Interestingly, The Tragedy of the Commons really does work with psychopaths, so once you move from a person to person level to corporations interacting the Tragedy of the Commons problem becomes a serious issue. Take a minimum wage, it necessary for the population as a whole to have surplus wealth to spend to keep an economy going. Individual companies, on the other hand, have an incentive to pay their own employees a pittance. If every company does that then there’s no surplus wealth for people to purchase most goods and slowly the economy grinds to a halt. Hence it’s in society’s best interest to have a healthy and large minimum wage (or better yet a UBI system) which will have to be enforced on companies by an outside force.
Yup. Once you go from a community of lasting relationships to a spot market of one-off, arms length transactions between strangers, the commons disappears. The Commons is not a place, it’s a set of relationships.
I’ve worked with psychopaths a lot, and not found them to abuse common resources as badly as corpos/billionaires. The not-stupid ones, tend to understand the larger social value of common resources, even if they lean on them a little harder.
I know comparing corporations to psychopaths is kind of unfair to psychopaths. Most psychopaths can see themselves farther into the future then the end of the quarter.
Interestingly, The Tragedy of the Commons really does work with psychopaths, so once you move from a person to person level to corporations interacting the Tragedy of the Commons problem becomes a serious issue. Take a minimum wage, it necessary for the population as a whole to have surplus wealth to spend to keep an economy going. Individual companies, on the other hand, have an incentive to pay their own employees a pittance. If every company does that then there’s no surplus wealth for people to purchase most goods and slowly the economy grinds to a halt. Hence it’s in society’s best interest to have a healthy and large minimum wage (or better yet a UBI system) which will have to be enforced on companies by an outside force.
Yup. Once you go from a community of lasting relationships to a spot market of one-off, arms length transactions between strangers, the commons disappears. The Commons is not a place, it’s a set of relationships.
I’ve worked with psychopaths a lot, and not found them to abuse common resources as badly as corpos/billionaires. The not-stupid ones, tend to understand the larger social value of common resources, even if they lean on them a little harder.
I know comparing corporations to psychopaths is kind of unfair to psychopaths. Most psychopaths can see themselves farther into the future then the end of the quarter.
Yeah, they do attach sometimes, even if not strongly, and have rational self interest that makes them plausible if problematic members of a community.