Economics Atlas
Claims this atlas currently marks as unsettled or as tested and found false. A debated fact is one scholars hold competing positions on; a debunked one has been checked against the record and found not to hold. Both are kept in view rather than quietly smoothed over, with the reasoning that put each one where it stands.
22 statements marked Debated.
Tragedy of the Commons, DescriptionThe tragedy of the commons describes a situation in which individuals acting in their own rational self-interest deplete a shared resource, even though this outcome works against the long-term interest of the whole group. The term was popularized by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in a 1968 essay arguing that a shared pasture open to every herder would inevitably be overgrazed, because each herder captures the full benefit of adding one more animal while the cost of overgrazing is spread across everyone. Hardin's own prescriptive conclusion, that only privatizing the resource or imposing centralized government control could prevent this outcome, is contested. Elinor Ostrom's empirical research, recognized by the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, showed that communities frequently design and enforce their own durable rules for sustainable collective management, without either solution.
Tragedy of the Commons, Concepts
Standing
Concerns Description
Currently States The tragedy of the commons describes a situation in which individuals acting in their own rational self-interest deplete a shared resource, even though this outcome works against the long-term interest of the whole group. The term was popularized by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in a 1968 essay arguing that a shared pasture open to every herder would inevitably be overgrazed, because each herder captures the full benefit of adding one more animal while the cost of overgrazing is spread across everyone. Hardin's own prescriptive conclusion, that only privatizing the resource or imposing centralized government control could prevent this outcome, is contested. Elinor Ostrom's empirical research, recognized by the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, showed that communities frequently design and enforce their own durable rules for sustainable collective management, without either solution.
The underlying dynamic Hardin described, that an open access resource tends toward overuse absent some constraint, is widely accepted; what remains debated is his narrower prescriptive claim that only privatization or state control can supply that constraint, a claim Ostrom's fieldwork challenged directly.
Source The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics
Tulip Mania, DescriptionA period in the Dutch Republic, peaking in the winter of 1636 to 1637, during which contract prices for tulip bulbs, especially rare virus-streaked broken varieties, rose to extraordinary levels before collapsing in February 1637. It is traditionally presented as history's first recorded speculative bubble and a byword for irrational market mania, though the scale of the traditional account is itself a live dispute among economic historians.
Tulip Mania, Events
Standing
Concerns Description
Currently States A period in the Dutch Republic, peaking in the winter of 1636 to 1637, during which contract prices for tulip bulbs, especially rare virus-streaked broken varieties, rose to extraordinary levels before collapsing in February 1637. It is traditionally presented as history's first recorded speculative bubble and a byword for irrational market mania, though the scale of the traditional account is itself a live dispute among economic historians.
The traditional account, repeated in most general reference works, treats the episode as an irrational, economy-wide speculative bubble. The economic historian Peter Garber and others who have gone back to the surviving contract and notarial records argue the traditional account overstates both the prices actually paid and the economic damage the collapse caused, since most of the trading ran through forward contracts among a comparatively small circle of specialist growers and merchants rather than the general public, and few buyers ever paid the peak contract prices in cash. Both readings are represented here rather than picking one as settled.
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica