1. Do the Concepts of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ and the Problem of ‘Collective Action’ Help You to Understand What Politics Is Essentially About? Your Answer Should Include a Statement of Your Understanding of the

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The concepts of the ‘ tragedy of the commons’ and the problem of ‘collective action’ most definitely help my understanding of what politics is essentially about. I will illustrate my understanding of the ‘tragedy of commons’ by exploring Hardin’s original publication and explain my understanding of what the ‘tragedy of the commons is by using global warming and pollution as current and topical examples of the ’tragedy of the commons’. I will then proceed to illustrate my understanding of the problem of ‘collective action’ aided by the great political scientist Elinor Ostrom and using relavant examples. Finally I will outline my understanding of what politics is essentially about by discussing the different meanings and associations with the word politics before coming to my conclusion of what politics is about after studying both aforementioned concepts. The Tragedy of the Commons Garrett Hardin explored the phenomenon of individuals acting independently and sanely according to each person’s self-interest, despite their knowledge that eroding the common resource is against their long-term best interests in “the tragedy of the commons “in 1968. Essentially then the ‘tragedy of commons’ is a situation where people cooperate or the community as a whole loses; yet each person has a large incentive to not cooperate. Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher referred to it as the ‘prisoners dilemma’. “In the classic version of the game, collaboration is dominated by betrayal and so the only possible outcome is for both prisoners to betray the other. Regardless of what the other prisoner chooses, one will always gain a greater payoff by betraying the other. Because betrayal is always more beneficial than cooperation, all purely rational prisoners would seemingly betray the other. However, in reality humans display a systematic bias towards cooperative behavior in this

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