Tragedy of the commons, illustrated

Case in point: antibiotics resistance:

The problem arises, paradoxically, because antibiotics are such a miraculous medical invention that they are heavily and broadly prescribed, even for relatively minor conditions like bronchitis or ear infections, and even for virus-caused conditions like flu where antibiotics don't even work. When antibiotics are so widely used, bacteria mutate in response and build up resistance. 

"In the United States, for example, resistance to the bacterium methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), has reached 60 percent. This means six out of 10 patients with this virulent staph infection can no longer be treated with oxacillin, a relatively low cost drug. But what still amounts to a cost problem in rich countries is becoming a serious threat to public health in the developing world: lower-income countries face a growing toll of death and morbidity from curable infections because the generally available antibiotics no longer work." 

The problems only start with infections that are resistant. Without antibiotics, almost every form of surgery lead to additional and potentially severe infections.

One obvious answer is to invent new antibiotics, but it has gotten more difficult and costly to do so... 

Many natural resources--like fisheries or forests or clean air--share the trait that if they are used in moderation, they have an ability to renew themselves and to continue. However, if they are overused, the resource can be depleted in a way that it has great difficulty in recovering. Moreover, as the "tragedy of the commons" scenario points out, every individual has an incentive to overuse a common resource, because the gains of using that resource all flow to the individual, while the social costs of overusing the resource are shared across society. This is the economic basis for arguing that natural resources need to be managed in some way: perhaps through private property rights like ownership or marketable quotas, or perhaps through more direct regulation of use, to prevent their overuse and depletion. 

The effectiveness of antibiotics fits this scenario. Each doctor and patient has an individual incentive to use a wide spectrum of antibiotics to treat any given condition. The benefits to the patient are immediate, while the potential costs of creating greater resistance to antibiotics are shared across society. The effectiveness of antibiotics is an extraordinarily important social resource, but it is being eroded by overuse. Exactly how to prevent overuse of this resource is debatable, but the need to take steps to do so is clear.