Free-Riding Our Future

Written by

Danny Chen

Free-riding problems are a sign of our society's failure.

When it fails, it fails systematically, which is hard to reverse…

Nonetheless, as an individual, free-riding brings us several short-term benefits, such as cost-saving, resource accessibility, and information acquisition.

The same situation applies to businesses and governments.

All these advantages give us more options in our daily lives, which is good.

So what is the bad?

The problem is foreseeable and compounds as time goes on.

Suppose we exclude compulsory restrictions from the military or police.

In that case, the global capital market is one of the few mechanisms that could bring up meaningful, long-lasting change with innovation.

Innovation development is great;

However, it won't last long without market demands from customers and ultimate beneficiaries.

The good news here is we can make changes to avoid the foreseeable disaster.

And it all starts with our climate action in our daily lives.