BS: Free rider problem- Comments?

Subject: RE: BS: Free rider problem- Comments?
From: Rapparee
Date: 22 Oct 07 - 07:38 PM

SWEET SURVIVOR
Peter Yarrow -Barry Mann -Cynthia Weil- Silver Dawn - ASCAP

You have asked me why the days fly by so quickly
And why each one feels no different from the last
And you say that you are fearful for the future
And you have grown suspicious of the past
And you wonder if the dreams we shared together
Have abandoned us or we abandoned them
And you cast about and try to find new meaning
So that you can feel that closeness once again.

Carry on my sweet survivor, carry on my lonely friend
Don't give up on the dream, and don't you let it end.
Carry on my sweet survivor,
Though you know that something's gone
For everything that matters carry on.

You remember when you felt each person mattered
When we all had to care or all was lost
But now you see believers turn to cynics
And you wonder was the struggle worth the cost
Then you see someone too young to know the difference
And a veil of isolation in their eyes
And inside you know you've got to leave them something
Or the hope for something better slowly dies.

Carry on my sweet survivor, carry on my lonely friend
Don't give up on the dream, and don't you let it end.
Carry on my sweet survivor, you've carried it so long
So it may come again, carry on
Carry on, carry on.

Subject: RE: BS: Free rider problem- Comments?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 22 Oct 07 - 06:39 PM

In the domestic sphere you often find that people will put up with genuine inconvenience rather than take the initiative and do something themselves which they feel other people really should be responsible for doing. For example they'll allow rubbish dropped by other people to pile up around their street rather than pick it up, or step carefully around turds left by passing dogs rather than clean them up.

The same kind of thing applies to potholes - obviously it's someone else's responsibility, so the tendency is to endure it almost as a matter of principle.

An individual who picks up the ball and runs, so to speak, tends to be seen as a bit suspect - its almost as if its a matter of asserting a kind of ownership of the territory. Which it is in fact, but you'd want it to be shared ownership and shared responsibility.

At an international and global scale it gets a lot harder and a lot hairier. Experience seems to suggest that its best for the big players to keep out of direct involvement.

Subject: RE: BS: Free rider problem- Comments?
From: Bill D
Date: 22 Oct 07 - 04:10 PM

There are a dozen formats of the "free rider" issue...NIMBY "Let george do it" etc...each slightly different, but mostly adding up to "It's not my problem" and "it alll depends on whose Ox is being gored"

Fortunately, not everyone feels like that, else there'd be no "Doctors Without Borders", Peace Corps, etc.....but when solving the problem involves LOTS of money and/or danger, volunteers, national or individual, decrease.

In the last analysis, all the millions of years of evolution leading to self-interest in the SHORT scale is at fault, and it takes a lot of explaining to overcome that for the multitudes. I can't see any real solution except lots more education and/or perecived immediate personal interest.

Not a bit of help, am I?

Subject: RE: BS: Free rider problem- Comments?
From: gnu
Date: 22 Oct 07 - 03:25 PM

Um... they help the poor to kill off each other... supply them the means and reasons to do it... maybe I am wrong, but, it seems to have been done for, oh, about thousands of years now.

Subject: RE: BS: Free rider problem- Comments?
From: beardedbruce
Date: 22 Oct 07 - 03:18 PM

Maybe true, but what does it have to do with this thread?

Subject: RE: BS: Free rider problem- Comments?
From: gnu
Date: 22 Oct 07 - 03:15 PM

The rich subjugate the poor directly and indirectly. I know that that is a stretch, perhaps even callous, but it's true.

Subject: BS: Free rider problem- Comments?
From: beardedbruce
Date: 22 Oct 07 - 03:08 PM

From the Washington Post:

What are your thoughts on this?


Hoping Someone Else Fixes Everyone's Problem

By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, October 22, 2007; Page A03

Let's say there are 10 houses on your street and a giant pothole develops right in the middle of the block. Everyone benefits if the pothole gets fixed, but that might require multiple calls to municipal authorities and a lot of hassle. Since every resident benefits even if he or she does nothing to solve the problem, each resident has an incentive to sit back and hope someone else will do the dirty work.

This phenomenon, known as the free rider problem, is ubiquitous whenever you have a combination of a public good and the need for collective action. Researchers have thought a lot about how groups can get around the problem.

Recently, a political scientist from North Carolina got to thinking about whether the free rider problem may explain a conundrum that has bedeviled international politics for decades -- a conundrum that recently reared its head in the news in multiple guises.

The problem, whether in Burma, Tibet, Armenia or Darfur, is what the world should do when people in a particular country are being oppressed. The most chilling example came in 1994, when the world sat on its hands and watched genocide unfold in Rwanda.

Most countries agree that ending genocide and political repression are important. A couple of weeks ago the U.N. Security Council unanimously declared its abhorrence for the military clampdown in Burma against Buddhist monks campaigning for human rights and democracy. The conundrum, though, is why such unanimity rarely translates into action that makes any concrete difference.

"Everyone agreeing on something is not sufficient to cause action -- that's the free rider problem," said Stephen Gent, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Gent recently analyzed all civil conflicts after World War II. He found that when the United States, Britain and other powers unanimously agreed with each other on the importance of some issue, they were the least likely to actually do anything about it, especially if no private benefit, such as access to oil or territory, was also involved.

Ending genocide, Gent argues in a study to be published in the Journal of Politics, is the ultimate public good. Everyone opposes genocide, even if they themselves do nothing to halt it. The free rider problem suggests there will be an incentive for each country to sit back and hope someone else expends blood and treasure to stop the killings.

When countries have intervened to end political repression, Gent finds, there are usually private benefits attached -- the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example, was not primarily meant to help repressed Iraqis, but to buy America protection against terrorism and a strategic foothold in the Middle East.

The free rider theory provides a novel explanation of why the world regularly fails to halt genocide. Todd Sandler, a University of Texas economist who studies free rider problems, praises Gent for showing how consensus can counterintuitively lead to inaction when it comes to humanitarian causes.

But Michael Barnett, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota and the author of "Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda," argues the problem is not collective inaction, but that most nations do not really care that much about repression in faraway places.

"Yes, they do not like genocide," adds Stephen Krasner, a Stanford University political scientist. "But, also yes, getting your own forces killed in a far-off place that most of your electorate has never heard of is not likely to win you votes."


Krasner says one problem with Gent's theory is that nations, unlike houses on a block, are not equals. Most countries lack the means to intervene, meaning that if powerful countries do nothing, nothing gets done. Domestic political pressures, he adds, make powerful countries unwilling to sacrifice lives: "That is why dealing with the tsunami was so nice -- no one got killed -- and why Clinton decided that the U.S. Air Force would fly at 30,000 feet when bombing to get the Serbs out of Kosovo."

Gent agrees that the extent to which countries care about what happens in other nations, and domestic politics, are factors in whether they intervene to stop a genocide.

And sometimes, he adds, countries take action even when no private interest is at stake, as the United States did in Haiti in 1994 when it restored democratically elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. But Gent says the free rider model accounts for these phenomena, too.

"It could be the public good to you is worth more than the cost of intervention," he said. "If your interest in this country is so high you are willing to pay all the costs to get this public good for everyone, you will see unilateral intervention."

In other words, if the pothole is right in front of your house or poses a problem especially for you, you may be willing to fix the problem on your own. Small countries do step up to the plate -- when the problem is at their doorstep. African nations, not major powers, are the ones now sending peacekeepers to halt the killings in Darfur.

What it comes down to is a trade-off between what Gent calls salience -- the connection a country has to another country's problem -- and the cost of doing something. Problems in nearby countries, or in places that share historical or ethnic ties, are like the pothole in front of your house.

Difficult problems in distant lands such as Burma are like potholes way down the block. For such problems, the world simply clucks its disapproval and then does nothing.