Ignoring the free rider problem until we get the holodeck doesn’t seem to be a serious solution. If you have a deadbeat brother sponging off you it is all well and good to think that one day you’ll win the lottery and you won’t care. That only works with your own money though. DB is talking about a system that you are trying to get other people to buy into. They won’t do that if your system is transparently rob-able. They’ll rob it instead. People aren’t dumb. Give em the choice of pulling the cart or sitting on it and you pull alone.
I mostly meant that “free rider” isn’t a problem in altruism (where you pay for things if you think it improves the world), only in capitalist financing (where you pay only for things where you expect to capture more value than your costs).
ALL recipients of charity and social support are free riders: they’re taking more value than they’re contributing. And I don’t care, and neither should you. Calling them “deadbeats” implies you know and can judge WHY they’re in need of help, and you are comparing deservedness rather than effectiveness. I recommend not doing that; deciding what people deserve pretty much cannot be done rationally.
I mostly meant that “free rider” isn’t a problem in altruism
Actually, it is. The problem with ‘free riding’ is not that it’s somehow unfair to the people who are picking up the slack, it’s that it distorts behavior. You don’t want to give money to beggars if this just incents more people to beg and begging is a horrible job—and this is true even if you’re altruistic towards people who might beg. You’ll need to find a way to give money that doesn’t have these bad consequences, even if that means expending some resources.
I was going for a specific common situation, a family member who is mooching. I didn’t mean that all recipients of charity are deadbeats. Obviously, that’s going to depend on the individuals in question.
This is a “teach/give fish” issue here. If you give people stuff they don’t scarequotes earn unscarequotes then they have, in a way, earned it. I mean, value judgement aside they have it now, right? They were miserable enough in front of you that they got it off you. Good on em. Mad beggar skills.
But that’s just on a personal level. If you expand that, and you aren’t just a dude who is a soft touch, but actually build an organization on the principle of “see cry, give hanky”, then your charity is vulnerable to a free rider attack. You gotta fix that, if you actually want to do good and not just create a client group.
If you’ve ever seen the situation of “it would actually be bad for me to get a job because I’d lose X benefit” you get what I’m talking about here. It is a real problem, and the fact that it takes a hard heart to look at it doesn’t make it less real. You have to solve the free rider problem if you want to do charity well, like you have to solve the impostor problem if you want to do encryption.
Ignoring the free rider problem until we get the holodeck doesn’t seem to be a serious solution. If you have a deadbeat brother sponging off you it is all well and good to think that one day you’ll win the lottery and you won’t care. That only works with your own money though. DB is talking about a system that you are trying to get other people to buy into. They won’t do that if your system is transparently rob-able. They’ll rob it instead. People aren’t dumb. Give em the choice of pulling the cart or sitting on it and you pull alone.
I mostly meant that “free rider” isn’t a problem in altruism (where you pay for things if you think it improves the world), only in capitalist financing (where you pay only for things where you expect to capture more value than your costs).
ALL recipients of charity and social support are free riders: they’re taking more value than they’re contributing. And I don’t care, and neither should you. Calling them “deadbeats” implies you know and can judge WHY they’re in need of help, and you are comparing deservedness rather than effectiveness. I recommend not doing that; deciding what people deserve pretty much cannot be done rationally.
Actually, it is. The problem with ‘free riding’ is not that it’s somehow unfair to the people who are picking up the slack, it’s that it distorts behavior. You don’t want to give money to beggars if this just incents more people to beg and begging is a horrible job—and this is true even if you’re altruistic towards people who might beg. You’ll need to find a way to give money that doesn’t have these bad consequences, even if that means expending some resources.
I was going for a specific common situation, a family member who is mooching. I didn’t mean that all recipients of charity are deadbeats. Obviously, that’s going to depend on the individuals in question.
This is a “teach/give fish” issue here. If you give people stuff they don’t scarequotes earn unscarequotes then they have, in a way, earned it. I mean, value judgement aside they have it now, right? They were miserable enough in front of you that they got it off you. Good on em. Mad beggar skills.
But that’s just on a personal level. If you expand that, and you aren’t just a dude who is a soft touch, but actually build an organization on the principle of “see cry, give hanky”, then your charity is vulnerable to a free rider attack. You gotta fix that, if you actually want to do good and not just create a client group.
If you’ve ever seen the situation of “it would actually be bad for me to get a job because I’d lose X benefit” you get what I’m talking about here. It is a real problem, and the fact that it takes a hard heart to look at it doesn’t make it less real. You have to solve the free rider problem if you want to do charity well, like you have to solve the impostor problem if you want to do encryption.