William Forster Lloyd
British political economist (1794-1852) who in 1833 introduced the herder-on-shared-pasture argument later popularized by Garrett Hardin as the 'tragedy of the commons.' Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford.
William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852) was a British political economist and Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Christ Church, Oxford from 1832 to 1837. He is remembered today almost entirely for one short passage in his *Two Lectures on the Checks to Population*, delivered at Oxford in 1832 and published in 1833. In that work Lloyd asked why cattle on a shared common tend to be "so puny and stunted" compared with cattle on private enclosed land. His answer is the kernel of what would later be called the Tragedy of the Commons: an individual adding an animal to his own field bears the full cost of the extra grazing, while an individual adding an animal to the common shares that cost across all users. The incentives therefore favor overstocking until the pasture's carrying capacity is exceeded. Lloyd's argument was largely forgotten for over a century. It was rediscovered by the fisheries economist H. Scott Gordon in the 1950s and then dramatically amplified by Garrett Hardin in 1968. Lloyd's original treatment was narrower than Hardin's, concerned with population pressure on subsistence resources rather than with a general theory of collective-action failure.