The free rider problem

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HerCrazierHalf

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This is more an economic problem but a lot of economics is philosophy and psychology plus money IMO.

Is there a solution to the free rider problem? Especially ones that effects a country or the world?

For example, a quick look at the moon tells us that asteroids large enough to end most human life are out there. Even smaller ones can devastate large cities. The last century saw a few, even one in Russian caught on multiple videos. This is admittedly a low probability/high cost event. But we have the tech to detect them for a bit over $500 million USD. Literally everyone benefits for $25 million from the top 20 countries yet such efforts have stalled for years.

Or small scale, a husband cleans the kitchen cause both him and the wife enjoy a clean kitchen. But he knows that if he doesn’t do it, she will and he still benefits.
 
The problem as you have stated it seems to assume that all members must make the same kind of contribution, e.g., money for the asteroid defense. In fact, an economic system thrives where members contribute to different market sectors, e.g., defense, agriculture, medicine, and so on. If a country does not help with the asteroid defense, what else are they doing for the common good?

Getting back to the question of a solution, it is basically the solution to any sin. There are people who lie, cheat, steal, freeload. There are incentives for good behavior, and penalties for bad behavior. It doesn’t work perfectly, but it works well enough, most of the time.
 
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JerryZ said:
I am aware that NASA spends some money on the asteroids issue
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They are, but my understanding is they are equipped to detect large dinosaur killer types. We still have others that can destroy cities that sometimes makes a close call.
 
Human nature.

All behavioral sciences study broken human nature.

Our perfection is not found in achieving perfection, but in perfecting the struggle against imperfection.
 
Perhaps the school of hard knocks winds up making some correction.
Consider the Jamestown colony.
Many colonists opted out of the labor necessary to create sufficient food and shelter to survive the winter months until Captain John Smith declared the " he that will not work shall not eat."
This encouraged free riders to reconsider their stance on personal labor.
Unfortunately, sloth can be a pretty tempting vice.
 
I think it’s a combination of two things.

The first is that we underestimate the negative impacts of an event (no pun intended) and the chances of it happening. And the second is that we’d rather spend money where there is an immediate and concrete benefit rather than spending it on preventing something which we’ve already decided is unlikely.

As to the second we also seem to prefer to spend money fighting a problem rather than investing in solutions. So if there’s an increase in crime then the money goes to more police and larger jails rather than better education and housing.

I heard a comment a few days ago (attributed I think to Desmond Tutu) which says that we spend a lot of time and effort pulling people out of the river. But don’t seem to spend much time going upstream to find out why they’re falling in.
 
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po18guy said:
All behavioral sciences study broken human nature.
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This reminded me of a book I started reading recently, The Mature Mind, by Harry Allen Overstreet, first published in 1949. My enthusiasm for reading the book was undercut at its very beginning by the author’s optimism. He seemed to be convinced, or was trying to convince the reader, that the field of psychology was going to bring a new age of enlightenment and solve the world’s problems. Ha!
 
Beryllos said:
The problem as you have stated it seems to assume that all members must make the same kind of contribution,
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The problem becomes nobody wanting to act and/or accept the costs otherwise. If they benefit but don’t chip in, why should I?
 
HerCrazierHalf said:
Is there a solution to the free rider problem?
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No. To paraphrase Christ: we will always have freeloaders.

As for the asteroid example, what could we do with the information? We could change the path of only the smallest objects, which we can’t find in time to respond to their approach. Objects which are detectable early enough to respond to are so large that we can’t change their path, and the blast zone becomes so large that evacuation becomes impossible. Imagine needing to evacuate everyone within a 50-mile radius of Newark, NJ in a year, or within a 1,000 mile radius of Vienna, Austria in ten years. Even a year isn’t long enough to get any gear onto the object as it approaches, and once we’re there how do we change the path of a mile-wide chunk of rock and iron so that it misses us?
 
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A couple of us have suggested incentives and penalties. What do you think of that?
 
Freddy said:
The first is that we underestimate the negative impacts of an event (no pun intended) and the chances of it happening.
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Indeed. Given the wide-scale resistance we see to the minor inconvenience of wearing masks, it doesn’t seem likely that there would be less resistance to an order to evacuate an entire state more or less permanently.
Freddy said:
As to the second we also seem to prefer to spend money fighting a problem rather than investing in solutions. So if there’s an increase in crime then the money goes to more police and larger jails rather than better education and housing.
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That brings up the problem of correctly identifying the true cause of a problem. I suggest that education and housing is a misidentification of the causes of crime; that’s a different discussion but the point is that it’s nearly impossible to get compliance from people who are absolutely convinced that your plan will make things worse.
 
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neophyte said:
it involves a fundamental misunderstanding of freeloaders
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Okay, that’s useful and I thank you for it.

I was asking the OP because he posed the question but didn’t disclose any prior thoughts or progress he has made toward an answer. He merely restated the problem. So I’m asking the OP, “What have you got so far? What specific difficulty or stumbling block has got you stumped?”
 
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Beryllos said:
A couple of us have suggested incentives and penalties. What do you think of that?
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That works and is used in real life, up to a certain scale. The roads and highways are paid by taxes the state and fed gov forcefully collects, solving that issue. But on the international scale incentives and penalties get closer to impractical.
 
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Yes you are right and the issue is that one needs to apply the resources available to maximize the benefits.
With the available technology right now we have to concentrate in detecting the larger bodies that can cause the wiping of our and other species on Earth, bear in mind that smaller asteroids do get detected by the search as well but because they are smaller they only are found when they are really close by.
Technology advances and gets better and cheaper. Someday we will posses a complete map of all the NEO asteroids as well as some of the farther out ones.
A killer asteroids can also come from the Kuiper belt and those are really hard to detect given our current technology. They can really come from anywhere.

Peace!
 
Oh man, I wish there was more time to discuss this topic. We should move this to another forum and continue the discussion after tomorrow.
 
Such as? I’m obviously not doing doctorate level philosophy here. 🙂
 
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