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By Root 1971 0

been written into law, nowadays the ranchers mostly obey the water commissioner whom they themselves elect, and they no longer take their disputes to court for resolution. Other such examples of homogeneous groups prudently managing resources that they expect to pass to their children are the Tikopia Islanders, New Guinea highlanders, members of Indian castes, and other groups discussed in Chapter 9. Those small groups, along with the Icelanders (Chapter 6) and the Tokugawa Japanese constituting larger groups, were further motivated to reach agreement by their effective isolation: it was obvious to the whole group that they would have to survive just on their resources for the foreseeable future. Such groups knew that they could not make the frequently heard “ISEP” excuse that is a recipe for mismanagement: “It’s not my problem, it’s someone else’s problem.”

Clashes of interest involving rational behavior are also prone to arise when the principal consumer has no long-term stake in preserving the resource but society as a whole does. For example, much commercial harvesting of tropical rainforests today is carried out by international logging companies, which typically take out short-term leases on land in one country, cut down the rainforest on all their leased land in that country, and then move on to the next country. The loggers have correctly perceived that, once they have paid for their lease, their interests are best served by cutting its forest as quickly as possible, reneging on any agreements to replant, and leaving. In that way, loggers destroyed most of the lowland forests of the Malay Peninsula, then of Borneo, then of the Solomon Islands and Sumatra, now of the Philippines, and coming up soon of New Guinea, the Amazon, and the Congo Basin. What is thus good for the loggers is bad for the local people, who lose their source of forest products and suffer consequences of soil erosion and stream sedimentation. It’s also bad for the host country as a whole, which loses some of its biodiversity and its foundations for sustainable forestry. The outcome of this clash of interests involving short-term leased land contrasts with a frequent outcome when the logging company owns the land, anticipates repeated harvests, and may find a long-term perspective to be in its interests (as well as in the interests of local people and the country). Chinese peasants in the 1920s recognized a similar contrast when they compared the disadvantages of being exploited by two types of warlords. It was hard to be exploited by a “stationary bandit,” i.e. a locally entrenched warlord, who would at least leave peasants with enough resources to generate more plunder for that warlord in future years. Worse was to be exploited by a “roving bandit,” a warlord who like a logging company with short-term leases would leave nothing for a region’s peasants and just move on to plunder another region’s peasants.

A further conflict of interest involving rational behavior arises when the interests of the decision-making elite in power clash with the interests of the rest of society. Especially if the elite can insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions, they are likely to do things that profit themselves, regardless of whether those actions hurt everybody else. Such clashes, flagrantly personified by the dictator Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and the governing elite in Haiti, are becoming increasingly frequent in the modern U.S., where rich people tend to live within their gated compounds (Plate 36) and to drink bottled water. For example, Enron’s executives correctly calculated that they could gain huge sums of money for themselves by looting the company coffers and thereby harming all the stockholders, and that they were likely to get away with their gamble.

Throughout recorded history, actions or inactions by self-absorbed kings, chiefs, and politicians have been a regular cause of societal collapses, including those of the Maya kings, Greenland Norse chiefs, and modern Rwandan politicians discussed in this book. Barbara Tuchman