The Problem with Collective Action Problems

Concentrated cost, dispersed benefit & social norms

I was listening to a podcast discussing smartphones and kids the other day. I’ll link that podcast here and simply say it was a very good listen.

For the purposes of this entry, allow me to set the stage.

Smartphones are generally bad for kids. Mental health data, attention span and reported happiness levels all indicate a sharp effect post-2010 — post the advent of the smartphone. There are many possible solutions to this problem, but the strongest (yet most difficult to achieve) is to change the norms surrounding parents and smartphones. If parents would collectively agree to not buy their kids a smartphone before high school, for example, and set boundaries such as no phones at the dinner table or in the bedroom, then we would see these negative effects begin to curtail. Further still, if parents can agree to enforce a no-phones-at-school policy and resist the urge to buy their young kids tablets to play with, we would surely see attention spans increase rather than continue to decrease.

Solutions that require norms to shift, that require mass action in order to attain the desired effect, are collective action problems. In economics, and other social sciences, the challenge with these problems is that the cost is concentrated but the benefit is dispersed. One parent may wish to not purchase a phone for their child before high school, but if “all the other kids have one” it becomes difficult to “deprive” your child. If schools require tablet computers, it is difficult to be the one parent who denies it. In short, the social cost of going against the grain is large and concentrated to the against the grain goer. And the benefit of these broad solutions, though large, is only achieved with a critical mass of against the grain goers.

Collective action problems are the exact opposite of political policy problems. The former is defined by concentrated costs and dispersed benefits, the latter by concentrated benefits (to a politician’s constituency) and dispersed costs (everybody else).

Garrett Hardin’s 1968 paper, The Tragedy of the Commons, explains this sort of collective action problem well. The simple example of a collective pasture for livestock animals to graze exhibits the point. Caring for the pasture to ensure its continued use is a benefit to all, but each individual rancher faces little incentive to do so because to care for the pasture would require fewer cattle to graze. Dispersed benefit, concentrated cost.

The problem alluded to in the title of this post is my wariness to consider this tragedy of the commons an actual problem.

Allow me to pose a simple question: is livestock grazing the best use for this pasture? It very well may be, and it is surely true that the pasture has been used as grazing land for some time now. But perhaps that land can be used for other pursuits. For farming, perhaps, or development, or mining, or scientific study. Examples of the tragedy of the commons always bootstrap two important assumptions: 1) The current use of the “commons” is the best use, and 2) this work has identified the best collective response. This is especially true in instances where property ownership is not a feasible solution.¹

In practice, these sorts of problems rarely operate in black and white. Applied to the example of smartphones and kids, those negative effects absolutely exist and are important, but focusing only on these ignores why we are where we are as a society. The simple fact is that there must be some benefit smartphones provide to both parent and child, if there were not, kids wouldn’t have them. Smartphones are not all bad, and even if they are mostly bad, the pros must be significant. Here, the “commons” are those things researchers have discovered that kids are losing (attention span, ability to make eye contact, mental health, etc.). The pasture being overgrazed is the minds of our children, and therefore the previous state of being whereby that pasture were not overgrazed is the “best use” or most desirable outcome.

Which sounds frightening, I’ll readily admit. But it ignores why parents seem to be making this trade-off en mass. I don’t have an answer to that, and the linked episode of that podcast will have researchers suggest the only reason is “because everybody else is doing it.” Ironic, because that response indicates a well-established social norm that has clearly developed over the past decade and a half. Obedience to the unenforceable, with parents no longer consciously knowing why.

Researchers who appeared on that podcast episode are confident in what must be done. Indeed, they’ve discovered the best new social norms to develop. How exciting! But, again, if there were some benefit derived from the current social norm, and there must be, as the norm would not have developed without some benefit, any proposed solution which deviates from it incurs a cost of at least that benefit foregone. With the likely value of that total cost being larger as those costs specific to the enacting of the new norm are accounted.

The problem with these collective action problems is that the current state of being did not simply arise without consideration. Whatever norm is currently in place became for a reason, and to deviate from it must necessarily forego the associated benefit. Prescribing a new social norm compounds that cost by ignoring opportunity costs more broadly — what other social norms may have developed in response, could those have been better, are there other solutions that may be more palatable, etc.?

None of this is to say that the current state of being is the best state. Ideologically, I’m in no way a conservative. But progress ought to be organic. There does seem to be momentum behind restricting smartphone usage for children, my proposal would be to allow this to play out insofar as it will. And I will propose the same for any problem of the commons.

In a world filled with grey areas and complex sets of costs, benefits, and incentives, it is important to accept the possibility that the pasture is better off being overgrazed.

1. The most simple solution to the collective pasture is to parcel and sell or assign it to individual ranchers. A property owner faces a strong incentive to preserve for future use because property ownership concentrates these benefits.