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I completely agree with Sam's analysis here. People were not interested in the experiment qua experiment, but were attached to one particular outcome. The most

• themgt 15y ago
  Completely agree. Wasn't JC a Starbucks marketing op in the first place? This guy giving the money to charity was stupid, but so was people feeling altruistic by participating in a commercial coffee chain's latest astroturf viral ad campaign
  • danso 15y ago
    No, someone made the accusation that it was a marketing op. No real proof was ever shown.
• glenra 15y ago
  You're missing the larger picture. Things like this do work in small scale. There are restaurants that let you "pay whatever you want"; there are musicians that make a decent living selling music that one can get for free either from them or from third parties. People obey traffic signals even when nobody is around to enforce them. Churches survive despite the option of stealing from the collection plate as it goes by. So this sort of thing can work and in many places does work. The main question here is whether one can establish a social norm that encourages more cooperation than defection. For that to work, defection has to garner shame and social disapproval. Hence the reaction you see here. > about a card that lets rich people buy overpriced coffee for other rich people! (And let's be completely clear, if you are in the position either to use Jonathan's card or have it used for you, you are almost certainly quite well-off.) The exact thing being shared is irrelevant to the principles involved because if you got it work, it could scale. Something that starts by providing the public good of coffee-sharing might grow to provide other public goods. If the idea isn't strangled in its crib by a wise-ass. Related analogy: the internet might once have best been described as something that "lets overeducated rich people talk to other overeducated rich people! (And let's be completely clear, if you are in the position to make use of the internet or have it used for you, you are almost certainly quite well-off.)" When I used to use "mapquest" to print directions or use "google" to find answers to some question, that was once a novel thing that only strange nerdy people did. But because the people who used it benefited back then, everyone benefits today. Almost every new innovation helps "the rich" or well-connected before it helps the masses. At the time silk stockings were invented, the queen of england was among the few who could afford them. TVs were only for rich people when they were invented; ditto VCRs, radios, microwave ovens, cars... So saying "this only helps well-off people!" as an excuse to dismiss an innovation is something most nerds just intuitively reject. So obviously wrong as to be not worth explaining. Hence (I suspect) your downvotes.
  • wzdd 15y ago
    Thank you for the response! I was quite disappointed with the downvotes. The examples you give do not convince me that my statement, "this only works because it is novel", is not correct. People obey traffic signals out of habit and / or fear that there may in fact be someone around (and even if they didn't, it would be out of concern for safety, nothing to do with this give-some-get-some principle); the "pay what you want" restaurant in London was a month-long promotion (and it now charges again), and many other incarnations struggle (see this NY Times article for information on several failed versions of the scheme: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/us/21free.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/us/21free.html); the vast majority of church funding (millions of dollars!) does not come from collection plates, and, even if it did, collection plates are dissimilar to this example because everybody watches what you do with the plate -- the social cost of stealing is far more obvious and pronounced (and, unlike Jonathan's Card, taking from a collection plate is unequivocally stealing, making the example even less relevant); and, finally, if there are musicians who make "a decent living" out of selling free music (as opposed to a profitable sideline) then I don't know of any. One counter example is Radiohead's "In Rainbows", where 62% of the people downloading paid nothing at all (see: http://www.globalnerdy.com/2008/10/16/radioheads-in-rainbows-experiment-was-a-success/ http://www.globalnerdy.com/2008/10/16/radioheads-in-rainbows...). The album still made money, due to Radiohead's brand power, but they have not continued the experiment with new albums. There are no good examples of a Jonathan's Card-type scheme working for any length of time in the real world. The problem with the response in general, and I think your response in particular as well, is this quote from you: > If the idea isn't strangled in its crib by a wise-ass. The very fact that the idea was strangled in its crib by a wise-ass, coupled with the dearth of similar ideas out there in the real world, seems to demonstrate fairly well that this is not a good idea. You then give a bunch of examples of expensive technology which eventually became cheap technology (stockings, the Internet, cars, etc). This is a completely unrelated to Jonathan's card -- nobody is going to deny that expensive technologies become cheaper and, in doing so, benefit more people! However, Jonathan's card doesn't rely on expensive technology -- it relies on all participants being altruistic. And in the real world, given a sufficiently large number of participants, not all of them will be altruistic. Jonathan's Card is particularly bad in this respect because one "wise-ass" can take so much value from the system -- contrast this with a hypothetical successful musician putting her album online, where the worst that a single defector can do is take the album for free.