Mancur Olson and the Tragedy of the Unbalanced Commons

• Autorzy: Richard Zeckhauser
• Języki publikacji: EN

Abstrakty

EN

Mancur Olson offered us big thoughts on big subjects. Today, he might well attack the problem of climate change and the current failure of nations to act effectively. Olson would note the incentives of nations to ride free or cheaply. He would observe that climate change is an alliance problem, one where some nations have much more at stake than others. With climate change, the alliance problem is redoubled, since the asymmetries among nations fall along multiple dimensions, including those of vulnerability to climate change, history of greenhouse emissions, emissions per dollar of GNP, level of economic development, and cultural environmental concerns. Each nation, valuing primarily its own concerns, advances principles favoring itself in the apportionment of painful cuts. Not surprisingly, the cuts that nations have agreed upon for the heralded 2015 Paris Accords will be woefully insuffi cient to avoid exacerbating climate change. Thus, despite much international discussion and many platitudinous agreements, concerns about the distribution of painful cuts will continue to prevent the nations of the world from even approaching an effi cient agreement. Our threatened planet needs a more sophisticated approach to this and other collective action problems, a field pioneered by Mancur Olson. (original abstract)

Słowa kluczowe

EN

Economic theory; Climate change; Political and economic situation; Economic policy

PL

Teoria ekonomii; Zmiany klimatyczne; Sytuacja polityczno-ekonomiczna; Polityka gospodarcza

• Czasopismo: Decyzje
• Rocznik: 2015
• Numer: nr 24
• Strony: 191--202

Twórcy

autor

Richard Zeckhauser

• Harvard Kennedy School, USA

Bibliografia

• Kaminski, Marek M. Empirical Examples of Voting Paradoxes. In: Handbook of Social Choice and Voting, edited by Jac Heckelman and Nicholas Miller, forthcoming.
• Olson, Mancur. (1965). The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Olson, Mancur. (1982). The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Olson, Mancur. (2000). Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships. New York, NY: Basic Books.
• Olson, Mancur, and Richard Zeckhauser. (1966). An Economic Theory of Alliances. Review of Economics and Statistics, 48(3), 266-279.
• Schelling, Thomas C. (1960). The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Identyfikatory

DOI

10.7206/DEC.1733-0092.67