of economic turmoil. And fascinatingly, during the pandemic, it was very much a collaboration of public services and classic Ostromian bodies in the form of mutual aid and community groups that delivered a response while businesses almost entirely ground to a halt.
As Tanzi points out, economists haven’t shown any great interest in understanding external shocks. If they had, maybe they would appreciate that in the permacrisis, it seems to be the private that is prone to tragedy not the commons. If this idea is indeed correct, I suspect that it could usher in a very significant shift in how we understand what makes for a successful economy: one that favours resilience over dynamism and so increasingly stresses the role of the public and the common over the private.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash.
Join our mailing list