> The tragedy of the commons is a term used in social science to describe a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action.

The Ivy League is a resource shared by both the commons and the elites. The belief stated at the end of my comment, that collective action taken to make Harvard more inclusive will inevitably strip it and all the other Ivy League schools of its vitality, will spoil that resource, forcing the elites to stop sending their kids there and snuffing the Ivy League's social ladder aspect out of existence.

That's a classic case of a tragedy of the commons. It's both a tragedy, in that nobody wanted that outcome, and it's driven by the collective action of the commons.

Huh, it's an interesting idea, that Ivy League is a public resource. I don't agree with that, because they're private institutions. I can see where you're coming from, though, and I'd say that's a super-populist way of thinking about them (and please note that I didn't say anything else about populism). But even in the case that the Ivy League universities were a public resource, it certainly is not "writ large" that this is a tragedy of the commons.

You seem to have knowledge and an understanding of the concept that I don't. I'd love to hear your articulation.

It's right there in my last post. Ivy League universities are not a public resource. Also, a tragedy of the commons is a tragedy of the commons, and you are being really disingenuous trying to compare control on the inputs of an Ivy League university with eating a species into extinction.

They don't have to be public, they have to be shared.

I thought you had some interesting economic point to make about these kinds of situations. So instead let me make one of my own. Economics isn't physics, it's broadly applicable to any kind of situation you think to apply it to. Any time you have a situation where you'd want to say, "this is why we can't have nice things," you're looking at a tragedy of the commons.