In my apartment complex we live with the coolest neighbors. They are all older, "super seniors" and to them my roommates and i are like their little sisters. Though these guys are pretty cool at times... they are absolute slobs! They are lazy, and due to their laziness they don't take out their trash... and it has been an obvious concern for the last few weeks. We take our trash cans down every tuesday morning, and every tuesday morning they don't take their down. So during the week while their trash cans are full they start filling ours up, while we use our trash cans, and this leads to an overflow of excess trash. It is disgusting. Though we have cool neighbors and they look out for us. They are just messy, this messiness not only leads to extra smelly trash, but a bad looking outside of our apartment and calls to the City of Columbus to give us fines to pick up their trash. Not only are they messy, but they are free-riders. EVERY TIME we have a party they always bum stuff off of us. Especially our alcohol and food. Now I know proper party code is to buy alcohol when you throw a party to give to your guests... our guests are our friends who walk lengths to get to our apartment. Our neighbors are 23, 24... with jobs... they buy beer every weekend... but in order to make that last longer, they come and ask us for ours... now I know this is a skewed view of negative externalities and free-riders, but I guess I needed to vent a little bit about my neighbor situation, and what better way than through an Econ. blog. : )
Morgan H.
TR 8:30
Haha thank you very much for that blog. I enjoyed reading it. I liked how you integrated both negative externalities and free-riding into your venting about your neighbors. Your blog is a positive externality: although it was not in your best interest to have neighbors like this, none the less to take time out of your schedule to write about it, your blog gave the people in this class a positive externality because it was an entertaining story for us to read. My reaction to this was a negative externality because I had to laugh and then tell someone next to me about it thus disturbing the enforced silence of everyone at study tables.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with you about the annoyance of free-riding. Although I don't have extremely pesty neighbors taking advantage of me and my housemates all of the time, instead my housemates are the culprit. Living with college students, I think we are in our prime of free-riding. I live in a house with eight girls, so the house can get cluttered pretty fast. In order to combat this problem, we all decided that we would be responsible for our own dishes. But soon enough this rule did not hold true, and it became completely unrealistic to assume that our sink would always be clean and empty. Unfortunately the same people tend to clean up everyone else's dishes all the time, meaning that there are free-riders present in our house. They are able to sit around and doing nothing, confident in the knowledge that someone else is going to eventually take the initiative to clean it up. Dang, it sucks being one of the responsible ones.
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