Social Contract, Free Ride: A Study of the Public-Goods Problem

by Anthony de Jasay

Overview

Social Contract, Free Ride is a cogent argument that strikes at the very foundations of traditional economic apologies for coercive action by the state to fulfill necessary public utility.

Anthony de Jasay is an independent theorist living in France.

Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781614872184
Publisher:	Liberty Fund, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/24/2008
Series:	The Collected Papers of Anthony de Jasay
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

PART ONE — THE SURRENDER OF AUTONOMY

1. Commitment to Co-operation 13
Custom 14
Contract versus Command 17
Avoiding Freedom-Talk and Rights-Talk 22

2. Promise, Performance, and Enforcement 25
Defaults 28
Enforcement 30
Grounds for Enforcement 34
How Contract Breeds Command 39

3. State-of-Nature Co-ordination 44
Co-ordination, Pure and Non-pure 48
Approaching Strangers 50
Pure Co-ordination by Contract 51
Inequality of Character 54
Not Rocking the Boat 57
The Hardest Case 60
State-of-Nature Public Goods: The Standard Approach 64
Reliance on Enforcement 71

4. Social Contract 75
Institutional Darwinism 81
Reconciliation 86
Restricted Domain: The Hobbesian Asymmetry 91
Restricted Domain: The Minimal State 96

5. Social Choice 102
Unrestricted Domain 105
Enforcement of Domain-Restriction 108
Non-fatuousness 110
Predisposed Rules 112
Agility and Sluggishness 116
Equiprobability I 120
Accepting Command where Contract Fails 123
Appendix: Redistribution 124

PART TWO — PUBLICNESS: SOLUTION AND RESULT

6. The Foundations of Voluntariness 133
Exclusion 135
Free Riders or Suckers All 142
Stacked, Interlocking, and Straddle Rankings 146
No Free Riders, No Suckers 149
The Straddle Ranking: A Necessary Condition 152
The Straddle Ranking: A Suffi cient Condition 156
Equiprobability II 163

7. Constructive Risk 166
All or None 168
“Uncertainty” 176
A Spontaneous Solution through Risk 179
All Cretans Are Not Liars 183
Inconsistent Expectations 185
Appendix: Straddle or Chicken 186

8. An Ethics Turnpike 192
Homo Oeconomicus 198
Three Grades of Rationality 199
Public-Goods Forks 202

9. The Unfairness of Anarchy 218
Abuse, Outrage, Envy 222
The End of Anarchy 229

10. The Return of the Free Rider 233
Reverse Contribution 234
Pooling 237
The Game of “Ask” 239
The Game of “Deficit” 248
Free Riding on Fairness 257

Works Cited 261

Index 265

Editorial Reviews

First published in 1989, this book by Hungarian-born libertarian philosopher and economist de Jasay aims to refute the existence of the classic public goods problem, which holds that contributions to shared benefits is collectively rational but individually irrational and that therefore a social contract must be fashioned with the power to coerce individual contributions to public goods. To the contrary, he argues, with simple contractual obligations there would be a self-selective set of people who would provide public goods as part of prudential calculation of the alternatives and there would be others taking the risk of the free ride in the acceptance that the prior group would be big enough. All the social contract does, then, is to transform these self-selecting groups into analogous, but coerced, groups of taxpayers and tax-beneficiaries.

Reference & Research Book News
August 2008


Does society truly need the government acting as a parental figure? The Collected Papers of Anthony de Jasay: Social Contract, Free Ride, A Study of the Public-Goods Problem presents several radical ideas for the reader to ponder. Arguing that through the social contract and morality inherent in Americans, voluntary contributions of the people would solve many of society's problems—because under the social system, everyone would feel urged to contribute if they had the ability to do so. The possibility that many would prefer to take the free ride is not discounted, however. Thoughtful and thought provoking throughout, The Collected Papers of Anthony de Jasay: Social Contract, Free Ride, A Study of the Public-Goods Problem is highly recommended for community library political collections.

The Midwest Book Review
July 2008

The publisher Liberty Fund has republished Anthony de Jasay’s book Social Contract, Free Ride: A Study of the Public-Goods Problem. In this book, de Jasay, one of the most original and sharpest political philosophers of our age, offers a critical review of the public goods argument for the state. He argues that a) economists and political philosophers too easily dismiss the possibility of voluntary production of public goods, and b) that the social contract solution to establish a state to remedy market failure and free-riding will create an environment that will bring back free-riding with a vengeance.

Although de Jasay prefers to make his case by staying within the orthodox rational choice framework, he admits the logical problems implicit in the social contract argument:

“The high road to coercion is the contractarian pretension that acceptance by a person of a share in a benefit he did not solicit is tantamount to his tacit acceptance of an obligation to provide a share of the corresponding contribution in the same way as those who did solicit the benefit."

The desire for fairness in contributing to public goods tends to generate political arrangements that will undermine both justice and fairness:

"…while the intent of the social contract is to suppress free riding, its actual effect is to open up an altogether new ground on which it thrives with impunity. For the deterrent to state-of-nature free riding is the falling probability of successful public provision of a good as abuse of it by free-riding increases. When the necessary contributions for successful public provision are assured by coercion, no such check operates and free riding is never too risky. Risk, in fact, enters people’s calculations with the opposite sign:  from a check upon free riding it turns it into a spur."

Liberty Funds edition of the book is presented as The Collected Papers of Anthony de Jasay.Hopefully this indicates the start of an ongoing series of de Jasay’s (unpublished) writings.

Aschwin de Wolf
September 18, 2008

From the Publisher