The wave commons: toward a (Rousseauvian) theory of entitlement and its rationalization

ABSTRACT

Surfers both cooperate and compete around a scarce natural resource – ocean waves suited for surfing – often with a fraught mix of motives and feelings, pro-social and anti-social. Much as surfers constantly adapt to a dynamic wave environment, their pro- and anti-social motives readily mix and shift, based on their interpretation of quickly changing context. What we learn from surfers is something materialistic focus on self-interest and realities of scarcity or abundance might de-emphasize or miss: a culture of interpretation and reasoning (e.g. ‘localism’) is as important in the formation of shifting pro- and anti-social attitudes as the material reality of wave scarcity or abundance itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Surfing
• cooperation
• common pool resource
• Ostrom
• rationalization
• localism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. It may be helpful to compare line forming practices – for instance at a post office or airport check-in desk – which are also relatively spontaneous and comparably global in reach. While surfers do a fluid sort of turn-taking, a conventional line formation is feasible only in very specific surf breaks, where desirable waves break in more or less the same place. When quality waves break over a dispersed area, a conventional line would ask surfers to forgo catching desirable waves even when they are otherwise uncontested. Few surfers will consent to this. Nor can surfers easily separate line-forming and free-for-all zones, since different types of waves can’t be saliently differentiated in most places.

2. To the extent notions of individual rationality or rational egoism have an element of plausibility, it lies in a connection to the interpretation of behavior as intelligible action. Just to make out what an agent is doing or not doing might be said, for instance, to require basic coherence in revealed preferences, perhaps as defined by rational choice theory. Even then, however, these are very minimal, highly abstract consistency constraints; they hardly entail a substantive, controversial normative doctrine such as rational egoism. ‘Revealed preferences’ trivially reflect whatever is, in fact, chosen. Coherence in revealed preferences is easily satisfied and places no constraint on the content of a preference, as either egoistic or altruistic. If it turns out that altruism is chosen on some occasion, then altruism is by definition what is preferred and what maximizes a person’s utility, defined as that which satisfies coherent revealed preferences. So even if the explanation of action requires the interpretive attribution of coherent preferences, they may well be pro-social preferences.

3. Further developments in game theory have only made models more apt for the uncertainty and risks real agents face (see Skyrms 2001 on assurance games). As Lejano and Ingram (2011) explain (citing preferences for fairness in experimental game theory), pro-social preferences specifically for mutual benefit in commons use can also be used to define game pay offs.