Tragedy of the commons
The degradation of a shared resource from which each user draws private benefit while imposing on others a cost no one internalizes.
Garrett Hardin published The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968, in Science. He described a shared, degradable space, costs borne by everyone, and no mechanism that makes the party causing them pay. Earth orbit offers a contemporary case. Each satellite draws a private benefit, the collision it causes produces a debris cloud that harms every present and future user, and that debris belongs to no one and no one answers for it. The instrument that internalizes precisely this kind of externality has existed for a century: compulsory liability insurance. No treaty imposes it in orbit, and only a few national laws require it of their operators, such as the French space operations act of June 3, 2008. Climate offers a variant, where insurers' retreat concentrates the worst risk in the public pool that those who stayed then fund.
The owner of the destroyed satellite is compensated, the party that caused the collision owes nothing, and no one answers for the debris cloud that harms everyone. It is the tragedy of the commons as textbooks describe it.
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