Urban myth ?

silverharp

An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had never failed a single
student before but had, once, failed an entire class. That class had
insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one
would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have
an experiment in this class on socialism.

All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so
no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test the
grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard
were upset and the students who studied little were happy. But, as the
second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even
less and the ones who
studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little..
The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test
rolled around the average was
an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted
in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.
All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that
socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the
effort to succeed is great; but when government takes all the reward away;
no one will try or want to succeed.

Could not be any simpler than that....

Lobelia Overhill

good point, well made ...

I wonder what would things be like if every job had the same hourly rate [for wages], doesn't matter what you do you get €X per hour. You're take home is therefore based on how many hours a week you can/will work.

anyone? anyone, Bueller, anyone?

daveirl

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johnnyskeleton

The exception is when you have some other way to motivate people. If the students were promised a group reward, if they were competing with a rival class or if they were forced to study at the point of a gun they would produce much the same results. Also, if their former classroom was corrupt (lots of cheating or favoritism), they might actually perform better immediately after the change when they see that working together benefits them all.

daveirl wrote:

This post has been deleted.

As with everything, the rich will be prepared to pay higher tax if they perceive that it will have some benefit and that they are not being needlessly targeted. Sadly, neither of these is true of Ireland at the moment, and I fear a big drop off in the tax take.

cavedave

All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so
no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

Is there a way to incentivise this so the free riding problem does not happen?

nesf

cavedave wrote: »

Is there a way to incentivise this so the free riding problem does not happen?

You can do something like a modern democracy and only redistribute part of someone's grade. It's still hard to disincentivise free riding mainly because some people will always be happy with passing for zero effort and not everyone wants an A.