Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (79 page)

in 1998, when I began visiting every year. Among my vivid teenaged memo
ries of the Big Hole were the snow covering the distant mountaintops even in mid-summer, my resulting sense that a white band low in the sky encir
cled the basin, and my recollection of a weekend camping trip when two
friends and I clambered up to that magical band of snow. Not having lived
through the fluctuations and gradual dwindling of summer snow during
the intervening 42 years, I was stunned and saddened on my return to the
Big Hole in 1998 to find the band almost gone, and in 2001 and 2003 actu
ally all melted off. When I asked my Montana resident friends about the
change, they were less aware of it: they unconsciously compared each year's
band (or lack thereof) with the previous few years. Creeping normalcy or
landscape amnesia made it harder for them than for me to remember what
conditions had been like in the 1950s. Such experiences are a major reason why people may fail to notice a developing problem, until it is too late.

I suspect that landscape amnesia provided part of the answer to my
UCLA students' question, "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the
last palm tree say as he was doing it?" We unconsciously imagine a sudden
change: one year, the island still covered with a forest of tall palm trees be
ing used to produce wine, fruit, and timber to transport and erect statues;
the next year, just a single tree left, which an islander proceeds to fell in an
act of incredibly self-damaging stupidity. Much more likely, though, the
changes in forest cover from year to year would have been almost undetectable: yes, this year we cut down a few trees over there, but saplings are
starting to grow back again here on this abandoned garden site. Only the oldest islanders, thinking back to their childhoods decades earlier, could
have recognized a difference. Their children could no more have compre
hended their parents' tales of a tall forest than my 17-year-old sons today
can comprehend my wife's and my tales of what Los Angeles used to be like 40 years ago. Gradually, Easter Island's trees became fewer, smaller, and less
important. At the time that the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut,
the species had long ago ceased to be of any economic significance. That left
only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other
bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the falling of the last little
palm sapling. By then, the memory of the valuable palm forest of centuries
earlier had succumbed to landscape amnesia. Conversely, the speed with
which deforestation spread over early Tokugawa Japan made it easier for its
shoguns to recognize the landscape changes and the need for preemptive
action.

The third stop on the road map of failure is the most frequent, the most
surprising, and requires the longest discussion because it assumes such a wide variety of forms. Contrary to what Joseph Tainter and almost anyone else would have expected, it turns out that societies often fail even to at
tempt to solve a problem once it has been perceived.

Many of the reasons for such failure fall under the heading of what
economists and other social scientists term "rational behavior," arising from
clashes of interest between people. That is, some people may reason cor
rectly that they can advance their own interests by behavior harmful to
other people. Scientists term such behavior "rational" precisely because it employs correct reasoning, even though it may be morally reprehensible. The perpetrators know that they will often get away with their bad behav
ior, especially if there is no law against it or if the law isn't effectively en
forced. They feel safe because the perpetrators are typically concentrated
(few in number) and highly motivated by the prospect of reaping big, cer
tain, and immediate profits, while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals. That gives the losers little motivation to go to the hassle of fighting back, because each loser loses only a little and would receive only small,
uncertain, distant profits even from successfully undoing the minority's
grab. Examples include so-called perverse subsidies: the large sums of money
that governments pay to support industries that might be uneconomic without the subsidies, such as many fisheries, sugar-growing in the U.S., and
cotton-growing in Australia (subsidized indirectly through the government's
bearing the cost of water for irrigation). The relatively few fishermen and growers lobby tenaciously for the subsidies that represent much of their in
come, while the losers (all the taxpayers) are less vocal because the subsidy is
funded by just a small amount of money concealed in each citizen's tax bill.
Measures benefiting a small minority at the expense of a large majority are
especially likely to arise in certain types of democracies that bestow "swing
power" on some small groups: e.g., senators from small states in the U.S.
Senate, or small religious parties often holding the balance of power in Israel
to a degree scarcely possible under the Dutch parliamentary system.

A frequent type of rational bad behavior is "good for me, bad for you
and for everybody else"
—to put it bluntly, "selfish." As a simple example, most Montana fishermen fish for trout. A few fishermen who prefer to fish for a pike, a larger fish-eating fish not native to western Montana, surrepti
tiously and illegally introduced pike to some western Montana lakes and

rivers, where they proceeded to destroy trout fishing by eating out the trout.
That was good for the few pike fishermen and bad for the far greater num
ber of trout fishermen.

An example producing more losers and higher dollar losses is that, until
1971, mining companies in Montana on closing down a mine just left it
with its copper, arsenic, and acid leaking out into rivers, because the state of
Montana had no law requiring companies to clean up after mine closure. In
1971 the state of Montana did pass such a law, but companies discovered
that they could extract the valuable ore and then just declare bankruptcy
before going to the expense of cleaning up. The result has been about $500,000,000 of cleanup costs to be borne by the citizens of Montana and
the U.S. Mining company CEOs had correctly perceived that the law per
mitted them to save money for their companies, and to advance their own
interests through bonuses and high salaries, by making messes and leaving
the burden to society. Innumerable other examples of such behavior in the
business world could be cited, but it is not as universal as some cynics sus
pect. In the next chapter we shall examine how that range of outcomes results from the imperative for businesses to make money to the extent that government regulations, laws, and public attitudes permit.

One particular form of clashes of interest has become well known under
the name "tragedy of the commons," in turn closely related to the conflicts termed "the prisoner's dilemma" and "the logic of collective action." Con
sider a situation in which many consumers are harvesting a communally owned resource, such as fishermen catching fish in an area of ocean, or
herders grazing their sheep on a communal pasture. If everybody over-
harvests the resource, it will become depleted by overfishing or overgrazing
and thus decline or even disappear, and all of the consumers will suffer. It
would therefore be in the common interests of all consumers to exercise restraint and not overharvest. But as long as there is no effective regulation of how much resource each consumer can harvest, then each consumer would
be correct to reason, "If I don't catch that fish or let my sheep graze that
grass, some other fisherman or herder will anyway, so it makes no sense for
me to refrain from overfishing or overharvesting." The correct rational behavior is then to harvest before the next consumer can, even though the
eventual result may be the destruction of the commons and thus harm for
all consumers.

In reality, while this logic has led to many commons resources becoming
overharvested and destroyed, others have been preserved in the face of har
vesting for hundreds or even thousands of years. Unhappy outcomes in-

elude the overexploitation and collapse of most major marine fisheries, and
the extermination of much of the megafauna (large mammals, birds, and
reptiles) on every oceanic island or continent settled by humans for the first
time within the last 50,000 years. Happy outcomes include the maintenance
of many local fisheries, forests, and water sources, such as the Montana
trout fisheries and irrigation systems that I described in Chapter 1. Behind these happy outcomes lie three alternative arrangements that have evolved
to preserve a commons resource while still permitting a sustainable harvest.

One obvious solution is for the government or some other outside force
to step in, with or without the invitation of the consumers, and to enforce
quotas, as the shogun and daimyo in Tokugawa Japan, Inca emperors in the
Andes, and princes and wealthy landowners in 16th-century Germany did
for logging. However, that is impractical in some situations (e.g., the open ocean) and involves excessive administrative and policing costs in other
situations. A second solution is to privatize the resource, i.e., to divide it into individually owned tracts that each owner will be motivated to man
age prudently in his/her own interests. That practice was applied to some
village-owned forests in Tokugawa Japan. Again, though, some resources
(such as migratory animals and fish) are impossible to subdivide, and the
individual owners may find it even harder than a government's coast guard
or police to exclude intruders.

The remaining solution to the tragedy of the commons is for the con
sumers to recognize their common interests and to design, obey, and en
force prudent harvesting quotas themselves. That is likely to happen only if
a whole series of conditions is met: the consumers form a homogeneous
group; they have learned to trust and communicate with each other; they
expect to share a common future and to pass on the resource to their heirs;
they are capable of and permitted to organize and police themselves; and the boundaries of the resource and of its pool of consumers are well de
fined. A good example is the case, discussed in Chapter 1, of Montana water
rights for irrigation. While the allocation of those rights has been writ
ten into law, nowadays the ranchers mostly obey the water commissioner
whom they themselves elect, and they no longer take their disputes to court
for resolution. Other such examples of homogeneous groups prudently
managing resources that they expect to pass to their children are the
Tikopia Islanders, New Guinea highlanders, members of Indian castes, and
other groups discussed in Chapter 9. Those small groups, along with the Ice
landers (Chapter 6) and the Tokugawa Japanese constituting larger groups,
were further motivated to reach agreement by their effective isolation: it

was obvious to the whole group that they would have to survive just on
their resources for the foreseeable future. Such groups knew that they could
not make the frequently heard "ISEP" excuse that is a recipe for mismanage
ment: "It's not my problem, it's someone else's problem."

Clashes of interest involving rational behavior are also prone to arise
when the principal consumer has no long-term stake in preserving the re
source but society as a whole does. For example, much commercial harvest
ing of tropical rainforests today is carried out by international logging
companies, which typically take out short-term leases on land in one country, cut down the rainforest on all their leased land in that country, and then
move on to the next country. The loggers have correctly perceived that, once
they have paid for their lease, their interests are best served by cutting its
forest as quickly as possible, reneging on any agreements to replant, and leaving. In that way, loggers destroyed most of the lowland forests of the Malay Peninsula, then of Borneo, then of the Solomon Islands and Suma
tra, now of the Philippines, and coming up soon of New Guinea, the Ama
zon, and the Congo Basin. What is thus good for the loggers is bad for the
local people, who lose their source of forest products and suffer conse
quences of soil erosion and stream sedimentation. It's also bad for the host
country as a whole, which loses some of its biodiversity and its foundations
for sustainable forestry. The outcome of this clash of interests involving short-term leased land contrasts with a frequent outcome when the logging
company owns the land, anticipates repeated harvests, and may find a long-term perspective to be in its interests (as well as in the interests of local peo
ple and the country). Chinese peasants in the 1920s recognized a similar contrast when they compared the disadvantages of being exploited by two
types of warlords. It was hard to be exploited by a "stationary bandit," i.e., a
locally entrenched warlord, who would at least leave peasants with enough
resources to generate more plunder for that warlord in future years. Worse
was to be exploited by a "roving bandit," a warlord who like a logging com
pany with short-term leases would leave nothing for a region's peasants and
just move on to plunder another region's peasants.

A further conflict of interest involving rational behavior arises when the
interests of the decision-making elite in power clash with the interests of the
rest of society. Especially if the elite can insulate themselves from the conse
quences of their actions, they are likely to do things that profit themselves,
regardless of whether those actions hurt everybody else. Such clashes, fla
grantly personified by the dictator Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and