I still think the notion has merit.

I, too, can get persnickety about misconceptions. The slow-heated boiled frogs experiment dealt with frogs with their brains removed. Live frogs are difficult to keep in the pot in the first place, leaping out at whim unless trapped in the pot. If trapped, they get more active as the heat rises, so the metaphor doesn’t reflect reality.

An ostrich was observed hiding its head in a bush and acting as if it believed it was fully concealed. Ostriches do stick their heads into the ground anyway, to forage for food like worms and burrowing bugs.

William Forster Lloyd may have had some misconceptions regarding the causes of and mitigations for the tragedy of the commons, but it remains a valid concept, as there are many limited resources that are over-exploited by human society, some of which present a great filter we will have to navigate. (That is to say, if they don’t drive us to outright extinction they will certainly cripple the sustainability of civilization enough to hobble our future potential, say for space exploration and colonization.)

While we can debate the consistency with which common resources are tragedized, it remains a useful metaphor, and there are plenty of cases in which a common shared resource gets depleted due to bad-faith in sharing negotiations and over exploitation. The depletion of wild cod in the Atlantic, for example, came due to overfishing by large industrial fishing interests and poaching within wildlife reserves in which no fishing was supposed to be allowed.

The classic range wars on the US plains came from a conflict between cattle ranchers and sheep ranchers (sheep eat the whole plant, including the root, so vert has to be replanted) When sheep didn’t keep to designated territories due to failure of planting, the cattle rangers determined the sheep ranchers couldn’t be trusted with their word, and violence prevailed.

Then there’s the US economy, in which the ownership class captured the government (intended to serve the public) so they could strip away social safety nets, education and eventually, sustenance wages, because companies who make profits in the short term can overwhelm, close-out and buy-out competing businesses who try to preserve profits in the long term. Curiously, Marx gets into this in Das Kapital and we’re seeing it play out before our very eyes. Also precarity is driving our lumpenproletariat to look for a Mussolini-wannabe strongman to sort all this out (Trump, or whoever, won’t but will capitalize on such promises).

And of course, there’s the rising pollution of the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses that is raising the average temperature of the earth. In the 1970s, meteorologists and climatologists suggested a +2℃ could be globally catastrophic, and risk extinction. Then in the aughts and 2010s, politicians suggested we could survive +3℃ or +4℃ and now it seems that +1.5℃ is driving depletion of the food machine that keeps us fed and supplies of safe drinking water, and if we don’t stop our emissions, we’re headed right into a food crisis. However we’re churning out more pollution than ever.

So you can wish the phenomenon away, but given this is also how cartels break (price-fixing rackets eventually collapse, as bad-faith players arrange for secret deals to undersell their rivals), we know it is often a functional phenomenon that isn’t being adequately mitigated by Ostrom’s (or whoever’s) suggestions.

I believe you in that there are methods to assure common resources can be preserved. But there are critical situations in which we will have to do something we’re not doing (whether those methods or not) or we’ll suffer the consequences of depleting those resources, and that is going to suck for all of us.

In the meantime, I’m still going to use tragedy of the commons as a metaphor, at least so long as I continue to survive those tragedies, which I expect will not be for too long.