How do things go from bad to worse?

Annals of Operations Research 2(1985)11 - 21 11

HOW DO THINGS GO FROM BAD TO WORSE?

Kenneth E. BOULDING

Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado, Campus Box 484, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA

Abstract

Humans are constantly making evaluations about the direction of movement in time of systems perceived as relevant, in terms of whether things are moving to the better or to the worse. The relevant system may be very small or as large as the whole planet earth; evaluations seldom go beyond the solar system. We evaluate things like health, wealth, security, justice, etc. and we have a strange capacity for putting many diverse variables together into a single rough evaluation. Accountants evaluate the state of a balance sheet or position statement quantitatively in terms of dollars; economists evaluate aggregates like the GNP. But almost everyone goes beyond quantification into rough, qualitative evaluations of the total state of a system. The evaluation of overall systems runs into the difficulty that different persons evaluate the same perceived change differently. Nevertheless, there are many processes in society by which differing evaluations are coordinated, even if they are not reconciled. The market is one, politics is another, and the moral order is a third. In large systems we are unlikely to come out with a single answer to even the question of whether things are getting better or worse. But we can identify certain instances where there is wide agreement that a movement is for the worse: the 'cliffs r-disasters, premature deaths, losses of liberty, etc. We can furthermore specify certain dynamic systems likely to produce these dramatic worsenings, and perhaps do something about them.

Keywords and phrases

Normatives, commons, dilemmas, tragedies, policies, decisions.

There is still a strange illusion in the scientific community that there are things called 'facts ' which are a proper subject of science and which can be discovered, as opposed to things called 'values' about which we can know nothing and which are not even a respectable subject of inquiry. This curious position fails to take into account that the very concept of a decision implies the evaluation of alternative futures, and we make evaluations constantly even when we are not engaged in decision. In fact a good part of human conversation is concerned with evaluations. The very common

�9 J.C. Baltzer A.G., Scientific Publishing Company

12 K.E. Boulding, How do things go from bad to worse?

courtesy greeting, 'How are you?' implies a capacity for evaluating the immensely complex system which is the human person. It would be hard to find any conversation that did not imply some kind of ongoing evaluation: 'How did you like the play last night?' 'What do you think of Mr. Reagan as a president?' and so on.

Evaluation indeed is not confined to humans. A cat likes one brand of cat food better than another. Even an amoeba prefers a particle of food to a particle of grit. We could even say that carbon 'likes' having four hydrogens or that a certain plant 'does not like' an acid soil. The very process by which a genetic structure builds up the phenotype involves constant evaluation and the selection of different potential inputs from its environment.

Humans have a remarkable capacity not only for evaluating their own condition and changes in it, and evaluating their immediate environment, but as knowledge of the world grows we develop a capacity for evaluating the whole state of the world, as well as a great variety of its subsets. Evaluation of large and complex systems, of course, always involves some kind of relative assessment of their different parts. A friend asks me, 'How are you?' and I say, 'Well, my cold is a lot better, but my knees are a little worse ', the implication being that my overall state is a little better. It could well be that we evaluate changes in state more easily than we do absolute states, although even here something like health is an absolute state that we evaluate, presum- ably with perfect health at 100 percent and the point of death as zero.

Accountants evaluate very large and complex systems in terms of a monetary unit or 'dollar'. There are two forms of evaluation here, of what we might call 'riches'. There is first the evaluation of the capital stock and the balance sheet. The accountant makes a list of all the items relevant to the economic value of an organization, some of which may be positive assets, like buildings and machines, stocks of goods, cash in hand, accounts receivable, debts owed to the organization, and so on; and some of which are negative assets or liabilities, such as accounts payable and other debts owed by the organization. Such a list is called a position statement. Then each item on the list has to be valued in terms of dollars. We are able to do this because the items with which the accountant is concerned usually have a market - that is, they are constantly being bought and sold - and the price at which they are being bought and sold is an indicator of the value per unit of the item. The evaluation, of course, is more complex than this and involves things like depreciation, sometimes accounting for inflation, various forms of evaluation of inventories, and so on, that we need not go into here.

The net value of all assets and liabilities is the net worth, which is convention- ally put under liabilities, mainly because the asset side represents those positive items which the organization operates with and manipulates, whereas the liability side shows essentially who owns these assets - that is, who has claims on their value. It should be possible for any individual to draft at least a rough position statement and evaluate a net worth, though in the case of the individual this should include the value of the mind and the body which the person owns, assuming there is no slavery, and this is often hard to put a dollar figure on.

K.E. Boulding, How do things go from bad to worse? 13

Besides balance sheets, there are also income statements. Income is essentially the rate of change of net worth per unit of time, after allowing for personal consump-

tion. Net production and grants (transfers in) add to net worth, consumption (and depreciation) subtracts from it. One reasonable definition of income (among several) is 'net production plus transfers in', which is equal to net consumption plus transfers out plus the net increase in net worth.

The question, 'Am I richer today than ! was yesterday?' is meaningful, but harder to answer than might appear at first sight, for riches has two components. One is the capital stock, and the other is income which is, as it were, the flow through the capital stock, consisting of additions to it and subtractions from it. Economists have overemphasized income as the measure of riches, especially in the form of consumption. What we get satisfaction from for the most part, however, is not consumption but the utilization of the stock of goods that surround us. I get no satisfaction out of the fact that my clothes are wearing out. I get satisfaction out of wearing them. And if they wore out more slowly, I would regard myself as richer. I would be able to sustain a larger capital stock on the same income.

We do also, however, get some satisfaction out of consumption itself. We like eating as well as being well fed, and there are good evolutionary reasons for this. But I have never found anyone who got satisfaction out of a roof leaking, or a car rusting, although we do get some satisfaction out of variety and there may, therefore, be some optimum rate of consumption or wearing out of capital stock. What we come up with then is a sort of riches function which has both the capital stock and income in it and it is not always easy to evaluate what weight we should put on these two items. How- ever, we are certainly not incapable of making these evaluations. Ordinarily, we do not bother with this because where the rate of consumption of capital stock is fairly constant, the rate of consumption and production - that is, income - is a pretty fair proportional measure of the capital stock itself. And we certainly have the feeling that a rise in income will make us richer, as it will also enable us to have a larger capital stock if we so desire. We do, however, think of the rake and spendthrift, whose consumption is larger than his income and so constantly diminishing his capital stock, as getting poorer. So there is some ambiguity in the language here.

As the accountant evaluates the riches of an individual or an organization, the economist ventures on the evaluation of riches of a total society, or even of the whole world, in terms of aggregate levels of production, consumption or capital stock. None of the various measures used, such as the Gross National Product, National In- come, Gross Domestic Product, and so on, are sufficient as a measure of aggregate riches, but they all represent evidence that is at least interesting. From the point of view of human welfare, the aggregate is not the most significant. We usually use some measure of per capita riches as an indicator of economic welfare, but this also can be misleading, for it takes no account of the distribution of wealth or income. Two countries might have the same per capita riches but one might have a few very rich

14 K.E. Bouldhzg, How do things go from bad to worse?

people and a large number of miserably poor and destitute, while in the other with less inequality a larger proportion of the people would be above what might be thought of as a poverty or misery line. Most people would then regard the second society as better off.

Besides economic indicators, there are also social indicators, once more fashion- able than they seem to be now, but they do tell us something. Things like the expectation of life, infant mortality, crime rates, people's subjective estimates of their own welfare and so on, can be valuable in an overall assessment.

We now, however, run into the problem that the assessments of the general state of the world, or of a portion of it, wilt be different for different people. A person who has just won an election may not unreasonably think that the world has gone from bad to better, and the one who has lost that it has gone from bad to worse. It is hard for anything to happen without it creating some perceptions of redistribution of welfare or well being. The relative price structure is constantly changing; those people whose assets are rising in price will see themselves as getting better off relative to those whose assets are falling in price. If one person or group gains political power and another loses it, power is perceived as being redistributed. We should be careful, however, of giving too much weight to short-run changes. A temporary worsening may lead to an eventual improvement. Defeat in war is quite often followed by a cultural or economic improvement on the part of the defeated party relative to the victorious one. After the defeat of France in 1870, it was Paris that became the cultural capital of the world. After the defeat of Germany in 1918, Berlin took that position. After the Second World War, it was the defeated Germany and Japan who did best economic- ally. Paradoxes of this kind abound, although there are also cases where defeat has been totally catastrophic and victory has been a benefit.

In order to have a perfect estimate of the state of the world as to whether it is going to the better or to the worse as a whole, we would have to evaluate the losses of those who lose and compare them with the gains of those who win in this constantly surging tide o f advantages and disadvantages. Economists shy sharply away from this. People without these inhibitions do, however, make these evaluations. There are, furthermore, devices in society by which the different evaluations of different people are coordinated, even if they may not be reconciled. The market itself is one such mechanism, even though the market also creates constant redistributions. It does, however, enable people to satisfy individual preferences - for instance, for tea rather than for coffee - without destroying the ability of others to satisfy their preferences. The market, as Mancur Olson says [ 1 ], is an economizer of agreement, simply because it responds, however imperfectly, to individual preferences in a relatively automatic way.

Political processes, also, economize agreement even when they only constitute an agreement to disagree, as in majority voting. The whole business of elections and voting, logrolling, lobbying, and the like, is an apparatus whereby individuals can ex-


press their evaluations of the state of the world and the total result is at least a crude weighting of the preferences of individuals, again of different political power and in- terests. Sometimes these processes are accepted as legitimate, sometimes they are not.

Finally, because evaluations of the state of the world are a constant source of discussion and conversation, a process of persuasion and argument continually goes on which not infrequently makes different people's evaluations converge. This is particu- larly noticeable in smaller subcultures. A man who belongs to a golf club and finds golf intolerably boring and makes no secret of it will pretty soon either leave or be thrown out. A subculture is indeed defined by a common set of valuations about the state of the world, or at least some small portion of it. The larger society, through the political process and also through its own preachments and arguments and propaganda, likewise encourages some subcultures and discourages others. The Baptists have a hard time in the Soviet Union; the Communists in the United States; and those defined as 'criminals ', everywhere, or even those defined by society as 'ugly' and 'gauche '.

All these processes are capable and worthy of careful study by the scholarly community. The study is unlikely to come out with any single 'answer' as to what the only correct valuation is. In fact, it would be most unfortunate if it did so, for the diversity of valuations is itself a value, especially in an evolutionary sense. What the study of social systems can produce, however, is information about processes which are almost universally recognized as moving the world from bad to worse.

We can postulate a 'goodness function', goodness being simply what goes up when things get better and goes down when things get worse. We can write goodness (G) then as a function of the state of the world in any dimensions we like to mention. If each conceivable state of the world can be represented by a point on a plane (really a hyperplane in n dimensions), then for each point we can measure goodness vertically, so we get a goodness mountain which has the property that the higher the better. This is much more likely to be shaped like a mesa than like a Matterhorn - that is, there are going to be a large number of states of the world the goodness of which are roughly equal. It could well be, however, that the goodness mountain has cliffs, falling over which represents a move to states of the world which are very much worse in almost everybody's estimation. A bad accident, an epidemic, an outbreak of war, a natural disaster, a depression, a severe inflation, the rise of a tyrant, a conquest, internal or external, the appearance of refugees, are cases in point. It is very important, therefore, to try to identify the processes which move us towards the cliffs and to set up warning notices and processes that will reverse our direction when we do perceive we are head- ing for a cliff.

There may also be long, upwardly sloping ridges, with steep declivities on either side. As we climb up towards a better world, there is always a danger that a misstep will bring us crashing down into the valley and that we will have to climb painfully up on the ridge again to resume our ascent. There may also be minor summits from which any movement is downhill, but from which we have to go down to some


kind of saddle before we can begin the ascent to a still higher level. I have sometimes called this the 'Mecca effect'. The pilgrim to Mecca, as in every pilgrim's progress, may get exhausted and impoverished on the way, but even when every mile is more difficult, painful, and worse in an immediate sense than the mile before, it brings the pilgrim closer to Mecca. The willingness of the human race to undergo dangerous explorations, risky investments and devastating revolutions is an indication that this pattern is by no means uncommon. We cannot always assume that the only right way to go is 'up ', but if the 'goodness mountain' is shrouded in fog, as it usually is, feeling our way up one step at a time may be the right thing to do, although dispelling the fog may be an important human activity which will give us a larger vision beyond our immediate troubles.

illusions of clarity, however, can cause great trouble. An illusory vision of some Mecca can be catastrophic and lead us to accept all sorts of destructive behaviors, which lead only further downhill, in decisions which lead to war or to revolution or to the destruction of the simple virtues of honesty and friendship in the pursuit of a larger ideal. One of the first answers, therefore, to the question as to how do things go from bad to worse is that people make decisions which deliberately make themselves and their environment worse off in the hope of future gains that may be illusory.

This behavior is often reinforced by what I have elsewhere called the 'sacrifice trap' [2], when we make sacrifices in the present in the hope of some future benefit for ourselves or for our society. It is then very destructive to our image of our own identity to admit that these sacrifices were in vain. Thus, a decision to go to war, or to start a rebellion, or to fast to death, or to become an ascetic or, at the other end, a ruthless searcher for power and wealth - all may in fact have been mistaken, for we have, as it were, wagered our identity on the gamble that our image of the world was correct and we cannot afford to admit that we were mistaken. This is why so often good money is thrown after bad, new martyrs after old, live soldiers after dead, re- newed efforts along the same lines as old failures, and so on. Even proverbs do not help much. If at first you don't succeed, the proverb urges us to try, try again, rather than to try something else, which may often be more beneficial.

The only remedy for these individual decisions that lead a decision maker from bad to worse would seem to be the development of better skills in forming images of the future. The first step towards this is the development of more accurate images of the past, for it is only from our image of the past that we can construct images of the future. Here the historian has a great task and responsibility. The glorification of war and revolution by historians is one of the factors making for inaccurate images of the past, leading into inaccurate images of the future, which lead in turn into bad decisions.

Part of the problem of developing more accurate images of tile future is that social systems, and indeed all ecological systems, are profoundly interactive in character. A decision on the part of A produces a decision on the part of B, which produces a decision on the part of C, and so on all down innumerable alphabets. I have used the


analogy here that an ecosystem is also an 'echo system' in which one shout can echo and reecho all over the system and end up in very different positions of the system from which the original shouter envisaged.

Two models of interactive systems throw some light on these problems. One is the famous 'prisoner's dilemma' and game theory [3]. Suppose we have two parties, A and B. Each has a choice of behavior, which we can label 'good' or 'bad'. If both A and B are good, both are better off than in any other position. If, however, one of them is good, the other may perceive that it would pay to be bad, for then he would gain at the expense of the other. If one party is bad, however, it pays the other party to be bad, so that the dynamics of the system end up with both parties being bad and both parties worse off, often much worse off than they would have been if both parties were good. For good and bad we can read disarm and arm; not cheat and cheat; not tattletale and tattletale (the original prisoner's dilemma); not steal and steal, and so on. It is a little distressing that in so many of these illustrations the positive word or act represents the bad, and the good is described by the not bad, which perhaps is

some linguistic evidence for the instability of the good-good combination. The only remedies for the prisoner's dilemma seem to be, first, mutual long-

sightedness, which would make each party realize that the advantages of changing from good to bad are merely temporary. Second, there may be the development of a sense of community and benevolence, in which each party refrains from being bad because of its effect on the other or on the sum of the wellbeing of the two together. A third solution is the development of some external political structure (law) which will lower the temporary payoffs for being 'bad' when the other party is 'good'. We might almost define a community as a group of people with a prejudice against negative-sum games and in favor of positive-sum games. It is still a real puzzle, however, why it seems to be so hard for the human race to learn benevolence, which turns all games into positive sum; and so easy to fall into malevolence, which makes everybody worse off and leads to negative-sum games.

Here again, the sacrifice trap may be something of an explanation. If random factors force a group or society into malevolence, this is self-reinforcing and becomes a kind of positive feedback which leads to everybody being worse off as we see, for instance, in E1 Salvador, or in Lebanon, or in Ireland. It is perhaps a great contribution of economics to this problem to point out that there are indeed 'Paretian optima', the roads to which make everybody better off in positive-sum games, in which at least nobody becomes worse off. The great problem is that the dynamics of the situation often leads the other way and it has not been easy to find institutional checks on these perverse dynamic processes.

As we contrast societies, for instance like E1 Salvador and Costa Rica, or Argentina and Australia, we see that it is quite possible for regions very similar in most respects to follow entirely different paths, one positive sum and the other negative sum. We still understand very little about what are the particular events and specific


characteristics which make one society go one way and the other, the other. There do seem to be points in the development of a society which might be called 'watershed points', in which very small or even chance forces will send the society either towards perverse dynamic processes that are negative sum or towards behavorial processes that are positive sum.

Another broad category of perverse dynamic processes, not wholly dissimilar from the prisoner's dilemma, fall under a model made famous by Garrett Hardin [4], 'tragedies of the commons'. The example implied is that of common grazing ground for a village, on which it pays each individual to graze his cattle a little more than his appropriate 'share', which would preserve the commons, so the commons gets over- grazed and everybody becomes poorer as a result. Sea fisheries are an example which is very much to the forefront today. Even the population problem is in a sense an example of this. It pays each family, especially in a peasant society, to have a large number of children, who will bring in income and support the parents in their old age. If everyone does this, the population expands to the point where per capita re- sources diminish and can eventually lead to catastrophe, like the Irish famine of the 1840's.

There seem to be only two broad answers to this problem. One is that of dividing up a commons among the users so that each acquires specific property in part of it. Hence, if any individual overgrazes, he suffers but no one else does, and every individual who uses the property wisely benefits directly from its wise use. This phenomenon is strikingly illustrated in the communist countries, where the private plots are much more productive than the collective farms. On a collective farm, which is a commons, everybody's business is nobody's business, and extra care and exertion and even wisdom on the part of the individual worker have a result which is divided up among so many that the individual responsible gets very little from his or her pains. Certainly the remarkable contrast between th e productivity of collectivized agriculture and of individual farms is a striking testimony to the reality of this 'tragedy'.

Property, however, is not a universal solution to this problem, for there are some things which cannot be appropriated. The sea is probably a good example, although nations are appropriating more and more of it as time goes on. The population problem is another example where the property institution fails. There is no way in which parents who have a large number of children can be made to pay directly for the general loss to the society which this may cause. Another example of this process is where incompetent or depraved parents produce children who are a high cost to the society and take from it much more than they give. There seems to be no way of putting this into private property family accounts.

Where property fails, the only answer is community and this is often hard to get. This community may simply take the form of a common moral order. The village commons may be saved by a morality of restraint, so that anybody who grazes too many cows will receive the moral censure of the village and even be excluded from its


community. The kibbutz in Israel seems to be an example of a commune successful because of a strong sense of community. Where moral censure turns out not to be enough, we develop legal structures, courts, and formal penalties, but even these sometimes turn out to be perverse. The cost of preventing certain forms of crime is almost certainly greater than the costs of the crime itself would be. And we have very poor cost-benefit analysis when it comes to this kind of legislation or legal procedures.

The development of community not only provides an apparatus for preventing public 'bads' but also for providing public 'goods'. This is a familiar story to economists. Here, however, we run into the 'freeloader problem', quite analogous to the tragedy of the commons - that is, the person who does not wish to pay their appropriate share of the cost of the public good. The remedy under these circumstances seems to be a legitimated threat system in the form of taxes or forced labor, as in the corv6e of various older societies, or military conscription in the modern world. There is a certain instability, however, in legitimated threat. It easily becomes illegitimate if the threats are perceived to be too heavy and the public good turns into a public bad, as is frequently the case in war and conscription.

Looking now to the positive side of the picture, how things go from bad to better, rather than how to prevent them going from bad to worse, we do perceive certain large areas of human life where there is wide agreement about elements in the goodness function that are indeed positive, where an increase in the element or vari- able increases goodness and makes things go from bad to better. Three large 'intermediate goods' can be singled out as relevant to the goodness function in this respect, which we could call riches, justice, and peace. For all those intermediate goods which might be put in the goodness function, a 'law of diminishing marginal goodness' is likely to apply - that is, when there is only a small quantity of the intermediate good in question, an increase in it will increase overall goodness a good deal. As the quantity of the intermediate good diminishes, this increase will get less and less, and eventually may become zero or even negative, as the good turns into a 'bad'. A plot of an intermediate good measured horizontally and an ultimate good vertically would look something like a McDonald's parabola. For some intermediate goods, however, the quantities are so small that there is little doubt in most people's minds that they are goods rather than bads - that is, an increase in them will increase the ultimate good [5].

Thus we might admit theoretically that some people are filthy rich and they would be better off if they were poorer. Indeed, economists have postulated a diminishing marginal utility of income or riches. Very few people are willing to admit that they have gotten to this stage, however, and certainly at least 999 people out of 1000 or more feel they would be better off if they were richer. An increase in riches, therefore, is widely perceived as a movement to the better, a diminution as a movement to the worse. Economists, as we have seen, have various devices for measuring riches, none of which are wholly satisfactory but all of which offer some evidence.

Just why some societies get richer and some do not (and some even get poorer) is a very important question for normative analysis, to which economists


have only very imperfect answers, for the process of getting richer or poorer is a property of the total system, not just of the economy. It involves such things as the nature of the family and of child-rearing, the nature of a society's religions, its educa- tional system, and so on. A number of sociological and psychological theories have been propounded to try to explain the differences among societies in this regard. For instance, Max Weber postulated a favorable impact of Protestantism, or at least a Puritan religion; this does not, however, quite explain the enormous capacity of Japan for getting rich. The psychologists emphasized the learning of a need for achievement in children as a precondition for enrichment. Then there is Marx's idea that capital is almost an independent substance greedy for its own enlargement. None of these theories are wholly satisfactory, however, and the overall process remains complex and puzzling.

There is fairly broad agreement that enrichment involves, in the first place, accumulation of human knowledge and know-how. Unless this increases there is no way of getting richer. Then, secondly, there must be increase in the stocks of significant human artifacts, in the shape of buildings, machines, means of transportation, and so on. The know-how is a necessary, although not a sufficient, condition for producing a stock of artifacts. The artifacts, up to a point, feed back on the know-how. Because individuals age and die and human artifacts likewise age, decay and die, there has to be constant replenishment of these stocks. If the replenishment is not more than the decay, there cannot be any accumulation, just as in any population births must exceed deaths if the population is to grow. For this reason the average length of human life is very important. Perhaps the main reason for the astonishing technological stability of the paleolithic was the fact that the expectation of human life was so low that it re- quired all the teaching and learning ability of a society to transmit the knowledge and know-how stock from one generation to the next. There was nothing left over for increase. With the coming of agriculture, the length of human life seems to have ex- panded somewhat, to the point where an irreversible process of accumulation of human knowledge occurred. Each generation was able to produce more knowledge than was lost by death. And the greater the stock of knowledge, the easier it became to add to it.

Justice is a much more difficult and vague concept than fiches, though very important. Everybody would agree that justice is good and injustice is bad, but there may not be much agreement as to what constitutes justice. Certainly the communist countries have a very different idea in this regard than do the capitalist countries. Still there is some agreement. One concept is that people should get what they deserve, either in punishments or in rewards. Deserts, however, are by no means easy to identify and we have strong inclinations for ourselves to temper justice with mercy! Another concept is that people should get what they need to fulfil their potential as members of a society, and it is also quite difficult to identify these needs. Nevertheless, where unnecessary poverty cripples human development, it is widely recognized as unjust.


A strong sense of injustice is a powerful element in the goodness function in the general appraisal of the desirable direction of social change.

Apart from a few romantic belligerents, there is also widespread agreement that peace is better than war, and that an outbreak of war represents a worsening of the human situation and the re-establishment of peace an improvement. The perverse dynamic processes mentioned earlier resulting, for instance, in arms races and escalating mutual threat and enmity, are important factors in the failure to preserve peace. Just as the development of riches and justice are learning processes, so also we have to learn peace. There are indeed signs that this can be done, not only through the establishment of monopolies of threat in governments, but also through the development of voluntary limitations on the use of threat and the substitution of the more productive and beneficial processes of exchange and integrative relationships for the more naked threat relationship which so often leads to things going from bad to worse. We see this both in the long-run 'gentling' of personal behavior, from the brutal baron to the polite gentleman, or from the rustic lout to the urbane citizen. We see it also in the growth of increasing areas of stable peace among nations. These processes are often painfully slow, but they are perceptible in human history, and it is in this extraordinary capacity of the human race for learning that we have some reasons for optimism that over the long pull things will go from bad to better as we learn how to do it.

R e f e r e n c e s

Ill M. Olson, The Logic of Collectl"ve Action (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1965).

[21 K.E. Boulding, The Meaning of the Twentieth Century (Harper and Row, New York, 1964). 131 A. Rapoport, Fights, Games, andDebates (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1960). [4] G. Hardin, The tragedy of the commons, Science (Dec. 13, 1968) 162. [5] K.E. Boulding, Human Betterment (Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, California, 1985).

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How do things go from bad to worse?