Chapter 3 Question

"Free riders can cripple enterprises". That idea, helpfully illustrated by the metaphor regarding the ship and the lighthouse, was probably the most effective part of the chapter in helping begin to grasp the concept of externalities. In order to get the deeper message of what Wheelan is trying to communicate you have to look past the very disconcerting observations about human nature; like the part where less than half of the people reading Stephen King's book were unwilling to pay the miniscule price he was asking. "only 46 percent of readers had paid to download the last chapter offered". It's even more distasteful because they were looking to other people to essentially pay that price for them. But the main point is that free riders are just are a different form of externality. They can make or break a situation just by the way the chose to act and there are situations where there's nothing you can do to protect yourself from them. It would be easy to identify free riders as the "bad guys" but they're just acting within human nature and it if who ever was paying for the product in the first place decided to charge everybody for it they would seem equally as unreasonable.