Some more recent work questions whether there was ever an actual "tragedy" of the commons, in an empirical sense of having happened in reality, as opposed to as a game-theory thought experiment. The 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics went to Elinor Ostrom's contrary work on the subject, e.g.: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Governing-Commons-Evolution-Institutions-Collective/dp/0521405998" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Governing-Commons-Evolution-Institutio...</a>