Leaf-blowers and Stadium Seating: Group vs. Individual Rationality

[The_Q]

Every weekend in autumn, my neighborhood has a wonderful ritual every pater familius partakes in. In the morning, they all go out with their leaf-blowers and spend a tiresome hour or two blowing leaves into each others yards, never actually sending them anywhere or cleaning up their own yards.

Wouldn't it be common sense to just go inside and all watch football? It'd save hours of work, the same amount of productivity would get done and everyone would benefit. So why don't we do it? Because we, as individual homeowners (and yardworkers, boludo), don't function as a group rationality. We see things as a single person. We either don't trust the neighbors to cut it out or think "I can make my yard the best on the street!" Either way, we end up pushing the costs onto the neighbors by avoiding football and blowing leaves instead.

Let's take a look at something you might have experienced for yourself. You're at the ballpark, you've just got your nachos, hot dog (if it's a Friday), soda or whatever from the concession stand. That's not the economics we're worried about right now. We're worried about an in the park home run. You just sit down, set your food to the side and look up. There's the crack of a bat, the batter starts running and you stand up to get a better look over the sea of heads in front of them. But you can't. Everyone else stood, too. They also wanted to see what was so interesting and see it well, so they all stood, too. You could have all saved yourselves the standing and just remained seated but, again, you're all thinking the same thing. "If I stand, I can see better," or, "if they stand and I don't, I'll see worse." Since the major cost of standing isn't on you, but the person behind you, you only see the benefit of standing.

This tends to be the case. In things that people feel the costs of, they tend to behave more conservatively (buying groceries, for instance). When costs have spillover effects, or as economists call them "negative externalities", people have a tendency to throw caution to the wind because they have no idea what harm they're causing.

PS- coberst

Q