Contract as Metaphor
The political problem of backlash is analogous to the economic problem of producing from a common pool. When a society has an asset that it uses in common, overusing it can destroy its value, and private economic incentives militate toward overusing a commonly-owned asset. To keep claims on the polity from overly destabilizing production, political deals that work, like economic common pool deals that work, may not be pretty and may not be efficient when compared to the ideal. These problems are best illustrates by the destructive drilling in the East Texas oil fields in the 1930s.
Keywords: East Texas oil fields, common pool, unitization, overuse, Texas Railroad Commission
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