Economics and Political Science in Depth

Economics and Political Science in Depth
Name
Institution
There are different economic concepts that explain how production choices are done. They also explain how employers relate with employees and thus how employers are able to maximize their profits while taking advantage of employees. This essay will explain the Tragedy of the Commons and the effect it has on the contemporary society.
The tragedy of the commons is the chosen concept in this essay because it explains how in a shared-resource system, individual users who act independently to satisfy their own interests do not mind the common good of all users and thus deplete or spoil the resource via collective action (Hunt & Colander, 2016). This means that since the resource is used by numerous users with each driven by his personal interests, it is easily depleted through collective action. In this case, a person thinks that he benefits while harming others while in reality, he is harming himself in the long-run. The tragedy of the commons was developed from the essay by William Forster Lloyd, a British economist, in 1833. To explain the concept, he used a hypothetical example involving people who were grazing on a common land unregulated in Ireland and Great Britain. The concept was later advanced through the work of Garrett Hardin, an American philosopher and ecologist in 1968. The word commons was used to refer to unregulated and shared resource such as highways, atmosphere, roads, oceans, fish stocks, rivers, and even office equipment (Katenov, Velegol & Schreyer Honors College, 2017). When people using these resources are left unregulated, they eventually deplete or destroy it.
Even though the concept was coined numerous years ago, it is still very relevant in the current world. According to Loat and MacMillan (2015), it is used on the contemporary society to explain issues with sustainable development, environmental protection, and economic growth. For instance, when talking of global warming, the tragedy of the commons is used to explain how people come together to deplete resources that are meant to protect the environment. For example, when left unregulated, pe...