The Great Yellow Bike Experiment: Why Socialism, Even in Ideal Situations, Can't Work
April 12, 2007

While touring Colorado College with my youngest son, I heard a great story about a socialist experiment that illustrates something important about economics.

Several years ago, the school decided to encourage students to bicycle around campus. So they bought dozens of bikes, painted them yellow, and parked them all over the place for the free and unfettered use of any student who wanted to ride them.

The idea was that you could grab a yellow bicycle, ride it wherever you pleased, and then drop it on the ground and not worry about it. When you got out of a class, a bunch of yellow bikes would be lying around and you could grab one. Then you'd ride it to your next class and leave it there.

It was a great idea ... but it didn't work. What happened was this: In the beginning, all the bikes were the same. But after a few months, there were differences between one bike and another. If you had a good bike that wasn't banged up and had gears that worked well, you didn't want to give it up. And if you did give it up and then came out of class to find only junky bikes there, you were really disappointed.

Kids started hiding bikes, locking bikes, even fighting over bikes. And to make matters more complicated, they started branding them like cattle by putting decals on them.

It is hard to do away with the human instinct to differentiate products and attach value to them. It is harder still to tell someone that something he has can be taken away from him by anybody who wants it.

If you can't get people to agree to share bicycles when the "state" supplies loads of them for free, how can you expect them to cooperate with limited goods and resources whose costs must be paid?

posted by M. Masterson @ 4:02 PM,

1 Comments:

At 8:11 PM, Blogger Tom O'Neill said...

Amen my fellow freedom lover!

The fact that the bikes fell into disrepair after a short while highlights another problem of collectivism. The theory is that everyone owns their "fair share" of the collective resource. The reality is that no one owns it. And since the economic incentives that come with ownership have been removed -- no one is looking after the asset value.

Murray Rothbard once compared the safety record at Disney World vs. Central Park to prove the same point. They are both sprawling parks filled with thousands of people, but the former is a much safer place to be a 2am because Disney has such a strong interest in protecting it's asset.

 

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