Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

How oneupmanship wrecks things for everyone

You can’t just have people round for a pie and booze now; you have to mess about with ramekins. Thanks for nothing, Delia

"A peacock is a wankified pheasant" [Getty Images/iStockphoto]

‘There’s a little bit of a fascist in all of us. For some, the tragedy of human want may provoke an impatient urge to expropriate and centralise economic resources. Others, alarmed at the world’s exploding population, may be attracted by calls for a programme of mass compulsory sterilisation.

But for me it’s letter boxes and street numbering. I want order. I want consistency. I want standards. And I want eye-watering penalties for property owners who try their fellow Britons’ patience and waste our time by making their addresses impossible to find.’

You may remember reading this from Matthew Parris in last week’s Spectator. When delivering leaflets in Derbyshire, he was infuriated by the difficulty of matching houses to their address. A trivial point, you may have thought. Not so. In fact Matthew had uncovered two issues which preoccupy practitioners of evolutionary biology, game theory, political science and economics. These are libertarianism’s twin Achilles heels — where individual and collective interests diverge.

In a perfect world, every house would be numbered — with odd numbers on one side, even numbers on the other. Unfortunately, two conflicting forces erode this happy state of affairs. One is the free-rider problem; the other is status signalling (or, as I prefer to call it, ‘wankification’).

The free-rider problem occurs when you exploit your neighbour’s house numbers to save the cost of displaying your own. If the people at numbers 43 and 47 display their numbers on their gateposts, the chap at 45 has no incentive to display anything himself. If enough people adopt this approach, the entire system collapses.

Status signalling causes the same problem in a different way. A house with a name is classier than one with a number, and so people ‘wankify’ their address — renaming number 47 as ‘Rose Cottage’.

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