One of the odder elements of the New Atheist myths about the Great Library is the strange idea that its (supposed) destruction somehow singlehandedly wiped out the (alleged) advanced scientific knowledge of the ancient world in one terrible cataclysm. It doesn’t take much thought, however, to realise this makes absolutely no sense. The idea that there was just one library in the whole of the ancient world is clearly absurd and, as the mentions of other rival libraries above have already made clear, there were of course hundreds of libraries, great and small, across the ancient world. Libraries and the communities of scholars and scribes that serviced them were established by rulers and civic worthies as the kind of prestige project that was seen as part of their role in ancient society and marked their city or territory as cultured and civilised.
The Ptolemies were not the only successors to Alexander who built a Mouseion with a library; their Seleucid rivals in Syria also built one in Antioch in the reigns of Antiochus IX Eusebes (114-95 BC) or Antiochus X Philopater (95-92 BC). Roman aristocrats and rulers also included the establishment of substantial libraries as part of their civic service. Julius Caesar had intended to establish a library next to the Forum in Rome but this was ultimately achieved after his death by Gaius Asinius Pollio (75 BC – 4 AD), a soldier, politician and scholar who retired to a life of study after the tumults of the Civil Wars. Augustus established the Palatine Library in the Temple of Apollo and founded another one in the Portus Octaviae, next to the Theatre of Marcellus at the southern end of the Field of Mars. Vespasian established one in the Temple of Peace in 70 AD, but probably the largest of the Roman libraries was that of Trajan in his new forum beside the famous column that celebrates his Dacian wars. As mentioned above, this large building probably contained around 20,000 scrolls and had two main chambers – one for Greek and the other for Latin authors. Trajan’s library also seems to have established a design and layout that would be the model for libraries for centuries: a hall with desks and tables for readers with books in niches or shelves around the walls and on a mezzanine level. Libraries also came to be established in Roman bath complexes, with a very large one at the Baths of Caracalla and another at the Baths of Diocletian.
Several of these libraries were substantial. The Library of Celsus at Ephesus was built in c. 117 AD by the son of Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus in honour of his father, who had been a senator and consul in Rome, and its reconstructed facade is one of the major archaeological features of the site today. It was said to be the third largest library in the ancient world, surpassed only by the great libraries of Pergamon and Alexandria. The Great Library of Pergamon was established by the Attalid rulers of that city state and it was the true rival of the library of the Alexandrian Mouseion. It is said that the Ptolemies were so threatened by its size and the reputation of its scholars that they banned the export of papyrus to Pergamon, causing the Attalids to commission the invention of parchment as a substitute, though this is most likely a legend. What is absolutely clear, however, is that the idea that the Great Library of Alexandria was unique, whether in nature or even in size, is nonsense.
The weird idea that the loss of the Great Library was some kind of singular disaster is at least partially due to the fact that none of the various other great libraries of the ancient world are known to casual readers, so it may be easy for them to assume it was somehow unique. It also seems to stem, again, from the emphasis in popular sources on the mythical immense size of its collection which, as discussed above, is based on a naive acceptance of varied and wildly exaggerated sources. Finally, it seems to stem in no small part from (yet again) Sagan’s influential but fanciful picture of the institution as a distinctively secular hub of scientific research and, by implication, technological innovation.
Tim O’Neill, “The Great Myths 5: The Destruction Of The Great Library Of Alexandria”, History for Atheists, 2017-07-02.
November 27, 2024
QotD: The Great Library and its competitors
November 26, 2024
QotD: Hesiod’s five ages of man
Hesiod is the seventh century BC management book writer. He didn’t write about digital strategy, but his poems drone on in the earnest monotone of an old-school sociology lecturer who — after years of correcting student papers — decides to try his hand at fine letters. Hesiod is ace at conveying fact, but not at re-inventing it. This makes him a fine chronicler, but not a poet. I cannot imagine anyone reading Works and Days today for anything other than anthropological curiosity.
I don’t remember all eight hundred lines of Works and Days — just five stanzas: one for each of the Five Ages of Men. First came the Golden Age, in which the land was bounteous, the forests were rich with game, and men were decent, happy, and favoured by the gods. But this state of bliss didn’t last. Cracks began to appear during the next generation with the emergence of the Silver Race — small crooks and delinquents who “could not keep from sinning and from wrongdoing one another”. Zeus didn’t like them and eventually killed them off. The third generation, the Bronze Race, managed to be an even greater disgrace, a bunch of hoodlums of great physical strength with “unconquerable arms which grew from their shoulders on their strong limbs.” (I find this image rather powerful. It reminds me of my gym on a Friday night.) Things looked up momentarily during the subsequent Heroic Age, as Zeus created a “god-like race of hero-men called demi-gods”. But everything went definitively, irrevocably tits-up in the fifth and final age: the Iron Age. Land became barren, crops wilted, stock died of disease; men were poor, men were bitter, son betrayed father, neighbour killed neighbour, chaos and treachery ruled.
As a story of decline and fall, it’s a nice one (although I’ve seen better). In terms of literary merit, it’s nowhere near Homer. So why am I harping on Hesiod? (Now do pay attention, as here comes the point of this essay.) The key variable between the time when men were happy and the time when they were not, according to Hesiod, is work. “In the Golden Age,” he writes, men “lived like gods … remote and free from … hard toil …” But in the Iron Age, “men never rest from labour …” Writing about the Iron Age — the age of hard work and misery — Hesiod wrote about his own time, but he also wrote about our time. We live in the Iron Age. It is a sad age. It is the age when people have to work. And work kills the spirit.
Elena Shalneva “Work — the Tragedy of Our Age”, Quillette, 2020-01-29.
November 25, 2024
QotD: Le Corbusier
But most bureaucrats aren’t evil, just ignorant … and as Scott shows, this ignorance isn’t really their fault. They don’t know what they don’t know, because they can’t know. Very few bureaucratic cock-ups are as blatant as Chandigarh, where all anyone has to do is look at pictures for five minutes to conclude “you couldn’t pay me enough to move there”.
Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.
November 24, 2024
QotD: Wood
Joseph Lstiburek, Builder’s Guide to Cold Climates, 2000.
November 23, 2024
How the US Paranoia of Leftism was Born
World War Two
Published 21 Nov 2024Elizabeth Bentley’s defection in 1945 didn’t just expose a Soviet spy network — it fueled America’s second Red Scare and a wave of anti-communist paranoia. Her revelations about Soviet infiltration within the U.S. government became a catalyst for McCarthyism, reshaping American politics and society in an era defined by fear and suspicion.
(more…)
QotD: Nietzsche’s message
H.L. Mencken, “Transvaluation of Morals”, The Smart Set, 1915-03.
November 22, 2024
QotD: Pre-modern armies on the move
(As an aside: one my enduring frustrations is the tendency of pre-modern strategy games to represent most flat areas as “plains” of grassland often with a separate “farmland” terrain type used only in areas of very dense settlement. But around most of the Mediterranean, most of the flat, cleared land at lower elevations would have been farmland, with all of the obstructions and complications that implies; rolling grasslands tend to be just that – uplands too hilly for farming.)
The other problem is pathfinding and geolocation. Figuring out where you off-road overland with just a (highly detailed) map and a compass is sufficiently difficult that it is a sport (Orienteering). Prior to 1300, armies in the broader Mediterranean world were likely to lack both; the compass (invented in China) arrives in the Mediterranean in the 1300s and detailed topographical maps of the sort that hikers today might rely on remained rare deep into the modern period, especially maps of large areas. Consequently it could be tricky to determine an army’s exact heading (sun position could give something approximate, of course) or position. Getting lost in unfamiliar territory was thus a very real hazard. Indeed, getting lost in familiar territory was a real hazard: Suetonius records that Julius Caesar, having encamped not far from the Rubicon got lost trying to find it, spent a whole night wandering trying to locate it (his goal being to make the politically decisive crossing with just a few close supporters in secrecy first before his army crossed). In the end he had to find a local guide to work his way back to it in the morning (Suet. Caes. 31.2). So to be clear: famed military genius Julius Caesar got lost trying to find a 50 mile long river only about 150 miles away from Rome when he tried to cut cross-country instead of over the roads.
Instead, armies relied on locals guides (be they friendly, bought or coerced) to help them find their way or figure out where they were on whatever maps they could get together. Locals in turn tend to navigate by landmarks and so are likely to guide the army along the paths and roads they themselves use to travel around the region. Which is all as well because the army needs to use the roads anyway and no one wants to get lost. The road and path network thus becomes a vital navigational aid: roads and paths both lead to settlements full of potential guides (to the next settlement) and because roads tend to connect large settlements and large settlements tend to be the objectives of military campaigns, the road system “points the way”. Consequently, armies rarely strayed off of the road network and were in most cases effectively confined to it. Small parties might be sent out off of the road network from the main body, but the main body was “stuck” on the roads.
That means the general does not have to cope with an infinitely wide range of maneuver possibilities but a spiderweb of possible pathways. Small, “flying columns” without heavy baggage could use minor roads and pathways, but the main body of the army was likely to be confined to well-traveled routes connecting large settlements.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part III: On the move”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-08-12.
November 21, 2024
QotD: The 1965 Immigration Act
Caldwell’s book is far too nuanced and expansive to cover here. But he identifies key moments and key changes. The 1965 Immigration Act was the beginning of a huge experiment in human history. It was complemented by open bipartisan-elite toleration of mass undocumented immigration across the southern border. And civil rights became something other than ending racial discrimination by the state: It became a regime of ending discrimination by individuals in economic and social life; then it begot affirmative action, in which race played an explicit part in an individual’s chance of getting into college; and it culminated in the social-justice agenda, which would meaningfully do away with the American concept of individual rights and see it replaced by a concept of racial group rights. Caldwell sees the last 50 years as a battle between two rival constitutions: one dedicated to freedom, the other to equality of outcomes, or “equity.” And I think he is right to see the former as worth fighting for.
But how do we get out of this trap? That’s where the depression sinks in. Neither Caldwell nor Klein see a way back to a common weal and a common good. Ezra offers some technical corrections — ending the Electoral College, the filibuster, and winner-takes-all voting. And they might help, although their potential unintended consequences should be carefully considered. Then he recommends meditation to control our own primal instincts — a role that Christianity traditionally held. (I don’t disagree with Ezra on the benefits of meditation, but it’s hardly a game-changer in America in 2020.) Caldwell proposes something far more drastic: a repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yes, you read that right. The proposal’s perversity matches its impossibility — and it’s buried in one sentence on the penultimate page of the book.
So much of Caldwell’s polemical history is fresh air; but the bleakness of its reactionary mood reveals how tribal Caldwell has become. He can barely eke out a few sentences reluctantly acknowledging some of the good things that the last 50 years have brought — in the lives of many women, in the prospects for African-Americans, in the dignity of homosexuals. He never acknowledges that Obama actually stood a chance of healing racial divides, if the GOP hadn’t demonized him from the start. And as an old friend of Chris’s, I know him to be a more gracious and humane person than this polemic might, at times, suggest. But that such a good man has gotten caught up in polarization and tribalism and such a brilliant man sees no hope for a peaceful resolution merely reveals how deep our problem is.
I have a smidgen more optimism. I see in the long-delayed backlash to the social-justice movement an inkling of a new respect for individual and creative freedom and for the old idea of toleration rather than conformity. I see in the economic and educational success of women since the 1970s a possible cease-fire in the culture wars over sex. I see most homosexuals content to live out our lives without engaging in an eternal Kulturkampf against the cis and the straight. Race? Alas, I see no way forward but a revival of Christianity, of its view of human beings as “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. This means such a transcendent view of human equality that it does not require equality of outcomes to see equal dignity and worth.
Yes, I’m hoping for a miracle. But at this point, what else have we got?
Andrew Sullivan, “America Needs A Miracle”, New York, 2020-01-31.
November 20, 2024
QotD: The Chads, the Staceys, and the Incels
These boys have their own vocabulary and belief systems. Pretty girls (Staceys) all sleep with the same few Alpha men (Chads). The Staceys ride the Cock Carousel, ie, have sex with the same few Chads. All this sluttish behaviour gives the Staceys something called A Thousand Cock Stare.
It is a grim world, in which women are evil and manipulative, and hated both for being sluts and for being virgins. It is a world in which pictures of pretty girls with their pet dogs are unbelievably sinister. These boys choose to live in this bleak world. They are culpable. But, if you tell all young, white boys that they are damned, why should they not behave as if they are damned?
A society which does not allow for people to atone, to be redeemed, and to be judged on their intent and actions is a miserable place. Most people interact with each other without antagonism most of the time. We should start being a bit more forgiving to each other, ditch the Puritanism and learn to cherish the well-meaning stumble towards decency. Even if, sometimes, we fall.
Antonia Senior, “Identity politics is Christianity without the redemption”, UnHerd, 2020-01-20.
November 19, 2024
QotD: The Reformation
Your hotter Protestants, your John Calvins and Oliver Cromwells and so on, saw all of this as mere ritual. And to be fair to them, late-medieval Catholicism was very elaborate, and very, very weird — slog through a few chapters of The Stripping of the Altars if you want the details. To the Prods, this was cheating — you can’t just go through the motions and expect to get into Heaven. They made a similar distinction between “natural magic” and the unlawful stuff — the one was undertaken only after deep study and the most rigorous self-purification, while the other “worked” entirely mechanically, because what the sorcerer was really doing was cheating; he was really making a deal with a (or The) devil, to short-circuit the natural processes.
Now, it’s important to realize that the Protestants were not saying anything close to “do your own thing, man”. They were NOT hippies, encouraging everyone to read the Bible and decide for themselves how best to commune with the Big JC. The German peasants thought that’s what Martin Luther was saying back in 1524, but Luther himself was out there urging the authorities to smash the peasants with extreme prejudice. The Protestants were, in fact, extremely concerned about ritual. It just had to be the right ritual, the Biblically sanctioned ritual, and nothing but that — that’s what “Puritanism” (originally an insult) means.
Severian, “Faith vs. Works”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-07.
November 18, 2024
QotD: Napoleon and his army
Napoleon’s easy rapport with his troops also gives us some glimpses of his freakish memory. On multiple occasions he chats with a soldier for an hour, or camps with them the eve before a battle; and then ten years later he bumps into the same guy and has total recall of their entire conversation and all of the guy’s biographical details. The troops obviously went nuts for this kind of stuff. It all sort of reminds me of a much older French tradition, where in the early Middle Ages a feudal lord would (1) symbolically help his peasants bring in the harvest and (2) literally wrestle with his peasants at village festivals. Back to your point about the culture, my anti-egalitarian view is that that kind of intimacy across a huge gulf of social status is easiest when the lines of demarcation between the classes are bright, clear, and relatively immovable. What’s crazy about Napoleon, then, is that despite him being the epitome of the arriviste he has none of the snobbishness of the nouveaux-riches, but all of the easy familiarity of the natural aristocrat.
True dedication to the welfare of those under your command,1 and back-slapping jocularity with the troops, are two of the attributes of a wildly popular leader. The third2 is actually leading from the front, and this was the one that blew my mind. Even after he became emperor, Napoleon put himself on the front line so many times he was practically asking for a lucky cannonball to end his career. You’d think after the fourth or fifth time a horse was shot out from under him, or the guy standing right next to him was obliterated by canister shot, the freaking emperor would be a little more careful, but no. And it wasn’t just him — the vast majority of Napoleon’s marshals and other top lieutenants followed his example and met violent deaths.
This is one of the most lacking qualities in leaders today — it’s so bad that we don’t even realize what we’re missing. Obviously modern generals rarely put themselves in the line of fire or accept the same environmental hardships as their troops. But it isn’t just the military, how many corporate executives do you hear about staying late and suffering alongside their teams when crunch time hits? It does still happen, but it’s rare, and the most damning thing is that it’s usually because of some eccentricity in that particular individual. There’s no systemic impetus to commanders or managers sharing the suffering of their men, it just isn’t part of our model of what leadership is anymore. And yet we thirst for it.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Napoleon the Great, by Andrew Roberts”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-21.
1. When not flinging them into the face of Prussian siege guns.
2. Okay, there are more than three. Some others include: deploying a cult of personality, bestowing all kinds of honors and awards on your men when they perform, and delivering them victory after victory. Of course, Napoleon did all of those things too.
November 17, 2024
QotD: “Here we have a game that combines the charm of a Pentagon briefing with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping”
Although Gygax left the company in the mid-1980s, TSR today continues to crank out D&D rule books, D&D miniature playing pieces, and all sorts of other D&D paraphernalia in quantities that make one wonder about the nation’s mental health. By means of a cunning stratagem (I asked somebody at the office), I managed to get my hands on a couple of those sacred rule books, and let me tell you, R. buddy, this game is weird.
The basic idea in your run-of-the-mill Go Fish-type game is to get all your opponent’s cards or all his checkers or some other readily grasped commodity. Not so with D&D. Here is a quote from Mr. Gygax on the subject: “The ultimate aim of the game is to gain sufficient esteem as a good player to retire your character — he becomes a kind of mythical, historical figure, someone for others to look up to and admire”. If what you’ve been playing up till now is Parcheesi you ain’t ready for this.
To play D&D you need at least two acolytes, who play under the guidance of a vaguely Mansonesque personage called the Dungeon Master (DM). By means of various murky protocols involving the use of charts and dice, each player establishes the persona of the “character” he or she will manipulate in the game, who typically ends up (if male) being an antisocial cutthroat of some sort, or (if female) possessed of large, grapefruit-like breasts. I deduce the latter from studying the illustrations in the book. Admittedly I was looking at a very old edition. Perhaps the newer ones are more PC. It’s always the way. Apart from predictable characteristics like strength and intelligence, players also have to determine such baffling minutiae as their likelihood of contracting communicable diseases or becoming infested by parasites. Why these things are important I have no clue. I’m just telling you what the rule book says.
The preliminaries having been dealt with, the players are led through an imaginary dungeon devised by the DM in search of treasure or some such. On the way, they will encounter various obstacles and evil creatures, which they will have to defeat or evade.
The concept seems simple enough. It’s the application that throws me. There are two main problems: (1) there are one billion rules, and (2) the game requires nonstop mathematical finagling that would constipate Einstein. The rule book is laden with such mystifying pronouncements as the following: “An ancient spell-using red dragon of huge size with 88 hits points has a BXPV of 1300, XP/HP total of 1408, SAXPB of 2800 (armor class plus special defense plus high intelligence plus saving throw bonus due to h.p./die), and an EAXPA of 2550 (major breath weapon plus spell use plus attack damage of 3-30/bite) — totalling 7758 h.p.” Here we have a game that combines the charm of a Pentagon briefing with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping. I don’t get it.
If you want to know more about Dungeons & Dragons, you can find D&D paraphernalia at many hobby and game stores. For the location of the outlet nearest you call 1-800-384-4TSR. Contrary to what you might think, all calls to this number are NOT immediately reported to the police.
Cecil Adams, “What’s the deal with Dungeons and Dragons?”, The Straight Dope, 1980-09-26.
November 16, 2024
QotD: Mao Zedong’s strategy of “protracted war” is a “strategy of the weak”
First, the party trying to win a protracted war accepts that they are unable to win a “war of quick decision” – because protracted war tends to be so destructive, if you have a decent shot at winning a war of quick decision, you take it. I do want to stress this – no power resorts to insurgency or protracted war by choice; they do it out of necessity. This is a strategy of the weak. Next, the goal of protracted war is to change the center of gravity of the conflict from a question of industrial and military might to a question of will – to make it about mobilizing people rather than industry or firepower. The longer the war can be protracted, the more opportunities will be provided to degrade enemy will and to reinforce friendly will (through propaganda, recruitment, etc.).
Those concerns produce the “phase” pattern where the war proceeds – ideally – in stages, precisely because the weaker party cannot try for a direct victory at the outset. In the first phase, it is assumes the stronger party will try to use their strength to force that war of quick decision (that they win). In response, the defender has to find ways to avoid the superior firepower of the stronger party, often by trading space for time or by using the supportive population as covering terrain or both. The goal of this phase is not to win but to stall out the attacker’s advance so that the war can be protracted; not losing counts as success early in a protracted war.
That success produces a period of strategic stalemate which enables the weaker party to continue to degrade the will of their enemy, all while building their own strength through recruitment and through equipment supplied by outside powers (which often requires a political effort directed at securing that outside support). Finally, once enemy will is sufficiently degraded and their foreign partners have been made to withdraw (through that same erosion of will), the originally weaker side can shift to conventional “positional” warfare, achieving its aims.
This is the basic pattern that ties together different sorts of protracted war: protraction, the focus on will, the consequent importance of the political effort alongside the military effort, and the succession of phases.
(For those who want more detail on this and also more of a sense of how protracted war, insurgency and terrorism interrelate as strategies of the weak, when I cover this topic in the military history survey, the textbook I use is W. Lee, Waging War: Conflict, Culture and Innovation in World History (2016). Chapter 14 covers these approaches and the responses to them and includes a more expensive bibliography of further reading. Mao’s On Protracted War can be found translated online. Many of Giáp’s writings on military theory are translated and gathered together in R. Stetler (ed.), The Military Art of People’s War: Selected Writings of General Vo Nguyen Giáp (1970).)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How the Weak Can Win – A Primer on Protracted War”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-03.
November 15, 2024
QotD: Battles are over-rated
Start with theory. States fight to impose their will on another state in pursuit of some political goal. To do that requires that they achieve sufficient local military superiority that the other state can’t stop them from achieving their political goal.
Nazi Germany wanted to be the new administrators of the agricultural area of the western Soviet Union. To do that, they had to evict the Soviet military, whether through direct destruction or forcing the Soviet government to withdraw their armed forces. Individual battles for control of a localized area only matter if they are a means to that end.
Does the occupation or non-occupation of that point on the map affect the ability of a combatant to keep fighting?
In some limited cases, yes. Battlefield victory enabled Germany to overrun France before France could really focus its productive effort on the war. After their surrender, the French could not produce weapons, and they functionally could not organize their manpower to fight the Germans. But if the German army conquered, say, a random city in the Soviet Union, like Stalingrad, Soviet production and manpower was barely affected. The war goes on.
In theory, the German army could destroy so much of the Soviet military in one battle (or even a few discrete battles) that the Soviets run out of men or weapons. If there was ever a time this could have happened, it would have been the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, when the Germans basically won a series of crushing victories.
The problem for the Germans was that by World War II, people in the combatant countries were good at building stuff in vast quantities, and the major combatants of World War II generally had access to sufficient natural resources. Even massive armies could not destroy produced weapons systems (e.g., tanks, airplanes) on the battlefield fast enough to remove the other side’s ability to continue fighting. What could (and did) happen was the destruction of the other side’s ability to produce and distribute weapons.
Sure enough, if you look at the actual data from even the largest battles, neither side really destroys a hugely significant amount of stuff. Take the Battle of Kursk — the largest tank and air battle of World War II. Wikipedia will dazzle you with the numbers of soldiers involved (millions), tanks deployed (in the ballpark of 10,000), and aircraft in the sky (in the ballpark of 5,000).
In this entire vast battle that supposedly dictated the outcome of the Eastern Front, the Germans lost approximately 350 armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) during the most intense 10 days of fighting. In the two months around when the battle took place, the Germans lost 1,331 AFVs on the entire Eastern Front. In the year of the battle, 1943, the Germans built more than 12,000 AFVs. Also worth noting: they disproportionately lost older, obsolete tanks at Kursk, and built new, capable tanks. The Germans lost a very manageable amount of equipment at Kursk — less than a month’s worth of AFV production.
If modern war means you cannot realistically destroy enough weapons in one battle to matter — if the largest battle of all time didn’t really matter — what did?
Anonymous, “Your Book Review: How the War Was Won“, Astral Codex Ten, 2024-08-09.
November 14, 2024
QotD: The tragedy of the commons in North London
One fact about those bathing ponds on the Heath:
Honesty boxes for bathers to pay to swim were introduced in 2005. There were plans for a compulsory charge in 2012, but they came to nothing.
We have open access to a resource, Marxian access. We also have one other fact:
It was once a well-kept secret. Now the bathing ponds on Hampstead Heath are among the most crowded parts of London on a hot summer’s day.
We have – by one measure at least – excessive use of that resource, use that needs to be limited in some manner.
This is a problem that has been noted before, it’s called the Tragedy of the Commons. As Garrett Hardin points out there are only two ways of restricting such access, capitalist – charge for it – or socialist – regulate.
The third option, Elinor Ostrom’s, does not work with this number of people. That communal agreement tops out at about 3,000 peeps, not 10 million.
Which of the two solutions works depends upon the specific circumstance and isn’t the point to be made here. Rather, the lesson to learn is that Marxian access just doesn’t work when demand is at or above capacity. A useful thing to think about when contemplating other areas of the economy.
Tim Worstall, “Hampstead Heath Ponds And The Tragedy Of The Commons”, Continental Telegraph, 2020-01-19.
