Chapter 12 — Further Reading

Foundational works

Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science, 1968 The article that named the concept. Hardin's original framing was about population growth and shared resources. The article is short, readable, and enormously influential — though Ostrom and others have since shown that the "tragedy" is not always inevitable.

Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, 1990 Ostrom's magnum opus. The book documents case studies of commons governance from around the world and develops the eight design principles. It won Ostrom the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Long but rewarding.

Elinor Ostrom, "Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems," Nobel Lecture, 2009 Ostrom's Nobel lecture is shorter than the book and gives a clear summary of her life's work.

Paul Samuelson, "The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure," Review of Economics and Statistics, 1954 The paper that formalized the theory of public goods. Samuelson showed that the efficient provision of public goods requires summing marginal benefits across all users — the rule we described in §12.3.

On the cod collapse (case study 2)

Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Penguin Books, 1997 A popular history of the Atlantic cod, from the medieval Basque fishery to the 1992 collapse. Kurlansky writes beautifully and the book gives a vivid sense of what was lost.

Ransom A. Myers and Boris Worm, "Rapid Worldwide Depletion of Predatory Fish Communities," Nature, 2003 A landmark paper showing that industrial fishing had reduced large predatory fish (including cod) to about 10% of their pre-industrial levels across the world's oceans.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Northern Cod Science, multiple reports The Canadian government's own scientific assessments of the cod stock, available online.

On individual transferable quotas (ITQs)

Christopher Costello, Steven Gaines, and John Lynham, "Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse?" Science, 2008 An empirical analysis of over 11,000 fisheries showing that those managed with ITQ-style systems were significantly less likely to collapse than those managed without them.

Tom Tietenberg, "Tradable Permits in Principle and Practice," Penn State Environmental Law Review, 2006 A review of tradable-permit systems across environmental and resource domains, including fisheries, air pollution, and water.

On public goods

Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, Harvard University Press, 1965 The classic analysis of why groups with shared interests often fail to act collectively. Olson's framing of the free-rider problem remains the standard starting point.

Todd Sandler, Global Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, 2004 A comprehensive treatment of public goods and collective action problems at the international level. Useful for thinking about global public goods (climate stability, pandemic prevention, basic research).

On parking economics (case study 1)

Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking, Routledge, 2005 (updated 2011) The definitive book on parking economics. Shoup, a UCLA urban economist, makes the case that free parking is one of the most wasteful subsidies in the U.S. economy. The book is detailed and persuasive.

Donald Shoup, Parking and the City, Routledge, 2018 A follow-up with case studies from cities around the world that have reformed their parking policies.

On the economics of the internet and digital public goods

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale University Press, 2006 Benkler's analysis of how the internet has created new kinds of public goods (Wikipedia, open-source software, freely available information) and how these goods are produced outside of traditional market mechanisms.

Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole, "Some Simple Economics of Open Source," Journal of Industrial Economics, 2002 An economic analysis of why open-source software gets produced despite the free-rider problem.

A reading order recommendation

If you have time for one of the books above, read Ostrom's Governing the Commons. It is the most important contribution to the economics of shared resources since Hardin's 1968 article, and it fundamentally changed how economists think about the alternatives to privatization and government regulation.

If you want a compelling narrative, read Kurlansky's Cod.

If you want to think about parking in a new way, read Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking — it will permanently change how you see every parking lot and parking meter you encounter.

Chapter 13 — The Economics of Inequality — is next. It's one of the most important chapters in the book, and it brings the efficiency-equity tradeoff from Chapter 8 front and center.