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#11
05-02-2007, 05:58 PM
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Re: It\'s a shame about my street
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] A very nice little old lady that lives on our street decided that there was just too much trash along the sides of the public road that we live on. She canvased the neighborhood looking for volunteers to help her pick up the trash. Since my wife takes regular jogs with our dog, she said she would be happy to pick up any trash she saw while running. I have tried to explain to her about all of the free riders who will benefit from all of the positive externalities she will be creating, which will surely prevent her from picking up the trash. I mean, I don't want her wasting her time and effort on something that any economist who understands the theory of positive externalities and public goods knows will end in failure. But she won't listen. She just keeps picking up trash. She's just a girl though; it's not like she can understand simple economics. [/ QUOTE ] Suppose she values having a clean street at 10 utils. If it costs her -100 utils, she will not clean the street. However, if she finds 10 other people who value having a clean street at 10 utils, they can split the cost of cleaning it, and it gets done, even though some other people might benefit from it and have no work. Making these types of arrangements is reasonable when you have a small number of people involved. For example, your street can't have more than a few dozen people on it. This method falls apart the more people are needed to agree to get it done. For example, if she lived on a really large street that took -100,000,000 utils to clean. She surely isn't going to clean it alone. She isn't going to clean it if she finds 10 people to help her either. She's going to need to find thousands of volunteers to help before it becomes worthwhile to clean. Free rider situations are easy for small groups. Much harder for large. Your analogy is like saying if I jump off of a 5 foot ledge and don't break my leg, jumping off a 50 foot cliff surely is no problem. Sorry, its a strawman. [/ QUOTE ] Yeah, your right. Imagine that instead of living on a street, she lived in a neighborhood or a town or city or state or country or on a continent or on a planet. She's not gonna do jack then LMAO 
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#13
05-02-2007, 07:51 PM
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Re: It\'s a shame about my street
So, Standard Avenue is 10 miles long and desperately needs to be cleaned up. A little old lady lives on Standard Avenue between 53rd and 54th Streets. She can't find enough people to clean the whole ten-mile length, but she does find 10 neighborhood people willing to help clean up along Standard Avenue between the 52nd Street and 55th Street intersections.
So that's what they do, and some neighborhood folks do get a free ride and they all enjoy a cleaner, nicer street in which to live in their immediate neighborhood. The final day the cleanup project is celebrated with a block party, which goes smoothly, and in the spirit of things, the old lady even accepts a Budweiser from one of the free-riding local yokels who stopped by to enjoy a free hot dog. The lady goes to bed at night very happy that she succeeded in getting her own neighborhood so beautifully cleaned up, but deeply depressed that she couldn't find a way to clean up the whole ten-mile stretch. The next night the old lady is featured on the local TV news, which spurs some other neighborhood residents along Standard Avenue to begin planning their own cleanup projects. Tragically, due to all the attention and excitement, the old lady dies of a heart attack (thereby decreasing the surplus polulation), so she misses the follow-up piece on the next night's news, which is an interview with a local college economist who explains the free rider problem in layman's terms. The other neighborhood leaders who are intending their own cleanup projects on various stretches along Standard Avenue manage to catch the TV interview, though, and with heavy hearts they cancel their cleanup plans, seeing as their plans cannot succeed in overcoming the free-rider problem and realizing that they cannot possibly clean up the full length of Standard Avenue. The rest of Standard Avenue stays dirty, which in turn leads it to fall into ill-repair over the next few years, and gang-bangers and drug pushers start moving in. Property values drop rapidly, crime increases, and the moral degeneracy in the area soars to untold heights in the formerly quiet neighborhoods of Standard Avenue. A year passes, and a national news channel picks up the cleanup story and recreates it from start to finish and broadcasts it on National News Channel during prime time. This prompts various neighborhoods all over America to do the same thing the old lady did, and it works wonderfully, and they have fabulous block parties to celebrate; and many more neighborhoods across the country jump on board. The next night a nationally celebrated economist, a Nobel Prize winner, explains in layman's terms the free rider problem to the nation at 7:00 PM CST. With heavy hearts, all cleanup plans are cancelled, and the country falls into ill repair over the next few years, and then the gangbangers and drug pushers multiply, and moral degeneracy soars: there are porno posters on every billboard on every street corner and on every highway overpass, and rap music has displaced Muzak and Lite Rock in every office building. The moral condition of the country looks so bad that Congess passes a bill to allow the military to enforce moral standards, but the new President threatens to veto it, which she does. A military coup is then staged (instigated by Robert Bork and Thomas Sowell), and everybody winds up under curfew and martial law. Nobody is free-riding at this point because nobody is doing anything because everybody is under house arrest. After a couple of months of the nation being under house arrest, the military starts to wonder how it will get paid if nobody is working. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve has the answer, though: print more money! So the military keeps getting paid, but nobody is growing any food. So all farmers are released from house arrest, and their subsidies are handsomely increased for crops they aren't growing. Imports from China reach an all-time high, and...would somebody else care to finish this? I'm getting tired and I'm going to have the last TV dinner since I can't go out.
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#15
05-02-2007, 08:28 PM
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Re: It\'s a shame about my street
[ QUOTE ]
Seems to me that's like trying to make the streets cleaner by bombing them. [/ QUOTE ] I haven't been bombed by my town's street sweepers as yet. And if you don't like the way your town upkeeps its streets, try to change it or move. That's the beauty of local government, you can influence it and there are 1000s of other local governments to choose from if you can't or don't want to try.
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#18
05-03-2007, 03:51 AM
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Re: It\'s a shame about my street
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] Seems to me that's like trying to make the streets cleaner by bombing them. [/ QUOTE ] I haven't been bombed by my town's street sweepers as yet. And if you don't like the way your town upkeeps its streets, try to change it or move. That's the beauty of local government, you can influence it and there are 1000s of other local governments to choose from if you can't or don't want to try. [/ QUOTE ] Why should I be the one to move when there's a local maffia ruling the city? Or are you suggesting that might makes right?
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#19
05-03-2007, 04:28 AM
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Re: It\'s a shame about my street
more and more i listen to you ACers, the more that you guys (ironically obv) sound like commies
im too busy to get into this, but the literature ive read seem to back up a lot of things on public good will and charities whatever. communists relied on these Utopian ideals as well sorry if i just ruined the light-hearted nature of this thread with a very generalized statement. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
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