There were many examples of overutilization mistakes of planned economy, during Stalin rule when dissidents were shot immediately, literally leading to famine and deaths… and I am afraid it might come back.

IMO, inequality is what causes tyranny of monopolies, leading to inevitable mismanagement… but that's another story. Remember, inequality caused Communist Revolution in Russia and nazism in Germany :)

Where it does happen, it seems, are the societies that are to large to impose such tribal system of control (above Dunbar's number?) or societies that are changing to fast to evolve any efficient system.

A guy that tries to use more than others do was called "мироед" ("miroyed", the one who eats what should be distributed among all).

The Russian commons' goal was very simple: all the members should keep alive until the next harvest, even if the weather or other conditions were unfavourable, which was happening too frequent. So all resources were gathered together and distributed evenly.

As for moving beyond homo economicus paradigm: Yes, when people are not lacking basic means to survive and when they are relatively confident about being able to survive in the future, quest for social status becomes more important driving force than profit-seeking. From that point on, accumulation of wealth is driven by desire to improve one's social status rather than other way round.

While that may seem silly, there's a good reason for that: In societies beyond dunbar number there's no way to maintain social status using traditional means (gifts and such) The only fully scalable way of maintaining status (in other words, making it possible to prove your status to any other human beign, even if you haven't met them before) is money.

So, if you are thinking about alternative ways for the economy to work, you'll have to solve the scalability problem in some other way.

"the Tiv women of central Nigeria who are constantly giving gifts, but never of the same value, to respond a gift with an equal gift would end the social debt and by implication, the relationship"

Seems that social status may also be a potent driving force. Which might not be too far fetched when for example considering things in the light of SCARF SCARF or similar models of driving forces.

And really, the massive ammounts of economic value produced in for form of Commons based peer-production should make one a little skeptical of the profit-seeking world view.

The real goal is to balance the profit-seeking and sustainability.

The point of the article is not to propose some system to achieve that (I don't have one) but to make it clear that privatisation is not a panacea and "tragedy of the commons" which is often used as an argument for privatisation is in fact an argument against over-exploitation, whether of private or public property.

as indicated, it's rather the privatisation of the cows, and the resulting short-term individual profit-seeking that's causing the tragedy.

I like Nassim Talebs books as well, unfortunately, haven't read the last one yet.

When cows are gone you can dig for gold,… Not scaling the cows business could be a mistake. Unless by cows you mean just environmental resources.

The real question: what is the worst case scenario and can we survive it? If not then let's regulate. If yes (with proof!) then let's suck it up. Next time someone else will look like an "idiot" anyway.

These ideas are not mine. They are the main point of Nassim Taleb's Antifragile book.

PS: small typo s/prople/people/

A real-life exemple: elections. Your vote is not going to tip the scale, and so voting is a waste of time. Except that if (mostly) everyone does this, it only leaves a handful of idiots / fanatics / paid voters to decide on the issue.

Interestingly, most people get very upset when you suggest that voting is a waste of time. More understandably, most people condemn the idiot in the tragedy of the commons. So there seems to be a strong "sense of the commons".