{"id":51,"date":"2004-09-14T10:15:50","date_gmt":"2004-09-14T10:15:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=51"},"modified":"2004-09-14T10:15:50","modified_gmt":"2004-09-14T10:15:50","slug":"the-success-of-the-commons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=51","title":{"rendered":"The success of the commons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A long time ago when I was studying agricultural economics, we were taught about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.garretthardinsociety.org\/articles\/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html\">The Tragedy of the Commons<\/a> as a simplistic piece of propaganda for laissez-faire capitalism. The story goes that if something is not owned by someone everyone will exploit it until it is destroyed; the &#8220;obvious&#8221; answer is to privatise it.<\/p>\n<p>Hence I was very pleased to read yesterday about a success of the commons, how in Woking &#8220;rough music&#8221; (i.e. loud public shaming rituals, like the <em>charivaris<\/em> discussed last week) was used to protect the common, being directed against those who overstocked the common or cut excessive quantities of woof or turfs (?) from it.<\/p>\n<p>This from E.P. Thompson, <em>Customs in Common<\/em>, The Merlin Press, London, 1991, p. 519. (Thanks to Sharon from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.earlymodernweb.org.uk\/emn\/\">Early Modern Notes<\/a> for directing me to it.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A long time ago when I was studying agricultural economics, we were taught about The Tragedy of the Commons as a simplistic piece of propaganda for laissez-faire capitalism. The story goes that if something is not owned by someone everyone will exploit it until it is destroyed; the &#8220;obvious&#8221; answer is to privatise it. Hence [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","author-natalie-bennett"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}