Category: Policy

You know the old story about the two women ranting at one another from their respective doorsteps on opposite sides of a narrow street. And a passing wit ((You can continue to think it was Dr Johnson; I check someone else’s sources.)) remarked: “They will never agree, for they argue from different premises”. That’s how I feel about almost everything and everyone involved in almost every kind of discussion of genetic engineering.

Watch, if you will, this extract from a longer discussion with Michael Pollan, foodsayer extraordinaire.

Now, tell me, what exactly did he say that might cause someone else to say

I’m thinking he is just another tool. Now he suddenly supports “open source” genetic engineering…absolutely not….playing god/artifically manipulating DNA is not our place.

What’s with the “scare quotes”? How does a self-described seed breeder manage to elide playing god with artificially manipulating DNA?

I’m reminded of another quote, this one definitely attributable to Woody Allen. It runs something like this ((And stap me if I can’t find a source.))

The great advantage of being smart is that you can always act like an imbecile, while the reverse is never possible.

Hell yeah.

Like lots of better-informed people, I too had not heard of Elinor ((Those who know call her Lin.)) Ostrom, who shared this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics. But when Luigi alerted me this morning to the award, and I read what he called a “place-marker” post, I had only one reaction.

Many years ago I corresponded a bit with Garrett Hardin, whose paper in Science provided the title for Luigi (and scores of others) to riff on. In the course of that, I said that I didn’t think that the average commons was much of a tragedy, given the various examples he cited of a well-managed commons. And he replied to the effect that the title of that paper was one of his biggest mistakes. He should have called it The Tragedy of the Mismanaged Commons.

Of course I treasure that letter, along with a few others, which is why I kept it somewhere very safe, which is why I cannot now lay my hands on it. And I think of it whenever people assume, as they do all too often, that a commons is inevitably tragic.

All of which hardly matters at all, except that it seems we really ought to know more about Ostrom’s work. Bits and pieces are blipping into life on the radar screen, and will clearly require some study.

This, from Tyler Cowan, is helpful.

For Ostrom it’s not the tragedy of the commons but the opportunity of the commons. Not only can a commons be well-governed but the rules which help to provide efficiency in resource use are also those that foster community and engagement. A formally government protected forest, for example, will fail to protect if the local users do not regard the rules as legitimate. In Hayekian terms legislation is not the same as law. Ostrom’s work is about understanding how the laws of common resource governance evolve and how we may better conserve resources by making legislation that does not conflict with law.

I like the idea of “legislation that does not conflict with law”. And this series of posts will clearly repay study.

However, we would like to extend an invitation to anyone out there who would consider rewarding us, and our readers, with a better account of how Ostrom’s ideas might apply in particular to agricultural biodiversity, as a global commons, as a public good, as anything, frankly. You write it, we’ll stick it up here.

Thanks.