Free Riding

by Richard Tuck

One individual’s contribution to a large collective project―such as voting in a national election or contributing to a public television fund-raising campaign―often seems negligible. A striking proposition of contemporary economics and political science is that it would be an exercise of reason, not a failure of it, not to contribute to a collective project if the contribution is negligible, but to benefit from it nonetheless.

But Richard Tuck wonders whether this phenomenon of free riding is a timeless aspect of human nature or a recent, historically contingent one. He argues for the latter, showing that the notion would have seemed strange to people in the nineteenth century and earlier and that the concept only became accepted when the idea of perfect competition took hold in economics in the early twentieth century.

Tuck makes careful distinctions between the prisoner’s dilemma problem, threshold phenomena such as voting, and free riding. He analyzes the notion of negligibility, and shows some of the logical difficulties in the idea―and how the ancient paradox of the sorites illustrates the difficulties.

Tuck presents a bold challenge to the skeptical account of social cooperation so widely held today. If accepted, his argument may over time encourage more public-spirited behavior.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Politics

232 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2008

About the author

Richard Tuck is Professor of Government Department. Professor Tuck is a premier scholar of the history of political thought. His works include Natural Rights Theories (1979), Hobbes (1989), and Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (1993). They address a variety of topics including political authority, human rights, natural law, and toleration, and focus on a number of thinkers including Hobbes, Grotius, Selden, and Descartes. His current work deals with political thought and international law, and traces the history of thought about international politics from Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke, and Vattel, to Kant. He is also engaged in a work on the origins of twentieth century economic thought; in it he argues that the 'free rider' problem was only invented, as a problem, in recent decades. Thus his interests to a remarkable degree span concerns in all subfields of the discipline.

Reviews

[Victor Wu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is brilliantly draws on philosophy, economics, history, and political science to make a compelling critique of Mancur Olson's seminal The Logic of Collective Action and the presuppositions about rationality and individual instrumental action which underpin it. It also offers a fascinating intellectual history of utilitarianism and modern economics, showing how past thinkers up until the mid-20th century operated on assumptions very different from—and, Tuck argues, superior to—Olson's.

[Nick Geiser · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would. The second half is an especially interesting history of both utilitarian thought and the development of economics from the perspective of collective action. Tuck shows that the development of rule-utilitarianism (i.e. the view that the right unit of analysis for a utilitarian moral theory is a rule rather than an individual action) corresponded to a change in how utilitarians thought about thresholds and other non-linear effects from individual actions. Rule utilitarianism became appealing because utilitarians became less comfortable with the idea that individual acts could be differentiated according to their effects in threshold and other such cases. He also offers an interesting history of the concept of "perfect competition" in economics, which he tries to show is a comparatively recent development.

The first half of Tuck's book is also interesting but less persuasive. Tuck's criticism of rational choice theories of voting and free riding, going back to his 1979 essay "Is There a Free Rider Problem, and if so, What is it?" is that the "free rider problem" in its pure form is actually a special case of the sorities paradox, or the "paradox of the heap." Basically, the problem is that if one's contribution to a public good (say a "heap" of sand in this case) is genuinely negligible, in the sense that one grain of sand makes a negligible difference to whether there is a "heap" of sand or not, then it doesn't matter whether your add your grain of sand. If it isn't a heap, then your grain won't make it one, and if it is a heap, then your grain is unnecessary. The connection Tuck notices between sorities cases and free rider problems is interesting, but sorities cases seem to be a problem of intransitive preferences rather than a specific issue for collective action. Tuck's theory of why its rational to vote is also unsatisfactory because it doesn't consider the opportunity costs of voting, which was the point of rational choice theories of voting and collective action all along.

[Jacob Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

My main interest in this book was the question of voting - I wanted to see his response to the argument that since your vote is extremely unlikely to change the outcome of the election, and voting carries some cost (in time, money, whatever), it’s not rational to vote. As I understood it, the response is that:

1. Your vote does have a high chance of being part of the set of votes that cause the outcome (e.g., if the candidate needs 51% of the vote to win, and actually receives 60%, then if you think of the ballots as being counted in some order, there’s a good chance that your ballot is part of the 51% that were necessary rather than the 9% that were superfluous).
2. Each vote in that set should be thought of as fully causing the outcome.
3. It can be rational to want to cause an outcome even though the outcome would still have occurred even if you had not.

I don’t find this fully satisfying, but it is interesting food for thought. The book also contains an illuminating discussion of the similarities, differences, and relationships between various types of problems related to collective action, and a fascinating recounting of the history of such problems.

[Dennis · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://pro-libertate.net/20100312/113...