Altruism and the Free Rider Problem

    Last week a category 4 hurricane hit my hometown of Cape Coral. It was one of the worst hurricanes to hit the US in decades, definitely the worst to hit my area. Like I said in class my social media has been dominated by images of flooding, boats in people’s backyards, and now pictures of people’s favorite Memories at a lot of places that are no Longer there. Times like this are pretty nerve racking, all my out-of-state friends have been itching to go back home to see what’s left and to help our families who stayed behind. My family is all ok, limited cold water is back and they expect power to return by the 9th of October. It is hard to get food and water before a hurricane because people buy out the shelves in worry. After the hurricane there is a shortage of potable drinking water and food. I have seen a lot of scary and upsetting images but I have also seen a crazy amount of care and compassion. So many people I know have been working for free around the community to help rebuild, have raised money to buy supplies to give out, or are using their boats to shuttle people on and off the islands which no longer have road access to the mainland. 

    The wellbeing of people in the Cape Coral/Fort Myers area is a public good. You cannot exclude people from improving their wellbeing (and I am sure there are some legal routes of harming their wellbeing) and my benefitting from their well being doesn’t take away from my friends benefit. It should then suffer from the free rider problem and people should be hesitant to contribute to the costs of their wellbeing because there is a communal benefit. In our Gruber textbooks, altruism is one solution to the free rider problem. In a totally rationally self-interested world we make decisions based on the costs and benefits to ourselves. But sometimes, and I would push to argue a lot of times, we do care about the outcomes of others. That’s why even when it doesn’t make sense to contribute personal funds there are Restaurants offering free food for as long as they can make it. And I’m sure the economists will say that there are still remnants of the free rider problem, that there is still an under provision of aid, but today I am choosing to focus of the positive.