Neoclassical economics has spent the last fifty years naturalising a deeply political fiction: that humans are self-interested, rational maximisers who cannot be trusted to manage their shared lives. From this single assumption, it built an entire moral universe—one where market incentives and state control are not just helpful, but essential. Without them, we’re told, cooperation breaks down, trust disappears, and systems unravel. Left to ourselves, we destroy the very resources we depend on.
Two seductive models sustain—and institutionalise—this worldview: the Tragedy of the Commons and the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
* The Tragedy of the Commons is a myth more faithfully recited in business schools than the invisible hand itself. Coined by Garrett Hardin in 1968, it tells the story of a shared pasture that inevitably ends up being overgrazed as all individuals pursue personal gain. His conclusion was clear: commons always fail unless privatised or centrally regulated. But Hardin never studied actual commons. His scenario was a fictional thought experiment, not an empirical analysis. Worse, he described not a commons (governed by community norms), but an unregulated "open-access regime". In reality, as Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel-winning research proved, well-managed commons thrive—because people build rules, sanctions, and relationships that sustain them. Hardin’s model was never a warning—it was an ideological justification for enclosure, disguised as science.
* The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a famous thought experiment: two players, one decision, no trust—both defect, both lose. The lesson? Cooperating is irrational unless enforced from outside. But the model is completely rigged. It strips away memory, communication, and social context. It removes everything that makes us human—loyalty, learning, moral judgment—and, of course, failure is guaranteed. The dilemma only “proves” something by ignoring everything that matters - in real life, cooperation quickly emerges, norms evolve, reciprocity holds.
These two models are not descriptive. They are disciplinary. They teach us to assume the worst, fear each other, and surrender moral agency. They recast morality as inefficiency and turn coordination into a technical problem for elites to solve.
All this serves one interest above all: power. If people can’t be trusted, then someone else must be—someone to own, to govern, to decide.
The tragedy isn’t the commons—it’s the dismal economic theory that taught us they could never work.
The real tragedy of economics is that it discredits care, delegitimises cooperation, and concentrates authority in the hands of those who profit most from public distrust: asset owners, technocrats, corporate managers, and state bureaucrats.
It’s time we told the truth.