[MUSI So how do we solve the problem of the tragedy of the commons.
But when you think about it, the issue with the common resources is really that
there's no property rights. Think about the issue when, the problem
when we were talking about the fishery. If you can get the rights to the one
person for controlling the resources, and that person will actually probably use it
efficiently like when we talk about the example of one person owning the A boats.
So therefore to solve the problem of the commons, It's, it's going to require some
measure of giving property rights or transferring the property rights in some
way and controlling the access to it. So there are different ways that our
governments have tried to do this. A common one for a resource like, fish Is
quotas, right? So you have a particular, the, the, the
rights of the, of the area that the people fish are given to the community, let's say
to a, to a fishing community, and they can establish quotas that would allow the
fishery to be used in a, in a sustainable way or an efficient way, right?
Now that's really hard to do because, you know, the water, the waters are open
access so you, it's, It's kind of difficult to control access to different
parts of, of the oceans. But that's one way of, of doing it, if you
give the, the rights to the community. Then the community as a whole, will be
able to perhaps, try to use their resources more effectively.
In the U.S., for, things like, species accessation, and so forth, we, and
hunting, we have hunting licenses that we give or fishing licenses.
And that is one way that the, the government tries to control the resource
or take, take ownership of the resource and use it in a way that is more
sustainable that is more efficient instead of just giving people free access to it.
For things like, slike sort of highway congestion, right?
Which is another common resource when you have a lot of people using the highway.
And then everyone ends up spending more time in the traffic and so forth,
everyone's putting more cost into it. One things that the governments have done
is to put tolls, right, so there's a particular amount of money you have to pay
to drive on a particular road. Now a lot of roads, it's difficult to do
that and, and politically it's a very tricky thing to actually put more tolls
because consumers should always demand you know, tolls to be roads to be free since
they are paying taxes on it. But on the other hand more, a lot of
economists will say, well, you know, but the, the result of everyone, however,
having free access to the roads is that it will be in a traffic jam.
So in the, in the high populated cities in the US like Houston and you know, the
corridor between Houston and Austin and San Antonio and Austin in Texas and also
in places like Chicago where they have a lot of traffic congestion.
Government have suggested or have play around with the idea of, what I call,
congestion pricing. Which is a road in which a toll, the
access to the road is controlled by a toll.
And the toll price changes according to how much traffic the road has.
And some of the experience at that, you know, the places that have actually done
this, and probably the main one we have in Texas.
I've actually seen very a lot of success. I mean the, the, the traffic on those
roads. I have actually being decreased quite
dramatically and people can drive, well, faster and get to their places faster, but
it is a really difficult thing to sell, for government officials, that people have
to pay higher price for roads. But now that you're, you know, taking an
economics class, now you understand that there's, that there's, there's two sides
to, to every story and, and the other side of letting people.
Free access to, to the highways doesn't mean that they're actually going to use
the highways for free. The cost of using the highways is the fact
that you'll have to put up with traffic congestion.
Now, turn yourself other ways of solving the common research.
A lot of them have to do with the topic that we're going to talk in the next
section. Which is the topic of externalities.
So I'm going to, we're going to list some of those, policies to when we talk about
externalities in the next session. Produced by OCE atlas digital media at the
University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.
Dr. José J. Vázquez-CognetClinical Professor
