Tragedy of the Commons

After a decade of painstaking research, federal and university scientists have reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people worldwide. Like the flu viruses now raising alarm bells in Asia, the 1918 virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, the scientists reported. To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database.

This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.

Co-operation has brought the human race a long way in a staggeringly short time

“Our everyday life is much stranger than we imagine, and rests on fragile foundations.” This is the intriguing first sentence of a very unusual new book about economics, and much else besides: “The Company of Strangers”, by Paul Seabright, a professor of economics at the University of Toulouse. (The book is published by Princeton University Press.) Why is everyday life so strange? Because, explains Mr Seabright, it is so much at odds with what would have seemed, as recently as 10,000 years ago, our evolutionary destiny. It was only then that “one of the most aggressive and elusive bandit species in the entire animal kingdom” decided to settle down. In no more than the blink of an eye, in evolutionary time, these suspicious and untrusting creatures, these “shy, murderous apes”, developed co-operative networks of staggering scope and complexity—networks that rely on trust among strangers. When you come to think about it, it was an extraordinarily improbable outcome.

The tech guru sees a "new economic system" in the unconscious cooperation embodied by Google links and Amazon lists.

Howard Rheingold is on the hunt again. With his last book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, in 2001, the longtime observer of technology trends made a persuasive case that pervasive mobile communications, combined with always-on Internet connections, will produce new kinds of ad-hoc social groups. Now, he's starting to take the leap beyond smart mobs, trying to weave some threads out of such seemingly disparate developments as Web logs, open-source software development, and Google.

At the same time, Rheingold is worried that established companies could quash such nascent innovations as file-sharing -- and potentially put the U.S. at risk of falling behind the rest of the world. He recently spoke with Robert D. Hof, BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau chief. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

Q: Where do you see the social revolution you've been talking about going next?

A: It's too early to say. The question is: What does it point toward? Some kind of collective action...in which the individuals aren't consciously cooperating. A market is a great example as a mechanism for determining price based on demand. People aren't saying, "I'm contributing to the market," they say they're just selling something. But it adds up.

Americans have retreated into cocoons of the like-minded where all they hear is echoes of themselves.

My wife's village in the Philippines consists mostly of bamboo houses perched on hills that rise gently from the rice fields. The hills are lush, the fields neat and well-tended; one almost forgets how poor these people are, in Western terms at least. My wife's father gets about $750 a year for his crop - a lot compared with sharecroppers who have little besides the rice they eat and clothes they wear.
Life is not easy. Yet there is a sense of sufficiency and contentment that is not much found in the US. There is time; daily life is not a grim march to the metronome of clocks. There is also the abundance of nature - coconut, banana, and mango trees, sweet potatoes and swamp cabbage, the chickens and goats that fill the yards. None of these appear in the stern accountings of Western economists who pronounce upon the poverty of such people.

Most of all, there is the rice, which is both livelihood and sustenance, the center of everything.

"If you have rice under the house," my father-in-law says, "you do not have worries."

The rice fields are productive in another way, too. By unspoken agreement, villagers can walk across the narrow dikes that define each farmer's land, to get where they need to go. Private property becomes to this extent a commons; boundaries that divide tend also to tie people together. The fields help produce community as well as rice, and this is both a reflection and reinforcement of a social cohesion that pervades daily life there.

No, it's not idyllic. People being people, feuds and animosities are not unknown. But bonds of mutual supportare strong. Studies have shown that Filipinos consider themselves happy to a greater degree than their statistical poverty might suggest. I could not help thinking that those paths through the rice fields point to one reason why.

I teach a seminar titled "Ideas of Human Nature" in which I restrict enrollment to 15 students. Others typically want to get in, and yet much of the class's popularity stems from the benefits that come from keeping it small. Most students understand the advantages of small classes, and they wouldn't want everyone who wishes admittance to get in; just themselves! If everyone gets in, the class becomes too big and discussion is inhibited, to everyone's disadvantage. And so, each year I find myself in the difficult position of telling a number of students that there simply isn't room for them. Each student turned away from this class understands the logic, but nonetheless, each would like the limit to be expanded -- by just one.

That would be a good idea.
- Gandhi (when asked what he thought of western civilisation)