The Tragedy of the Commons
I mentioned it earlier when quoting Jared Diamond some years ago, but back then did not know the English term for what in German is called "Drama der Allmende".
Quote:
The metaphor illustrates the argument that free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately reduces the resource through over-exploitation, temporarily or permanently. This occurs because the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals or groups, each of whom is motivated to maximize use of the resource to the point in which they become reliant on it, while the costs of the exploitation are borne by all those to whom the resource is available (which may be a wider class of individuals than those who are exploiting it). This, in turn, causes demand for the resource to increase, which causes the problem to snowball until the resource collapses (even if it retains a capacity to recover).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
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