5

Free-riding, or Not Doing Your Bit

‘From now on I’m thinking only of me.’

Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: ‘But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.’

‘Then,’ said Yossarian, ‘I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?’

– Joseph Heller, Catch-22

One of the biggest media events of 2013 was the birth of a child. Not any child, but George, Prince of Cambridge, third in line to the British throne. Interest in the birth was global: on the day of the birth, 22nd July, the BBC News website received more traffic than ever before, with 19.4 million unique browsers. An estimated ninety separate TV crews spent a long day camped outside a London hospital waiting for the birth to be announced. In the midst of the media frenzy, a BBC reporter standing outside the hospital expressed grave concern about the challenges that George’s parents would face: ‘A major problem is the intense media interest which will surround the boy.’

Wait a moment. Isn’t there something a bit odd, even hypocritical, about a BBC reporter worrying aloud about this? Presumably the BBC realizes that it plays a major role in sustaining intense media interest in the British royal family. When challenged about the harm done to the family by saturation media coverage, the BBC has always pointed out that its involvement alone does not cause the problem. In the barely imaginable parallel universe involving BBC silence on royal matters, the argument goes, there would still be more than enough other media organizations to ensure saturation coverage. So, if there is a problem, the BBC is not responsible for it.

This is a variation on an argument that has become very familiar in recent decades: it makes no difference whether or not I do my bit. I might worry about climate change, but it makes no difference whether or not I cut my carbon emissions by consuming less, driving less, flying less. So why bother? And although I may be horrified by the latest African famine, my charitable donation makes no difference. So why bother? Again, it makes no difference whether or not I vote, so why bother? Since it makes no difference, doing my bit in all these cases would not be virtuous. It would be completely futile. The only sensible decision is to free-ride on the contributions of others.

Facebook UK seems to think so too. In 2014, despite UK sales of over £100 million, it paid only £4,327 in UK corporation tax. By 2018, its tax payment had risen to £15.8 million – but sales had grown to £1.3 billion, so it still paid barely more than 1 per cent in tax. Facebook free-rides on the contributions of other taxpayers, who pay for state-subsidized improvements in UK internet infrastructure – enabling almost two-thirds of the UK population to use Facebook. Facebook can free-ride because we let it. We might boycott Facebook over fake news, but not over their tax avoidance, because free-riding is normal behaviour nowadays. We just shrug our shoulders and mutter, ‘Wouldn’t you …?’

And yet for most of human history, when people have confronted these kinds of situations, they have reached the opposite conclusion. The term ‘free-riding’ was first used in 1850s Wisconsin to refer to travelling on a train without paying. But the wider contemporary meaning of ‘free-riding’ – enjoying the benefits made possible by the contributions of others without contributing yourself – was unknown outside academia till the 1970s. The transformation of the phrase ‘free-riding’ from obscure academic jargon to everyday speech is a recent one.

Of course, people have been free-riding for as long as there have been communities large enough for free riders to sponge off. But they didn’t call it that. The wider usage of the word ‘free-riding’ in the last fifty years or so reflects a fundamental shift in the status of this kind of behaviour. Over this period, free-riding behaviour began to shed some of the negative connotations with which it had always been associated: quite suddenly, it became the smart thing to do. ‘Free-riding’ wasn’t just a new label for old behaviour but a new argument that such behaviour was acceptable: an argument mostly based on some economic theory not even invented until the 1930s and still confined to academia as late as the 1960s. As ideas go, free-riding is very new.

The emergence in the 1960s of a hippie countercultural mentality of fatalistic powerlessness provided fertile ground for the spread of this new idea. The activist Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, a defining statement of 60s hippiedom, exemplifies the contradictions in free-riding. Rejected by over thirty publishers, it sold over a quarter of a million copies in the first six months after publication, and countless copies were stolen – but without the buyers there would have been very few copies produced for the free-riders to steal. Hoffman thought it was immoral not to steal from the ‘Pig Empire’ (the US), and ruefully acknowledged his contradictory success: ‘it’s embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the bestsellers list.’1

HOW DID FREE-RIDING BECOME SMART?

In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon tells the story of a shepherd, Gyges, who witnesses an earthquake in which a chasm opens up in the earth. In a Hollywood disaster movie, Gyges would leave the earthquake zone as fast as his SUV would carry him. But it’s not that kind of story. Gyges descends into the chasm. He finds a gold ring, which he puts on, and rapidly discovers that by twisting the ring, he can make himself invisible. It’s that kind of story. Gyges does not spend much time contemplating how to do good with his new powers. On the contrary, with the help of the ring, Gyges quickly gets into the royal palace, whereupon he seduces the queen, murders the king and seizes the throne. Glaucon argues that all of us would steal, murder and seduce if we had such a ring: we obey the law only because we face penalties for disobedience.fn1 The rational action is to pursue your own self-interest, even if it harms wider society, if there is no penalty for doing so. Effectively, Glaucon recommends free-riding whenever you can do so without penalty. Socrates rejects Glaucon’s reasoning, arguing instead that everyone should obey the law even in the absence of sanctions. Free-riding is implicitly but emphatically rejected.

In the eighteenth century Adam Smith reached a similar conclusion to Socrates. Smith noticed that it can be smart for people to cooperate for mutual benefit, even if, individually, they can do better in the short term by not cooperating. The particular case of cooperation for mutual benefit that most interested Smith was business people cooperating to arrange a cartel or some other form of price-fixing: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’2 Smith and his followers concluded that in a capitalist economy there is a strong tendency towards cartels, monopolies and other forms of anti-competitive activity.

Price-fixing might seem an abstruse technical issue, but in the following century Marx took Smith’s argument further, substantially raising the stakes in the process. Marx argued that the competition on which capitalism relied was being subverted by various forms of anti-competitive activity. Indeed, for Marx, capitalism was headed for self-destruction partly through the tendency of competition to be eroded away. By the 1930s many people agreed, concluding that communism was the answer. Today, it is easy to forget how the world looked to many people then. In an open letter to the Manchester Guardian in March 1933, George Bernard Shaw and twenty other prominent British socialists robustly defended Stalin’s regime and rejected the evidence then emerging of mass famines in the Soviet Union. (Shaw remained a fan of Stalin. In 1950, asked for his choice for ‘Man of the Half-century’, Shaw suggested three – Stalin, Einstein and ‘one whom I cannot modestly name’.)3

Against this background, there was a large audience in the West hungry for ideas which could be used to defend capitalism. And, specifically, for ideas to answer the question left open by Adam Smith: how to preserve competition when firms have a natural inclination to subvert it, to cooperate for mutual benefit?

One answer provided by thinkers after Smith, such as John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, was that people are often too short-sightedly irrational to collaborate for mutual benefit. For example, a firm which stood to gain more in the long term by joining a cartel or other price-fixing agreement would be tempted instead by the short-term profits from cutting prices and gaining market share over rivals. This argument had merit but now seemed too flimsy a basis on which to build a defence of capitalism. It was not enough to respond to the challenge posed by Marx merely by noting that firms are often too short-sighted to realize that their long-term interests lie in subverting competition. A big idea was needed.

Free-riding was that idea. It provides the crux of a powerful argument suggesting that competition is rational and natural after all. In this way of thinking, collaboration by firms is not smart but foolish, because every firm can free-ride on the collaborative efforts of other firms in the industry. As a result, cartels and other attempts to undermine competition will collapse. To see why, we need to explore a specific example of collaboration in a bit more detail.

Suppose that a small firm has agreed to restrict its sales to help uphold a price-fixing agreement. The firm will soon realize that it can make more profit by quietly ignoring the agreement and selling more. The agreement will not collapse immediately, because the extra sales made by one small firm will have a negligible effect on the market price.4 In other words, the business owner will be thinking along the lines of it makes no difference whether or not I do my bit to maintain the price-fixing agreement. The firm should sell as much as it can, while free-riding on the higher price made possible by the sales restraint of other companies in that market. The snag is that since all firms in that market think like this, the agreement will soon collapse – or never get started in the first place, because firms anticipate the collapse. The logic of the argument suggests that price-fixing agreements are unsustainable – even though if companies could somehow sustain them they would all be better off.

This obscure technical argument about price-fixing, developed in the 1930s, has turned out to have a giant impact on modern life, because it is the genesis of all those now familiar free-riding arguments which conclude that cooperation is futile. But first the free-riding idea needed someone to bring it out of its relative obscurity in economic theory and apply it to wider society.5

Enter a farm boy from North Dakota. Mancur Olson was born in January 1932 in North Dakota’s Red River Valley, into a Norwegian-American farming family.6 Even when, decades later, he had become famous throughout the world of academia, he retained his Norwegian accent and humble farm-boy manner. As the awards and honours rolled in, he continued to begin his curriculum vitae with his social-security number – as if he needed to prove who he was. One characteristic pronouncement, delivered in the flat voice of the prairies, was ‘Look for a problem that is interesting and important – never mind how it is classified – and tackle it. That is my advice to Mancur Olson, and that is my advice to everyone else.’7

As the eldest of three sons, Mancur was allowed to sit in on adult conversations about the prospects for the farm. There were many discussions about the difficulty in getting small farmers to work together, despite their shared interest in getting a fair price for their crops. The Olsons observed that back in Norway, and in the other Scandinavian countries, there seemed to be a much stronger tradition of getting people to work together for common interests, achieving both economic growth and a measure of equality for society at large. Mancur Olson never forgot these conversations, and by the time he came to write his PhD dissertation he was preoccupied with why some groups seem able to work together for their common interest, while others cannot. Like Ken Arrow’s, Olson’s early career involved military service – as a lieutenant in the US Air Force in 1961–3 – and time at RAND. Olson’s breakthrough came when he took the economic theory of perfect competition between firms and applied it to a vast range of social situations. In his aptly titled 1965 masterwork The Logic of Collective Action, Olson built on the earlier argument about price fixing: small firms realize that there is no point in restraining their sales for the sake of the agreement, because, since their sales are a negligible part of the total market, their restraint makes no difference. True to his roots, Olson chose the example of a small farmer to apply this thinking: ‘A farmer who placed the interests of other farmers above his own would not necessarily restrict his production to raise farm prices, since he would know that his sacrifice would not bring a noticeable benefit to anyone. Such a rational farmer, however unselfish, would not make such a futile and pointless sacrifice …’8

To push home his point about there being no virtue in doing your bit – making a sacrifice – when it makes no difference to anyone, Olson continued: ‘Selfless behavior that has no perceptible effect is sometimes not even considered praiseworthy. A man who tried to hold back a flood with a pail would probably be considered more of a crank than a saint, even by those he was trying to help.’9

This striking metaphor brings out Olson’s key insight. If it makes no difference whether or not you do your bit, then there is no point in making a futile sacrifice. So there is nothing immoral about free-riding: it’s just the rational thing to do. Free-riding might seem selfish, but in these situations self-sacrifice helps no one. In arguing that rational people free-ride rather than cooperate, so that collective action is hard to sustain, Olson had a bigger target in mind than small farmers. He went after Marxism. Explicitly rejecting what he called ‘Marxian theories of class action’, he argued instead that the opportunity to free-ride will prevent groups acting together in pursuit of their common interests. Only if there is some form of coercion will groups act collectively. As an illustration, Olson concluded that labour or trade unions must be coercive, otherwise they would not survive. For Olson, the trade union movement had the same authoritarian overtones as the Soviet economies.

Unsurprisingly, Olson’s revolutionary analysis was well received on the Right. Their intellectual leader, Friedrich Hayek, arranged for The Logic of Collective Action to be translated into German. By the 1980s, Olson’s analysis appeared to fit neatly into the intellectual underpinnings of free-market worldviews such as Reaganomics and Thatcherism: cooperation and collective action are generally hard to sustain, so competition must be the natural state of affairs.

And yet, there is a puzzle. Despite the seemingly unassailable logic of Olson’s argument, free-riding still has a dodgy reputation. Nowadays it feels like many of us rely on it makes no difference whether or not I do my bit thinking to let ourselves off the hook in a wide range of situations – even though we don’t really believe the argument. One reason for our unease might be that heavy-duty free-riders, the kind of people that devote their lives to free-riding, tend not to be very admirable, impressive or nice.

FREE-RIDERS V. LITTLE PEOPLE

Tax evasion is a strong form of free-riding. At the end of the 1980s Leona Helmsley, one of the biggest US tax evaders of the decade, explained her views about tax to her maid: ‘We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.’10 Helmsley’s lack of sympathy for other people was legendary, so we should not take this kind of arrogant flaunting of tax avoidance as typical of tax avoiders in general.fn2 But even among people who need to maintain a reputation for being law-abiding, aggressive minimization of your tax bill is no longer something to be coy about. Former US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner repeatedly forgot to pay tax on his earnings from working at the IMF. After an IRS audit, Geithner paid back taxes on only two of the four years owing, relying on the Statute of Limitations to avoid paying the rest. This suggests that Geithner (or his accountant) felt no moral obligation to pay all tax originally due. Geithner did pay the remaining two years’ worth of tax – but later, just before being nominated for Treasury Secretary.11 There has been a similar shift in corporate culture. When CEO Eric Schmidt was asked in 2012 about Google’s tax-avoidance strategies, he replied, ‘We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this. We pay lots of taxes; we pay them in the legally prescribed ways. I am very proud of the structure that we set up. We did it based on the incentives that the governments offered us to operate.’12

The size of Google means that its tax avoidance makes a meaningful difference to government revenues.13 But for the rest of us little people, Helmsley’s notorious phrase has it the wrong way round. For us, tax avoidance seems to make sense: it makes no difference to what the government can afford to do whether or not I pay my little bit of tax. Restraining myself, refusing to engage in tax avoidance, appears to be pointless self-sacrifice.

If you resist this conclusion – perhaps because you do pay all your taxes – it is worth pausing to think if you nevertheless free-ride in other contexts instead. It is easy enough to do so, almost without noticing. As well as travelling on trains without a ticket, I free-ride if I sneak into a sports match or a music festival without paying. Or take a coffee from the office machine without putting money in the honesty box. Or accept that my community needs to recycle most household waste but don’t bother to sort my own household recycling. Or exaggerate the value of an item lost when making an insurance claim. These free-rides are probably still regarded as morally wrong by most of us. Yet according to the compelling logic of the free-riding argument, free-riding is the only rational thing to do, assuming that the likelihood of punishment or some form of social sanction is minimal. Maybe our morality just needs to catch up with our understanding of economics?

Maybe in some cases it already has. Many people illegally download music or read newspaper content for free online, relying on others to pay. Maybe you browsed this book and others in a bookshop, but while standing there you learned via your smartphone that it is cheaper on Amazon, so you didn’t buy anything in the shop. Organizations from Ryanair to the UK National Health Service repeatedly poach skilled workers who have been expensively trained elsewhere. All these free-rides are widely regarded as acceptable. And free-riding is so normal. Nowadays accessing free music or other content online is too commonplace to mention; past generations would have needed no less than Glaucon’s invisibility ring to get free music from the record shop.

It is easy to see how the free-riders might justify their actions. Maybe I entered the sports match without paying because I’ve been a loyal fan for ages, buying season tickets in previous years. Now the club is owned by a billionaire but ticket prices have risen sharply, and I’m unemployed and short of cash. I take a coffee from the office machine without paying because I know that the suggested price I am supposed to pay has been calculated to allow for ‘forgetfulness’. The machine still covers its costs even if not everyone pays. I’m taking one of the spare coffees. I do some illegal downloading because I pay for some music, the cost of supplying downloads is virtually zero and the band members are all millionaires. I inflate my insurance claim and deflate my tax return because I know several of my friends have done so, and so I assume most people do. Or perhaps I exaggerate my insurance claim because previously I made a legitimate claim but the insurance company refused to pay out on a technicality.

Some of these justifications are worth taking seriously in themselves. They invoke powerful ideas about fairness. However, as reasons for free-riding, they miss the point. Free-riding may or may not be fair or virtuous. But free-riding is always the smart thing to do, because you gain; and always the rational thing to do, because your contribution makes a negligible difference to the collective endeavour, so no one loses if you withdraw it. Yet the fact we use these other reasons to justify free-riding suggests that, despite the force of the argument for free-riding, we don’t like to admit to the little free-rides sprinkled across our daily lives. The mystery only deepens.

Perhaps the explanation is straightforward. Perhaps we reject the logic of the free-riding argument after all. What if the little people rebel? What if everyone tried to evade tax whenever possible? What if everyone decided to free-ride whenever possible? The consequences for society would be disastrous.

There are two problems with this easy reply. First, it doesn’t provide a positive reason to do your bit. As Yossarian in Catch-22 realized, if everyone else is free-riding or otherwise acting selfishly, and you don’t, no one gains and you lose. A society cannot survive on the back of a single taxpayer. Collective endeavours need more than a single contribution, so if everyone else is free-riding you don’t achieve anything by doing your bit. Second, the free-rider can simply respond, ‘But not everyone does free-ride. So I can rely on the contributions of others.’ It is true that not everyone can free-ride. As a free-rider, I need other people to contribute and should encourage them to do so. So maybe I am inconsistent, or at least hypocritical, in discouraging other people from free-riding while doing it myself. But being a bit of a hypocrite seems better than a needless contribution to a collective endeavour which will happen anyway. And if it won’t happen, doing your bit is as senseless as trying to hold back a flood with a pail.

In the wake of Mancur Olson’s work, free-rider thinking spread across society in the 1970s. If Olson and his followers were right, previous generations were all making a huge mistake in their thinking about when and why to cooperate. They understood cooperation and the meaning of an individual contribution to a group effort in an entirely different way. How, for instance, did previous generations persuade people to pay their taxes? Partly, of course, with the threat of punishment if you were caught cheating. But just as importantly there was a shared understanding that it is in each individual’s interest to pay their taxes. A diverse range of economists and philosophers agreed that if cooperation secures benefits for all concerned, that alone is good enough reason for each individual to contribute voluntarily to the cooperative enterprise.14 A 1930s Italian economist even described people who do not voluntarily pay their taxes as ‘a pathological group against which society must defend itself’.15 So, back then, free-riding was regarded as acting against your own best interests – irrational, or even pathological.

If we’re looking for a flaw in the argument for free-riding, this older perspective on doing your bit seems long overdue for a revival.

MAKING THINGS HAPPEN BEATS BEING INDISPENSABLE

What are you going to do at work next week? In my typical week, there are plenty of things which must be done. There is also a long list of other things to do, over which I have some discretion. But there is never enough time to do all of them. (Sound familiar?) I could decide to make a list of all the things I want to happen, then rank them in order of priority. In deciding the ranking, various considerations would come into play, such as the relative desirability or importance of the different things; the pleasure or otherwise of doing them myself; whether or not a colleague would do them if I don’t; and, sometimes, the desire to be the person who makes a particular thing happen. Once I have things ranked in order of priority, I would simply work down the list from the top, until I ran out of time.

Do you make decisions in that way? No, I don’t either. But we might see it as a hyper-rational way of making decisions, in some sense an ideal. And yet it is fundamentally incompatible with the thinking behind free-riding, because of one of the considerations just mentioned – whether or not a colleague would do something if I don’t. According to free-rider thinking, if something is going to happen anyway, regardless of whether or not I do it myself, then it would be irrational to waste any time on it. It should not even be on my ‘to do’ list. It was this subtle principle, hidden in Mancur Olson’s argument, that distinguished his analysis from all previous thinking. Stated in isolation, it might seem a very sensible principle. Yet its implications are deeply implausible and fly in the face of how we usually think.

To begin with, if it is stupid to spend time on something when I know that someone else will do it if I don’t, then I should only do things in which my participation is indispensable – things which won’t happen unless I do them. But no one would arrange their working life, or indeed their life as a whole, on that basis. Suppose I am taking my dog for a walk on the beach and I see someone in the sea who looks in distress. I am a good swimmer. But there is another person nearby on the beach, who from her physique and clothing looks like a strong swimmer who has just emerged from the water. I judge that the strong swimmer will definitely rescue the person in distress if I don’t. And only I can make sure my dog does not run off. Should I stay with my dog, or help the strong swimmer to save the person who might be drowning? Free-rider thinking is clear: the person in the water will almost certainly be saved in any case. I should keep hold of my dog because, unless I do, no one else will. It would be irrational to prioritize the person who might be drowning.16

Few of us think like this. We think there are good reasons to save the person in distress, even though they will be rescued regardless of our intervention. Deciding not to free-ride is just like that. It can be perfectly rational to contribute to a collective activity, even if the activity will still go ahead regardless of whether or not I contribute. At work I might prioritize working on a major team project for an important client over doing the client bills, even though I am the only one authorized to do the bills. The project just matters more, even though the work on it would progress in my absence. In this situation I do not think it makes no difference whether or not I do it. I believe that I have made a difference: I have helped cause something to happen. I have done my bit for the team effort.

The argument for free-riding assumes that my contribution to some collective project or activity can make a difference only if the activity will not happen unless I contribute. But the story about the person who may be drowning shows that we do not think like this, at least some of the time. I believe that I can make a difference even if, without my contribution, others would have ensured the activity goes ahead. I make a difference because my contribution helps cause it to happen: it is my effort that helps bring it about, rather than just the activities of others. If I contribute, I am responsible (along with others) for the collective activity.

Obama’s election in 2008 was a powerful illustration of this way of thinking. His famous line ‘You are the change you’ve been waiting for’ brilliantly exploited the desire of some voters to be ‘part of’ the endeavour to get him elected – to help bring that about, even if it was probably going to happen anyway. Research by pollsters at the time showed that many of the ‘don’t knows’ shifted to supporting Obama once it became clear he was likely to win. This ‘bandwagon effect’ has been observed in many other elections too. Yet it contradicts free-rider thinking: if one candidate seems highly likely to win, so your vote will make no difference to the outcome, why make the effort?

It is one thing to identify behaviour where free-rider thinking does not prevail, such as election bandwagon effects or office teamwork. Perhaps these are just isolated instances. But is there any systematic rejection of free-rider thinking nowadays, even when the stakes are high?

Yes, because of how we think about responsibility. It is not just that people in distress in the sea are rescued by saintly dog-walkers passing by. More worrying for free-rider thinking is how we treat these rescuers. We honour them and praise them – you weren’t surprised when I called them saintly. We do not say that the rescuer deserves no credit, because they are not responsible for the rescue, and made no difference, because someone else would have stepped in to save the person if the rescuer didn’t. Our thinking about responsibility is especially well developed in connection with serious crimes: the meaning of criminal responsibility has been discussed over thousands of years of popular debate and legal argument, leading to a strong consensus.17 Different legal systems agree that if two gangsters corner an enemy in a dark alley and both of them point their guns at their victim, intending to kill, but only one of them fires, then the gangster who fired is responsible for the murder. We do not say: ‘Had the gangster not fired, the other gangster was certain to do so. Therefore the first gangster didn’t make any difference; the murder would have happened anyway.’ But this is precisely the view of responsibility behind the free-riding argument.

Once we uncover this perverse view of responsibility, a view which greatly restricts how an individual’s contribution can make a difference, then free-rider thinking itself begins to seem equally perverse. Mostly in life we do not restrict our efforts to activities where our contribution is absolutely essential for the success of the activity. Yet the free-riding argument says we are irrational unless we focus on being indispensable in this way. So at the very least, the free-riding argument is shaky: often it is not irrational to contribute to a collective activity, even if the activity will happen anyway. Buried inside free-rider thinking is a view about what it means to ‘bring something about’ or ‘cause something to happen’ – a hidden assumption about the meaning of cause and effect.18

What should we conclude from all this?

On the one hand, free-rider thinking doesn’t just run counter to our common sense, our ideas about responsibility and so on, it also runs counter to the arguments of generations of thinkers before Olson, including Socrates, Adam Smith, David Hume, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. They thought that if you benefit from a collective activity, then that alone is reason enough to contribute to it (providing that your benefit from the collective activity exceeds the cost of contributing). And, it’s worth noting, their argument for doing your bit appeals purely to self-interest, rather than expecting individuals to make sacrifices for the sake of the common good.

On the other hand, the logic of the free-riding argument has not gone away. If you avoid paying tax, don’t vote or don’t do your bit to reduce carbon emissions, you are unlikely to have been persuaded to give up free-riding just yet. Why exactly should you contribute to some collective activity, if the activity will happen in any case?

One reason has been mentioned already: you might contribute because you want to be involved – you want to be ‘part of the change’, you want to belong, rather than watching from the sidelines. Many economists snigger at this possibility, dismissing it as a desire for ‘warm glow’. As so often, economists’ language used to describe virtuous behaviour subtly belittles it. ‘Warm glow’ suggests a narcissistic smugness, self-centredness rather than altruism, insinuating that an altruistic or political act is really all about you. Yet wanting to help bring about some collective goal – actively contributing to it – makes sense only if you identify with and value the outcome as an end in itself. Desiring the outcome is the reason for your contribution; any warm glow you feel is just a by-product of your involvement. Of course, the sense of fulfilment associated with helping bring about some collective goal may be outweighed by the drawbacks of making a contribution. Many blood donors get this kind of fulfilment, a sense of doing their bit, from giving blood – but still not enough satisfaction to give blood every time they are invited to do so, because of the time and inconvenience involved. And not many people get a deep sense of fulfilment from paying tax.

However, there are two more general reasons for doing your bit. First, there is uncertainty. For the sake of simplicity, we have assumed so far that the collective project or activity will definitely still happen, regardless of whether you contribute. But in reality there is always uncertainty. I am never absolutely sure that other people will step in if I don’t do my bit. Even with the best intentions, few work colleagues are a completely reliable back-up if I don’t get things done. Perhaps the election will be decided by one vote. And perhaps the other person on the beach – the strong swimmer who has just emerged from the sea – is in fact to blame for the person in distress in the water and I have stumbled on the scene of an attempted murder by drowning. Second, in many cases when I am tempted to free-ride it will make a difference if I do so: the final outcome will not be exactly the same. If I evade paying tax, there is a real loss of tax revenue to the government. It may be small, but it is not zero. Free-riding makes a difference whenever a collective endeavour or project is made up of the sum of individual contributions, and more contributions imply a more successful project. When I do not bother to recycle my household waste or give blood but rely on others to do so I make a small difference to the success of these socially valuable activities. Yet there is a widespread belief that my tiny contribution to a large project is so negligible that it can be ignored.

These points may seem minor, but their implications are major.

CLIMATE CHANGE and me

I am worried about climate change. I really am. But what can I do? It is absurd to believe that the car I drive, or the number of flights I take, or whether I fit solar panels on my house, can make any difference to the big picture. The UK as a whole, for instance, is responsible for only around 2 per cent of global emissions. Climate change is going to happen regardless of what we do. And the scale of the problem is barely comprehensible. Across the world in 2017, more than 170 tonnes of coal were burned every second.19

The enormity of the climate-change problem and the negligible impact of individual actions are two themes that arise repeatedly in focus groups on public attitudes and are echoed by large corporations and governments.20 Together, they are probably the biggest obstacle to radical action to address climate change. But we should be suspicious: as ever when free-riding beckons, it is extremely tempting to let ourselves off the hook, to assume that individual contributions make no difference.21

The psychology of cognitive dissonance tells us that when the truth is uncomfortable, we often respond by falling into self-deception. This need not be due to selfishness: it may be that if I make an uncomfortable effort or sacrifice now, I will gain much more later. But this kind of self-control is hard to achieve. Psychologists have shown that thinking about an experience in the present will be more ‘salient’ – more vivid, more prominent in our minds – than the same experience in the future. So we pay more attention to an immediate sacrifice than a distant future benefit. If I pretend to myself that my contribution makes no difference, then I can avoid the vivid, immediate sacrifice.

There are other psychological forces which lead us to underestimate the difference our ‘negligible’ contributions make. If the context of a contribution is local, small, personal or temporary, we underestimate the impact it can have on an outcome which is global, large, public or permanent, because the two contexts are cognitively distinct.22 This is why in 1883 Thomas Huxley, rightly regarded as one of the greatest biologists of his era, could nevertheless write: ‘probably all the great sea fisheries are inexhaustible; that is to say that nothing we do seriously affects the number of fish’.23 He simply could not imagine a permanent reduction in fish stocks, given the scale of fishing he observed and the temporary losses it implied – temporary because breeding constantly replenishes stocks.

As well as these unconscious cognitive errors, there are also flaws in our conscious reasoning about contributing to collective activities and projects. Suppose my contribution really is negligible relative to the size of the project. That fact alone is not enough to justify doing nothing. Mixing the metaphors, in order to let myself off the hook, I have to be able to pass the buck. After all, my contribution makes a difference, however small. To justify not contributing myself, I have to believe that although I cannot make a useful difference, someone else can. In the case of climate change, corporations and governments can make a difference on a scale I cannot.

This response is fine as far as it goes – but it doesn’t go very far, certainly not far enough to let you off the hook. To begin with, individuals usually bear some responsibility for the large impacts of corporations and governments. When governments support fossil-fuel-based energy and corporations supply it, this is in large part because we demand cheap energy, and a lot of it. And just because governments or other powerful actors in society should act, it does not follow that I need not bother.

It bears repeating: small contributions are small, not zero. When I donate money to famine relief and my donation pays for food which saves the life of one child, that donation is clearly a worthwhile contribution. It remains worthwhile even if many people still die from the famine, lives which could have been saved through more donations from me or others.24 There is a psychological dimension here as well as a moral one. Excessive focus on the enormity of the total task leads us to ignore the value of completing part of the task, even a small part. To overcome this ‘focusing illusion’, we must frame the task or problem differently. Saving single lives is worthwhile; so, too, is reducing carbon emissions in my household, city or country. The total task is no more than the sum of these smaller gains and cannot be completed without them.

Another problem with our fixation on the enormity of the total task is that we overlook the contributions already made by others, contributions which diminish the task remaining – and so my individual contribution becomes more significant. My judgement that my contribution is negligible often assumes that no one else is contributing. Governments and large corporations often assume this too, whether through self-deception or deliberately seeking an excuse for inaction. In Britain, the individual contribution of the aviation sector to total UK emissions is currently around 6 per cent – a figure which is repeatedly used by aviation lobbyists to argue that the sector’s contribution is relatively minor and so government intervention is unwarranted. But because of the efforts being made elsewhere in the economy to adopt green technology and reduce consumption, the contribution of aviation will rise to around 21 per cent by 2050. The negligibility of the aviation contribution rests on ignoring these efforts. And there is more: the 21 per cent estimate is based on business as usual: it assumes that emissions reductions elsewhere in the economy will simply maintain current trends. If we assume instead that these other emissions will be in line with what they should be (according to the UK’s official national carbon budget), then aviation’s contribution rises to somewhere between 50 and 100 per cent of total emissions by 2050.

Finally, and most importantly, we have so far looked only at the direct effects of individual contributions, but there are usually indirect effects too. We’ve seen how Buchanan and the other public choice theorists were puzzled by rational people bothering to vote, because in many electoral systems your vote has no direct effect on the candidate elected – unless the election is decided by one vote, which is extremely unlikely. But this so-called ‘paradox of voting’ is in truth not paradoxical at all. I vote because my vote has the indirect effect of increasing my preferred candidate’s mandate. With more votes cast in her favour, my preferred candidate can demonstrate greater support for her policies; in a democracy this should increase the chance of these policies being put into practice. Similarly, when I fit solar panels on my roof at home, the indirect effects may be more important than the direct reduction in carbon emissions: my action may stimulate friends and neighbours to fit panels; it may help market demand for panels reach the level where economies of scale in their production kick in, reducing panel prices; it shows a willingness to incur a large upfront cost to obtain renewable energy, which may change politicians’ views about popular support for renewable energy. These indirect effects arise in many contexts. My individual contribution can often influence others, raise market demand or change politicians’ perceptions of public support – and indirect effects such as these can help cross-cultural, economic or political ‘tipping points’, in turn triggering wider change. The tipping point can have political and social consequences as well as economic ones. Once enough people do their bit – diligent household recycling or installing solar panels – this behaviour becomes ‘normal’ rather than restricted to the lone Green Warrior in the neighbourhood.

Even when free-rider thinking pays attention to indirect effects, it assumes we know their size, and the location of the tipping point, so the probability of your contribution crossing the tipping point can be calculated. But usually in reality, none of this is known. Tipping points are often entirely unexpected, their existence becoming clear only with hindsight.

The upshot of all these possibilities is that the overall effect of your contribution to some collective effort can often be significant, because you can influence the thinking and behaviour of others. Much of the blame for our believing otherwise lies with economists, not just for their advocacy of free-riding as the smart choice but for the worldview influenced by their ‘physics envy’: each of us is like an atom, having negligible effect on the system around us. However, part of the blame lies with us, because the belief that each of us has a negligible effect on the world around us is just the flip side of our cherished belief that others have no effect on us. Most of us, consciously or not, embrace some kind of sovereign fantasy: we assume that we are completely autonomous, even though the evidence against this is overwhelming. Humans are social beings to their core and our beliefs and behaviour are heavily influenced by observing and learning from others.

The dark side of the sovereign fantasy is the belief that I cannot influence others because they are sovereign decision-makers too. This idea, together with the belief that individual contributions are negligible, constitutes the cornerstone of individualism, implying that I can forget any wider social consequences of my actions and focus just on my own interests. I can act with impunity because my actions make no difference to society. But if my actions make no difference, I am also powerless to effect social change. A belief in the negligibility of your contribution doesn’t just license free-riding. It encourages a fatalistic view of the world in which individual action to bring about social or political change is pointless. Powerful people who seek to discourage the rest of us from challenging the status quo have good reason to promote the belief that you can’t make a difference.

HEAPS, HARMLESS TORTURERS AND HESITANT POLITICIANS

Try this experiment. Take a clean sheet of paper. Add a small amount of sand, say the amount you can pinch between two fingers. Then add roughly the same amount of sand again, dropping it on top of the rest. Do you have a heap of sand? Not yet. Keep adding sand, a pinch at a time. Do you have a heap now? It seems unlikely, because a pinch of sand is not enough to turn a non-heap into a heap. If you don’t already have a heap, adding another pinch makes no difference. Unfortunately, this logic always holds: another pinch is never enough to make a difference, so you can never make a heap of sand in this way. And yet if you add sand for several hours, surely you have a heap? Philosophers have been teased and tortured by this paradox ever since the ancient Greek philosophers first identified it; they label it the Sorites paradox, after the classical Greek for ‘heaped up’. There is no straightforward solution to the Sorites paradox.25 The problem is inherent in the meaning of ‘heap’. There seems to be no distinct threshold between a non-heap and a heap, one which can be crossed by a pinch of sand. Instead there seems to be a vague range of piles of sand which are just about big enough to qualify as heaps.

This kind of vagueness is very common. If a man loses all his hair little by little over time, each hair lost does not make enough difference to turn him bald, so how does he go bald? Here is a refutation of free-riding and bogus ideas about negligibility: each individual contribution seems to make no difference, yet together they bring about a significant change. This argument against free-riding is so important that it’s worth looking at another thought experiment which focuses explicitly on how small acts by different people can together make a big difference – the Puzzle of the Harmless Torturers.26

In the Bad Old Days, a thousand torturers each had a different victim. Each torturer pressed the button on a torture device a thousand times. Their victims could not perceive the extra pain from each button press but the cumulative effect of a thousand presses left them in horrendous pain. All the victims suffered in the same way, from separate but identical devices.

But now the torturers develop moral scruples. They change how they work. Each torturer now presses the button on a torture device just once, but they do this for every device: they press once on each of a thousand torture devices. The victims suffer the same horrendous pain. But none of the torturers makes any single victim’s pain perceptibly worse, so each torturer sleeps peacefully, pleased to be a harmless torturer.

Such thought experiments are nice puzzles, but it is hard to believe they help us make decisions in the real world. Yet the Puzzle of the Harmless Torturers may be an exception. It has, arguably, led to a rare thing: progress in moral philosophy. Most philosophers are now convinced that a series of negligible harms can add up to something substantial, even if each harm is truly imperceptible. The same goes for benefits. This surprising conclusion matters to the rest of us because – as we’ve seen with climate change and fishing – many real-world situations have an analogous structure. Imagine some large area of land which you perceive as ‘unspoilt’ – perhaps a national park. Bit by bit the park is developed, with a few sensitively designed houses spread about and some small access roads. Slowly, the houses and roads accumulate. Eventually, most visitors decide the park is ‘spoilt’, but exactly when did that happen? How much development is compatible with leaving the park unspoilt?

The Puzzle of the Harmless Torturers and the Sorites paradox show us that these are hard questions. The park really does end up spoilt; it is not an optical illusion. The problem lies in the vagueness of concepts like ‘spoilt’, which allows developers to argue that small developments make no difference. Elsewhere, free-riders can exploit vagueness to justify their claim that individual contributions make no difference.

But any simplistic attempt to make vague concepts precise is clearly doomed to failure. It is not just that no one has the power to meddle with our use of ordinary language. The vagueness is inherent in the concept. A ‘heap’ just is a vague thing – it would be absurd to assume instead that there is a clear threshold, a precise number of grains of sand, that differentiates a non-heap from a heap. And yet this absurd imposition of sharp thresholds is just what free-rider thinking requires of us.

To see why, let’s return to the common-sense objection to free-riding: what if everyone did it? According to Mancur Olson’s analysis, there are three cases to consider. The first two are straightforward: (i) If everyone free-rides, the collective project will not happen, so my non-contribution makes no difference; (ii) If no one else free-rides, the collective project will happen, so again my non-contribution makes no difference. In both cases, the conclusion is that I should free-ride.27 But what about the intermediate case (iii): Some people free-ride and some people contribute? Then, according to Olson, I should free-ride only if other people are contributing enough that the project can go ahead without my contribution.28

The problem here is not quite the obvious one – how much is enough? – but the assumption that there is an answer to that question. Olson’s analysis assumes that there is a threshold or tipping point, beyond which there are enough contributions for the project to go ahead. But life is not like that. The collective project or goal may be defined in terms of inherently vague concepts, like the goal of retaining an unspoilt national park. And even if the goal can be precise in principle, in practice it may be impossible to identify where the threshold or tipping point lies. One of the big difficulties with securing global agreement on substantial measures to tackle climate change is the disagreement over how much climate change is tolerable and, prior to that, how to define and measure the extent of change. Against this background, free-riding is especially tempting, because there is no tipping point triggering drastic climate change to worry about. Or rather, if such a point exists, there is uncertainty or disagreement concerning where it lies. And this kind of uncertainty can arise even in circumstances, like voting, where the tipping point seems absolutely clear.

The Great Reform Act of 1832 began the process of extending the franchise towards universal suffrage in Britain. Although its effects were modest – even after the act, only one in six adult men could vote (and no women) – the act was passed only after the country became virtually ungovernable because of huge political unrest. There were riots across England, with mob rule over Bristol for three days. Protesters urged a run on the banks: £1.5 million (about £160 million in modern terms) was withdrawn from the Bank of England. In this atmosphere, an important vote in Parliament was won by just one vote. That decisive vote was cast by John Calcraft, who spoke fiercely against reform, then changed his mind at the last moment. Given the strength of feeling on both sides, this did not go down well: ‘He killed himself six months later, correctly imagining himself to be hated by both sides equally.’29

As we have seen, free-rider thinking implies it is worth voting only if your vote is decisive – if the election hangs on one vote. In elections, there is a sharp threshold, so in principle free-rider thinking makes sense. If your vote will not cross the threshold – if you are sure that one side will win by a large margin – then it seems pointless to vote. At least in terms of its direct effects, your vote will make zero difference to the outcome. Free-riding seems more compelling because your contribution truly makes zero difference.

But in practice free-rider thinking here faces the same problem as in the climate change example: the difficulty of identifying the threshold. Even in the extremely rare case where your vote might be decisive, your decision is upset by people like John Calcraft who change their minds at the last moment. While having the chance to cast the decisive vote might sound like a great power trip, Calcraft’s ending reminds us that most people do not want to be in that position. Suppose Obama had been elected by just one vote: would you want to be known publicly to Republicans as the one who elected him? The closest modern US result was in Florida in 2000; again, a sharp threshold for electoral success was hard to identify, lost in a haze of ‘hanging chads’. In Britain, the recount process is no clearer: it continues until one side gives up in despair or exhaustion. In the 1997 general election, Mark Oaten won the seat of Winchester by just two votes, after multiple recounts. Then the loser got the result declared invalid in court on a technicality, so the election was re-run. Oaten won again, this time with a majority of 20,000.fn3 The evidence of closely contested real elections, then, suggests that theoretically clear thresholds are hard to identify in practice – one more reason why it is foolish to use free-rider thinking to decide whether or not to vote.30

And even in cases where a sharp threshold can be identified, there is yet another problem with free-rider thinking. It implies that I should contribute only if we are just below the threshold – only if my contribution adds enough to lift total contributions above the threshold. Unfortunately, if everyone thinks like this, the result will be a giant game of Chicken. Everyone is trying not to contribute until the last possible moment, in the hope of avoiding doing so. But if just one person miscalculates, the collective project collapses and everyone loses. In most contexts, this is a stupidly risky way to live. And it leads to a highly unstable society.

The rise of free-rider thinking is not a straightforward story about a crazy idea wreaking havoc. Or a sensible idea distorted and deformed so that it begins to do more harm than good. Instead there has been a small but profound shift in our thinking about how, as individuals, we can or cannot ‘make a difference’ – a shift so subtle that it has taken some deep intellectual excavation to uncover it, even though the effects can now be seen everywhere.

Just a few decades ago it was the free-riders, not the contributors, who would have been seen as ‘irrational’. According to Socrates and Adam Smith (among others), free-rider thinking departs from wise thinking in multiple ways: small contributions matter, the indirect effects of our contributions matter too, and people deserve credit (or blame) for helping make something happen, even if it would have happened anyway. Free-rider thinking relies on identifying a threshold of ‘enough’ contributions by others, something that may be impossible even in principle and is almost always risky in practice. And finally, we should be open to the possibility that people will behave selflessly rather than selfishly. In his working life Mancur Olson was always giving his time for free and contributing to collaborative academic projects, expecting nothing in return, rather than free-riding. All these considerations suggest a hopelessly complex approach to decision-making, but there is a simple rule of thumb which even the selfish can live by, a rule which gives the right answer most of the time: contribute if you estimate that your long-term benefit from the collective endeavour at least matches the cost of your contribution. Free-rider thinking has introduced a particular form of needless strategizing into modern life. We will all be better off the sooner we recover the ancient wisdom that cooperation generally beats free-riding.