The Tragedy of the Illumination
A Story about Common Household Light
Three freelance journalists walked into a bar. This was their usual spot, and they took their customary table. As soon as they entered, the bartender started pouring their customary order – a round of the latest rotating craft on tap from DraftDodge, a local microbrew.
Milhouse began to tell a story. “You two will get a kick out of this,” he said. “When I was in college – my junior year – I lived in a group house. There were eleven of us and most of us had jobs, which meant we were in possession of some capital. And it was a cheap house in a cheap part of town in a cheap part of the country. So, we actually bought the house. We were all economics majors.”
“Of course,” said Vasily.
“Yes, I think you can see where this is going. We thought we had it worked out. We had a grand plan for dividing up the mortgage payments into shares and then each of us was a shareholder in possession of a number of shares equivalent to the portion of the house that each of us owned. So, every guy owned his bedroom. And the value of his shares – and therefore the burden of the mortgage that he owed – reflected the size, number of windows, relative closet space, etcetera. You know, if you had your own bathroom, you’d be paying more.”
“What about kitchen, living room, that stuff?” asked Dimitri.
“Yeah, that’s where I was going. We figured we each owned an equal part of the communal living area. So, our shares included our portion of that. We figured, you know, eleven of us, we should be able to vote and if a majority of shareholders wanted to do something with that part of the house, then we would. Of course, that sounded good in theory, but didn’t work out quite that way in practice.”
“Hostile takeover?” laughed Dimitri.
“Not exactly, but we realized after a few weeks that we still hadn’t solved the tragedy of the commons. Let me tell you how it went…
The seven of them sat, stood, perched, or variously squatted and kneeled, around the dining room. “It’s the tragedy of the commons,” said Rudy. “If it’s everybody’s responsibility, it’s nobody’s responsibility.”
“Yeah, it’s not like you’re going to get a consensus out of us,” said Norman, who was in the process of registering a new club with the university called, “Libertarians Against Unanimity.” Norman had started the paperwork as a joke aimed at the academic bureaucracy, but the university was being surprisingly cooperative. Almost as if they didn’t care.
“We can’t even agree on what kind of takeout to get,” said Tommy, “because Jack doesn’t like pizza – freaking weirdo.” Tommy was also the founder of a niche campus club, “Free Traders Against Free Trade Agreements.” So far, the only members were him and Rudy, but multiple faculty members in the economics department had already volunteered to serve as advisors.
“Pizza barely counts as food,” retorted Jack, “but I don’t see why everyone has to get the same thing anyway. Strikes me as, on principle, against everything we believe in. Loosely speaking of course. Everyone getting their own food and paying with their own money is the perfect solution. After all, George prefers cooking anyway, so he’s just going to do his own thing.”
“Getting back to the matter at hand,” said Norman.
“Yes,” said Jerry. “My basic take is that this isn’t my responsibility.”
“Of course, you would say that,” said Rudy.
“I heard my name,” said George, coming out of his room.
“Yes, we were just talking about you.”
“Yes, about how you don’t like getting takeaway and you prefer to cook. But, hey, since you’re here we kind of need your help on a question. For that matter, go and get Andy and Scott and Ron – we need them here too.”
“You can’t tell me what to do. You can’t hold me here against my will,” grinned George.
“Fine,” said Norman, rolling his eyes, “please get Andy and Scott and Ron, if you wouldn’t mind. Tell them we request their presence, but by no means must they come if they have other pressing matters to attend to.”
He punched Jack in the arm when Jack said, “to which they need to attend.”
As George left, Gary piped up, “My basic take is that I’m perfectly happy if we decide to get a new one, but what if someone else doesn’t want to? What if one of us prefers sit in the dark?”
“What do you mean, ‘we decide,’” said Jack. “There’s no such thing as collective decision-making. How can ‘we’ decide anything? That just means someone’s getting the shaft. Whoever among us has the strongest personality imposes his will on everyone. Or the majority coerces the minority.”
“We can have a trial by combat,” said Rudy. “You know, feats of strength. If you’d prefer that sort of thing.”
“Actually, I prefer the dark,” said Milhouse, who was going through a phase. “Electric illumination was the beginning of the end.”
“Thanks, Mil, so helpful. You know, last I checked, you still use an iPhone.”
“Sometimes you must go deeper into the machine in furtherance of the ultimate goal of bringing it all crumbling down.”
“Very funny.”
“Hey,” said Gary. “Milhouse doesn’t want the change. He wants to sit in the dark. We can’t force him against his will.”
George came back with Andy and Scott and Ron. “So pleased you all could join us,” said Norman. “We were just talking about the hardware question. We’ve made reverse progress; we’ve gone backwards to the question of whether or not each of us prefers light or dark.”
“If you’re walking in the wrong direction, progress requires turning around and going backwards,” quipped Milhouse.
“Yes, and you’re part of the problem,” said Norman.
“Hey,” said Jack. “What kind of fascism is this? You’re going to tell him that he’s part of the problem? And what? We’re the solution. We don’t have a claim on him. We don’t own him. Nobody has any claim on anyone else. The whole point of the shareholder ownership of this house was that nobody could presuppose to have a claim on anyone else.”
“I’m going to ignore that,” said Norman.
“You can’t just ignore me!” responded Jack indignantly.
“Well, actually, I can. You don’t have a right to my attention. Your freedom stops at the point it imposes a cost on me,” replied Norman drily.
“Touché, I’ll give you that one,” said Jack. He sat back, looking impressed.
“So,” continued Norman, “light or dark? Scott, Andy, your thoughts?”
“Sitting in the dark certainly works for me,” said Scott, who had taken ketamine mere moments earlier. Andy, who was in the process of growing cannabis, cracked a lopsided grin and high-fived him. “I vote for dark,” he said.
“Hold on,” said George. “We can’t just allow a vocal minority to dictate policy for the rest of us. That would hardly be fair. We can’t go around worrying about making sure everyone is happy. That’s no way to run a house. We should put it to a vote.”
“Then we’re going to end up with a tyranny of the majority,” retorted Gary. “We can’t just let eight of us run roughshod over three of us just because we outnumber them.”
“Maybe we should have written down some sort of rules at the beginning when we started this thing,” said Jerry. “You know, to have an established process for working this kind of thing out.”
Everyone stared at him.
“Ok, fine, I’m being a squish. Ignore that,” he said, waving his hands.
“If we were a real corporation, a majority vote would decide the matter,” said George.
“The problem is we each have equal shares in the common space,” said Gary. “That was a terrible idea.”
“Maybe we really can’t solve the tragedy of the commons,” said Andy. “That was the whole point of the shareholder thing in the first place, was to solve the problem of joint ownership. Shared property. Maybe there isn’t a way for it to work.”
“What are we going to do, divide the common area up into eleven equal partitions?” asked Norman.
“No, that would never work.”
“I have a solution,” said Ron, who hadn’t spoken yet. Ron was a little older than the others and he’d worked in industry before going back to get another degree. Rumor was that he had a lot of money socked away somewhere – probably divided among various alternatives to fiat currency.
“What is that?”
“I’ll buy you out.”
“All of us?”
“Yes, all of you.”
“How?”
“Easy. I pay off the entire mortgage. Cash. Then the house becomes mine and I charge each of you rent – proportional to the value of the shares you currently hold. Once the property is mine, I take matters into my own hands when it comes to appliances and such.”
“Have you got the… well, of course you have. Wait, we haven’t even gotten to the question of labor costs and who goes to the store and buys it and…”
“Don’t you see?” exclaimed Gary, “Ron just solved all that.”
“Yes. Once the property is mine, matters of interior illumination are up to my sole discretion as owner of the deed. Labor time and hardware costs will be mine, but I will have full responsibility for the decision.”
“So, you’re going to go to the store and buy the bulb and come in here and install it?”
“Yes.”
“But we haven’t even gotten to the question of fluorescent or LED or incandescent,” said Andy.
“Andy, when I’m majority shareholder, that will be up to me,” said Ron.
“Ok, well I’m telling you, they make these LED bulbs now that are way better for the environment.”
“Andy,” muttered Ron, darkly, “I don’t care about the environment.”
“So, Ron bought everyone out?” said Vasily.
“That’s hilarious,” said Dimitri.
“Yes,” said Milhouse with a knowing grin. “But do you want to know the best part – the moral of the story?”
“This story has a moral?”
“Well, maybe more of a philosophical question that was answered by our collegiate deliberations.”
“What’s that?” asked Vasily, who believed that a true writer stripped away anything smacking of fluff and applied that principle to his speech, especially when conversing with Milhouse.
Milhouse grinned. “We discovered that it takes eleven anarcho-capitalists to change a lightbulb,” he said.