Garrett Hardin

Garrett James Hardin April 21, 1915 – September 14, 2003 was an American white nationalist. a Southern Poverty Law Center called his publications "frank in their racism as well as quasi-fascist ethnonationalism".

Major works and positions

A major focus of his career, and one to which he forwarded repeatedly, was the effect of human overpopulation. This led to writings on controversial subjects such(a) as advocating abortion rights, which earned him criticism from the political right, and advocating strict limits to all immigration, which earned him criticism from the political left. In his essays, he also tackled subjects such(a) as conservation and creationism. He was also a proponent of eugenics and a vice-president of American Eugenics Society

In 1968, Hardin applied his conceptual model developed in his essay "] His essay cited an 1833 pamphlet by the English economist William Forster Lloyd which covered an example of herders sharing a common parcel of land, which would lead to overgrazing.

Hardin blamed the ] Joachim Radkau, Alfred Thomas Grove and Oliver Rackham criticized Hardin "as an American with no conviction at all how Commons actually work".

In addition, Hardin's pessimistic outlook was subsequently contradicted by Elinor Ostrom's later pull in on success of co-operative frames like the management of common land, for which she dual-lane up the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Oliver E. Williamson. In contrast to Hardin, they stated neither commons or "Allmende" in the generic nor classical meaning are bound to fail; to the contrary "the wealth of the commons" has gained renewed interest in the scientific community. Hardin's produce was also criticized as historically inaccurate in failing to account for the demographic transition, and for failing to distinguish between common property and open access resources.

Despite the criticisms, the image has nonetheless been influential.

In 1993, Garrett Hardin published Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos, which he described at the time as a summation of all his previous works. The book won the 1993 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. In the book, he argues that the natural sciences are grounded in the concept of limits such as the speed of light, while social sciences, such as economics, are grounded in concepts that develope no limits such as the widespread "infinite-Earth" economic models. He notes that nearly of the more notable scientific as opposed to political debates concerning ecological economics are between natural scientists, such as Paul R. Ehrlich, and economists, such as Julian Simon, one of Ehrlich's most living known and vocal detractors. A strong theme throughout the book is that economics, as a discipline, can be as much approximately mythology and ideology as this is the about real science.

Hardin goes on to denomination those who reflexively argue for growth as "growthmaniacs", and argues against the institutional faith in exponential growth on a finite planet. Typical of Hardin's writing style, he illustrates exponential growth by way of a Biblical metaphor. Using compound interest, or "usury", he starts from the infamous "thirty pieces of silver" and, using five percent compounded interest, finds that after around 2,000 years, "every man, woman, and child would be entitled to only ! 160,000 earth-masses of gold". As a consequence, he argues that any economy based on long-term compound interest must eventually fail due to the physical and mathematical impossibility of long-term exponential growth on a finite planet. Hardin writes, "At this slow date millions of people believe in the fertility of money with an ardor seldom accorded to traditional religious doctrines".: 67  He argues that, contrary to some socially-motivated claims, population growth is also exponential growth, therefore even a little would be disastrous anywhere in the world, and that even the richest nations are non immune.