Why the public farm always ends up empty

Pocket edition. This is a shorter version of a longer article; you can read the full edition when you have more time.

A shared farm runs dry because the cost of using it is paid by the group and the benefit goes to whoever uses it. Nobody has to be selfish for it to happen: it's enough for each person to take a little more than they put back.

For decades it was taken for granted that there were only two ways out: privatise the resource or put an authority in charge of watching it. The political scientist Elinor Ostrom showed that this was false, and won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for it.

She studied real communities that had been managing forests, fisheries and irrigation systems for centuries with no owner and no police, and drew out the features they shared: clear boundaries on who may use the resource, rules adapted to the specific place, participation by those affected in setting them, monitoring done by the people involved themselves, graduated sanctions that start out as a warning, and a cheap way of settling disputes.

What's striking is that many servers arrive at that list on their own, through one mess after another.