Tragedy of the Commoners in Economic Space as a Public Good

Abstract

The Japanese are the great children lovers, ever since the era of Manyoh (700s AD) when the poet Okura Yamanoue declared that silver, gold and precious stones were nothing compared to his beloved children. If the wife is the master of the household, the children as its core are the kings of a typical Japanese family. Nevertheless the present Japan may be characterized by gross underproduction of children per family. One of the many reasons cited casually is poor housing conditions with cramped spaces often referred to as ‘rabbit hutches’. It goes without saying that the greater are the costs of anything, the less is the quantity demanded, and supplied accord-ingly, in the market. The higher cost of housing, however, does not ipso facto imply underproduction of it, nor does it imply the underproduction of children as an output(!?) of the housing input.

The present title ‘Tragedy of the Commoners’ is stimulated by Paul A. Samuelson’s contribution to the present volume with a similar title, ‘Tragedy of the Commons ...’, but with a subtle, though apparent, difference. This is a revised extended version of a part of my paper presented at the PRSCO meetings in Cairns, 1991, entitled ‘Diagranomics Pedagogica’, and subsequently reported in the present form at the Second PRSCO Summer Institute in Taipei, Taiwan, 1992. Helpful comments and discussions by Professors Martin Bronfenbrenner, William Baumol, Nicholas Economides, Masa Fujita, Geoffrey Hewings, Chao-cheng Mai, and Yorgos Papageorgiou are gratefully acknowledged, with the usual disclaimer.