Why COVID is NOT a "tragedy of the commons"

Though the phrase was catchy and supported by various market interests after the 1968 article that popularized the phrase there never was a tragedy of the commons, except as an idea. But to apply the phrase to the COVID pandemic is wrong for another reason too. COVID is a fundamentally a biological affliction, arising from the nature of the virus. Its rapid spread everywhere around the world is associated with the typical everyday indiscriminate travel and social mingling of people in many countries, but the inability to control it quickly likely had as much to do with the inability of societies to act with a united (aka common) approach that, if need be, curtails previous individual license. Either way, the problem is not just that of people coming together, it has been a problem of a public policy failure to coordinate, compounded by the reduction of public investment, as promoted by neoliberal economists, in societal resources like Personal Protective Equipment.

One major point of Elinor Ostrom's famous Nobel honoured work on what we may call "the comedy of the commons" was that successfully managed commons were, and remain, sustainable. It is individualism, competition and austerity that underlie COVID related breakdowns. A community of Milton Freidman wannabes are unlikely to sustain a successful commons. That's their problem, not the commons'.