1 Quoted in Strain, C. (2016), The Long Sixties (New York: Wiley), 188.
2 Smith, A. (1776), The Wealth of Nations, book 1, chapter X, part II.
3 Weintraub, Stanley, ‘GBS and the Despots’, Times Literary Supplement, 22 August 2011.
4 For the development of economics, a crucial feature of the new understanding of ‘perfect competition’ was the assumption that the contribution of each producer to the market is effectively zero, not just negligible. Much of orthodox producer theory is based on this mathematical error.
5 See Tuck, R. (2008), Free Riding (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Tuck’s superb philosophical and historical analysis inspired much of my discussion in this chapter.
6 Oppenheimer, Joe A. (2008, 2nd edn), The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume (eds.). http://www.dictionaryofeconomics.com/article?id=pde2008_O000094&edition=current&q=mancur%20olson&topicid=&result_number=1.
7 Mancur Olson obituary, Economist, 5 March 1998.
8 Olson, M. (1971, rev. edn), The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 64.
9 Ibid.
10 The New York Times, 12 July 1989.
11 Wall Street Journal, 22 January 2009.
12 Independent, 13 December 2012.
13 It is hard to estimate the precise shortfall because the tax-avoidance efforts of corporations such as Google centre on concealing what proportion of their taxable activity arises in a particular country. One estimate suggests that Google ought to be paying around an extra £700 million in tax in the UK alone (‘Ending the Free Ride’, Civitas, November 2014; http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/EndingtheFreeRide). Another methodology suggests the largest 243 listed companies globally should together be paying at least $82 billion more tax a year (‘The $82bn Listed-company Tax Gap’, Financial Times, 12 April 2015).
14 In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham made exactly this point in arguing that it is in each individual’s self-interest to pay tax.
15 De Viti de Marco, A. (1936), First Principles of Public Finance (London: Jonathan Cape), 114.
16 Tuck, 60.
17 See Hart, H. L. A., and Honore, T. (1985), Causation in the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press), which explains causation in the legal system as a manifestation of Mill’s view of causation.
18 A widespread view of causation holds that for something to count as a ‘cause’, then if it had not occurred, the ‘effect’ would not have occurred. This counterfactual view of causation is rejected here, in favour of the sufficiency theory of causation first developed by John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic. For a balanced discussion of causation see J. Collins et al. (2004), Causation and Counterfactuals (Cambridge, MIT Press).
19 International Energy Agency data; see https://www.iea.org/coal2017/.
20 See for example S. Barr (2008), Environment and Society (Aldershot: Ashgate).
21 My arguments in this section draw heavily on M. Lane (2011), Eco-Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press), chapter 3.
22 This point is inspired by Kahneman’s representativeness principle. See D. Kahneman (2011), Thinking Fast and Slow (London: Penguin).
23 Inaugural address to the Fisheries Exhibition, London, 1883. Quoted in Lane. See http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/SM5/fish.html.
24 Unger, P. (1996), Living High and Letting Die (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
25 The current consensus is that any so-called ‘solution’ involves deeply counter-intuitive modifications to our beliefs about basic logical principles. Effectively, we ‘solve’ the Sorites paradox by generating other equally challenging paradoxes. R. Keefe and P. Smith (1996), Vagueness: A Reader (Cambridge: MIT Press), includes some leading candidate ‘solutions’, with an excellent introduction.
26 Based on D. Parfit (1984), Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon), 80, with minor modifications.
27 At least if we ignore the complications raised earlier, such as uncertainty about what others will do, or my contribution making a small difference, because the project is literally the sum of individual contributions, and more contributions imply a more successful project.
28 Assuming that I prefer the outcome where the project happens and I contribute to it to the outcome where the project does not happen and I don’t contribute. (Without this assumption, free-riding is irrelevant: I definitely won’t contribute, even without free-rider thinking.)
29 Hilton, B., A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People, quoted in D. Runciman, ‘Why Not Eat an Éclair?’, London Review of Books, 9 October 2008.
30 See Runciman.