Why Does Socialism Work (online) ?
My father-in-law forwarded a story the other day (debunked on Snopes.com) about a political science professor that failed an entire class because he collectivized their grades. The story goes that the hard workers lost the incentive to work hard as the slackers pulled down the average, and eventually everybody failed.
The story was well-written, in a folk-wisdom sort of way, and it is in-line enough with the pessimistic biases of the average American conservative that most people take it as gospel. “Socialism can’t work!” they cry.
But socialism *does* work, online anyway. Look at Wikipedia. A bunch of people (myself included) donate time and money for no other reason than because they want to. And the result is one of the single best knowledge resources ever to come out of humankind. You might argue some anecdotal cases of wikipedia failing, but for every one of those, there are thousands of cases where it has succeeded greatly, and enlightened tens of millions of individuals.
So, being a reader of lots of popular psychology and econ books, I get to wondering why this works, especially when it is so counter to our natural intuition about free-riders. In fact, classical economic theory would predict that wikipedia would naturally fail, as you can free-ride without consequence.
Here, in no particular order, are my reasons that these things DO work:
1) Redefinition of value. It has been shown that people place value on the esteem of their peers, so the cost of time is compensated by the respect of your community
2) If you can tap into someone’s passion, you can actually *give* them energy, instead of using up their energy. Talking (or writing) for an hour on your favorite subject might leave you better off than watching TV or sleeping.
3) People can plan. People recognize that a system with nothing but parasites will die. In the iterative prisoners dilemma, we understand that decisions we make now may affect how others treat us (and the system) later. So I may choose to invest in a communal project with the belief that my return on investment will be greater than 1. I write one wikipedia article, which strengthens the system, and when I come back I can read 10 articles that appeal to me.
4) Selection bias–we only see the successes!
There are probably lots of collectivist attempts out there that have failed miserably… certainly far more of these than there are wikipedias. But the failures never reach my eyes. The bigger the success, the more likely I am to have seen it, so the “availability bias” ensures that I will see a lot of very successful collectivist attempts and very few (if any) failures.
Still, the cost of failure in the virtual world is pretty limited, since we’re mostly investing excess resources (like spare time, or spending money) in the first place. Arguably, in a system with more riding on the outcome (like whether I get to eat or not), we could no longer trust in the kindness and fairness of our fellow human beings.
May 31st, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Long time reader, first time commenter. I can’t help but see a connection between your last two posts that I thought I’d share. Many of the 5 teaching methods in the article you posted are based on the assumption that children have an inherent desire to learn and grow, and quite often the public school system squashes that desire to learn.
Similarly, I believe that every child has an inherent desire to contribute positively to society, and given a healthy childhood raised by parents who encourage these ideals, these children become productive adults. It is only when someone they look up to convinces them that “lazier is better,” or someone tells them that they are incapable of a achievement, that children lose that desire to contribute their time and talents.
I think socialist experiments and societies that have been infected with the “lazy bug” have become so because of the influence of non-socialist people and cultures who are constantly trying to convince them that they should be lazy and unproductive just because they can be. In a utopian socialist society, people would take pride in their accomplishment and contribution to society far more than money, free time, or material goods, thus perpetuating the positivity of socialism and making themselves and their entire society healthier and happier. Not only would the entire community benefit, but people who have longer-lasting joy and satisfaction (as compared to our American consumer society that is only temporarily satiated by material goods).
If only we could stop the outside influences like poor schooling and bad parenting from destroying our best inherent qualities: our desires to learn, grow, and give.
June 15th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Sorry it took so long to approve your comment; I get so much comment-spam that I have to monitor pretty carefully, and when I was on vacation, nothing got monitored.
I agree that people have lots of inherently good qualities, but we also can be easily side-tracked by false achievement signals that come from things like video games. I think the key to promoting positive behaviors is to make the “payout” as immediate and obvious as possible.