If Everyone Picked Up a Piece of Trash

I was reading a New York Times piece answering frequently asked questions about climate change when I thought to myself about how many people, myself included, will pass trash on the sidewalk and just keep going.

Why don’t more people pick up trash on the street? It’s relatively easy to do, and you don’t even have to go out of your way – you’re likely to pass a trashcan wherever you’re headed. I thought maybe I could apply the Prisoner’s Dilemma theory to explain why someone wouldn’t.

If Person A and Person B both pick up the trash, they receive a payoff of 5 each. The world looks nicer and is cleaner because of their actions.

If one person picks up trash off the street, and the other one doesn’t, the person picking up the trash receives a payoff of 2, and the one who leaves the trash gets a payoff of 6. The reasoning here requires a bit of an assumption. The picker-upper receives a lower payoff because they are the one picking up trash in the world, but because they are doing so alone, there is still trash around. The picker-upper becomes frustrated despite his good action. The one who doesn’t pick up the trash benefits from seeing a partially cleaner world without having to do anything.

Finally, if neither person picks up the trash, they both receive a payoff of 3 because the world may not be as clean, but neither person is committing time to cleaning up the trash. Neither person loses anything from their inaction – except a damaged Earth.

Based on their payoffs, both players end up in the bottom-right square of 3,3 instead of the mutually superior square of 5,5. Litter laws sometimes prevent people from adding to trash on the street, but no one is at blame if they avoid picking up trash already in the environment. In order to get both Player A and Player B to pick up trash, some incentive would have to be made to force them to make a Pareto-optimal move to the top-left square.