Quotes About Free riders

while reciprocal altruism does require a higher level of cognitive sophistication and behavioral flexibility than kin selection altruism, insofar as the altruist must be able to recognize free riders and discontinue interactions with them, too much cognitive sophistication may in the end undermine the altruistic impulse.

From time to time there emerged in the West voluntary communist societies. One of them was the Virginia Company in Jamestown (1607); another, New Harmony of Indiana, founded in 1825 by the British philanthropist Robert Owen. All such attempts broke down sooner or later, largely because of their inability to resolve the problem of "free riders," members who drew a full share of the community's harvest while doing little if any work.

the threat to good collective outcomes doesn't come only from free riders and predators, as mainstream social sciences teach us, but also from well-organized norms of kakonomics, which regulate exchanges for the worse.

It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love—love within groups—amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders, may be the most we can accomplish.