Small Wins as a Large Way to Jump Start Public Goods: An Example of The Crazy Horse Monument

Many of us pride ourselves over our national monuments; e.g., The Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore. However, like all public goods, these national treasures require collective action for upkeep and, in some cases, provision. While the people foot the bill for these monuments through coercion (i.e., taxes), there may be a more excellent way to support these public goods. In this post I provide one way a central authority (the U.S. Government or Leviathan) could “help” fund public goods while leaving the choice in the hands of the U.S. Citizens. I will restrict my discussion to one particular public good that has been limping along for 84 years: The Crazy Horse Monument in South Dakota.

(Crazy Horse – source: http://spinhxara.tumblr.com/post/36547590001/prophecy-of-chief-crazy-horse)

The Crazy Horse Monument

(Before I begin I want everyone to be aware that the Monument does not currently receive government funding and that on previous occasions (several decades ago), Korczak Ziolkowski – the sculptor and owner of the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation – declined several gifts from the US government to support the project’s completion.)

The Monument’s construction started in the late 1920s but has since seen little progress. Only the face of Lakota Chief Crazy Horse is visible with a long stone platform which will later be his arm. Walker (2008) reports that the Foundation needs $26 million to complete the monument. (The Foundation also wants to build a medical school next to the Monument for Native Americans and that will be a separately funded project.)

Twenty-six million dollars seems like a long shot for this one family to achieve. They get a million dollars here an another million dollars there but over the last eight decades, the Foundation is not very close to completing collective action. What can be done? For once, I will advocate using the Leviathan but not in a coercive way.

(Crazy Horse Monument – source: http://www.panhandlepost.com/2013/09/29/another-chance-to-hike-to-the-top-of-crazy-horse/)

A Small Solution: Small Wins

The Crazy Horse Monument is a big task that requires thousands of hours of human labor and millions of dollars in equipment and coordination. While I am not an expert in masonry, I would think the Monument could be accomplished through several masonry teams working on different sections of the statue. Right now it is the  Ziolkowski widow, her children, and a handful of Native American interns (from time to time) working on the Monument. (Even if I was wrong on using teams of masons, it sounds like the Foundation needs money to fund labor and equipment to speed up the process. It seems like a lack resources rather than a lack of will.)

Collective actions like the Crazy Horse Monument are complex. When collective actions are big and complex the first human reaction is to feel overwhelmed. Feeling overwhelmed can lead to people taking no action at all. How can we acquire $26 million to finish the project when it we are just one family?

One solution would be to break the large project up into smaller collective actions. Each smaller collective action – when complete – can be considered a “small win” and these small wins propel larger collective actions (Weick 1984). A small wins strategy can be employed by a group of people wanting to create a public good – like completing a monument (McCarter, Mahoney, & Northcraft 2011).

What small win could this Foundation go for? One would be to get H&R Block and TurboTax to ask a simple question to each of their customers “Would you like to leave 5.4 cents of your return behind to help complete the Crazy Horse Monument in honor of the Native Americans?”

Notice the word “leave” is used here instead of “give” when it comes to asking the taxpayer for 5.4 cents. Why phrase the question that way? And why ask for 5.4 cents?

Some Findings in Social Dilemma Research

More than 25 years ago, social psychologists Marlyn Brewer and Rod Kramer (1986) hypothesized that individuals would be more cooperative in collective action problems when they faced a problem framed as a taking problem compared to a giving problem. People tend to weigh cognitively giving something up more heavily that taking something of the same value (Kahneman & Tversky 1979). The result: Brewer and Kramer suspected that people would more willing to leave (not take) money behind to help a larger group compared to then they already had the money and had to give it away to benefit the group. They found that participants withheld on average 9.32 resource units per game in the give-some treatment and harvested on average 6.60 resource units per game in the take-some treatment. If we take the difference in resource units in these two treatments and convert them to money (as Brewer and Kramer did at the end of the experiment), then participants in the give-some treatment were earning for themselves 5.4 cents per game more than participants in the take-some treatment. Put another way, participants were leaving behind 5.4 cents for the group in the treatment framed as a taking program compared to the treatment framed as a giving problem.

(source: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/17/obama-camp-lets-make-a-deal-on-tax-returns/)

So What?

The Brewer and Kramer (1986) experiment suggests that people are willing to leave resources behind to help a group when a situation is presented as a take-some problem compared to a give-some problem. While it is only 5.4 cents a person is willing to leave behind, the number becomes more practical and attractive when we consider the macro scheme of things.

In the 1985 (the year the Brewer and Kramer paper was submitted for publication) there were 18.81 million U.S. residents that filed a federal tax return and either owed the government nothing or received a return. Say during tax filing season each of these citizens was asked if they were willing to “leave” 5.4 cents behind to help complete the Crazy Horse Monument. Say only 18 million said “yes”, then this would leave $960,o00 to fund the public good’s provision.

“Well, that’s silly.” You will say. “First of all $960,000 is not enough. Second of all it may have cost the Foundation just as much – if not more – to coordinate the letters, tax preparers, and printing to ask 18.81 million people to leave 5.4 cents of their return behind.”

The transaction cost – the costs associated with any transaction or collective action – it would have taken in 1985 to raise $960,000 is a matter of argument. But what if we took this same question and asked the 51.63 million people that did NOT owe the government taxes in 2008 (the most recent year I can find data for). By 2008, TurboTax, H&R Block, and other providers have made it mush less costly to file taxes when it comes to time and effort (e.g., e-filing). What if each of these tax-service providers asked the 51.63 million filers (that owed nothing) to “leave” 5.4 cents of their return to complete the Crazy Horse Monument? If only 51 million said “yes” and 630,000 said “no”, then the result would be  $2,754,000 for the Foundation. Such funding could boost the foundation’s productivity on the Monument – especially if they use this strategy several times.

“But, why would these tax-service providers ever do that? Nothing is for free!” You say. You are right, we should consider these service providers and look for a win-win. What if the Foundation let H&R or TurboTax keep .3 cents of the 5.4 cents left behind? Assuming the 51 million people still left their change, the Foundation would walk away with $2.6 million and H&R and TurboTax would split $15,300. What is great about this setup is that the Foundation could have the two service providers bid for lower service charges having potentially even more of the money left by the tax payers go the Monument. (They could even start the bidding process with many tax-service providers and select the two providers that offer the best rate.) The small-wins strategy here could leave to large gains.

By small means can great things be brought to pass.

Now you may ask when keep the request at 5.4 cents. Why not just ask for 10 cents? The reason comes from some very clever panhandlers.

Can You Spare 17 cents?

Have you ever been asked for money by a stranger? What did specifically ask you for?

Most panhandlers (or others in need) ask “Could you spare some change for a stranded traveler?” (I like that request because the person asking it was on the same street corner for three years where I lived!) Others may say, “Can you spare me a dollar [or quarter]?”

 (source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amarillo_Tx_-_Dynamite_Museum_-_Cricket_Panhandler.jpg)

Most responses to these requests is “no” either in words or by ignoring the person. However, sometimes people ask something different. “Excuse me could you spare 17 cents? I need enough to by a sandwich.” This request is different in several ways from more traditional requests like “Can you spare a quarter?” First, it is an odd amount of money. Those of us that walk busy streets on autopilot can easily tune out requests for common amounts of money. “Just another panhandler asking for a handout,” we may think to ourselves. But when the amount asked for is odd or different, our interest is “piqued”. “Why would someone ask for such a strange amount of money? There must be a good reason for it.” We ask ourselves. The pique technique has been examined by several groups of scholars in the social sciences (Santos et al. 1994; Burger et al. 2007). This body of work finds that people are more willing to comply with a request when it is unique and there is a reason for the request.

So, when trying to fund public goods, make the requested contribution seem like the person is leaving something rather than giving something. Also make the request small, unique, and give a reason for it.

Bibliography

Brewer, M. B., & Kramer, R. M. 1986. Choice behavior in social dilemmas: Effects of social identity, group size, and decision framing. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 50(3), 543-549.

Burger, J. M., Hornisher, J., Martin, V. E., Newman, G., & Pringle, S. 2007. The pique technique: Overcoming mindlessness or shifting heuristics?. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 37(9), 2086-2096.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. 1979. Prospect theory: An analysis of decisions under risk. Econometrica, 47(2): 262-291.

McCarter, M. W., Mahoney, J. T., & Northcraft, G. B. 2011. Testing the waters: Using collective real options to manage the social dilemma of strategic alliances. Academy of Management Review, 36(4), 621-640.

Santos, M. D., Leve, C., & Pratkanis, A. R. 1994. Hey Buddy, Can You Spare Seventeen Cents? Mindful Persuasion and the Pique Technique1. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 24(9), 755-764.

Walker, C. 2008. Crazy Horse Memorial turns 60 with no end insight. USA Today. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-06-02-2619407123_x.htm

Weick, K. E. 1984. Small wins: Redefining the scale of social problems. American Psychologist, 39(1), 40-49.

How Native American Lands are like Geo-engineering Inventions

Let’s Play Checkers

Have you ever wondered why Native American Lands remain undeveloped in many instances? Many tribes have thousands upon thousands of acres that could be used but the land sits idle. Why? One reason is Checkerboarding, a situation where large portions of land are parceled into grids and the small parcels of land are then transferred (or “allotted”) to many different people. In the case of Native American lands, some of the parcels were unilaterally allotted to non-Native Americans by the US Government. What does this do? It creates, what Columbia professor Michael Heller calls, “gridlock”. Observe the figure below, an illustration of Checkerboarding a tribe’s lands. The yellow squares are allotted by the US government to Native Americans for private use and the red squares are allotted to non-Native Americans for private use. The problem: they are all jumbled up. Should a group of Native Americans want to pool their lands together for farming, building a large commercial park, or other investment, they have to get permission from any non-Native American who has a parcel within the area. Accomplishing this is not easy and is costly in terms of time and money. Like a mass of automobiles congested on the interstate, Native American lands are congested because of the US government’s property rights’ allocation method.

(source: http://www.iltf.org/land-issues/checkerboarding.)

That’s My Balloon!

Now we turn to a coalition of Geo-engineers on the other side of the world in the UK involved in the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) Project. This UK public-private partnership, composed of the state, universities, and Marshall Aerospace, investigates ways of reducing global warming effects through Geo-engineering. The product of this project was a large balloon that sprays particles into the atmosphere with the hope of cooling down a geographic region (see figure below). The balloon’s launch is possible by dozens of smaller innovations generated jointly by different science teams funded by public and private institutions. While collaboration was initially successful and the balloon manufactured, as of May 2012, the balloon sits in a warehouse and its launch is indefinitely suspended.

The reason for the project’s suspension is an overtaking of credit by several science teams on the new shared technologies used in the balloon launch. Several science teams sought to secure the taking of credit through patenting processes and technologies. The problem here is that the more credit a science team takes – and holds the related intellectual property rights – the more social and economic rents and control they enjoy from the balloon’s launch and future related innovations. However, the more credit one team takes the less there is for another, and the taking of credit also creates the necessity of receiving permission to use and distribute the resources’ rents. The inability to determine fair governance and, more generally, whether it is fair to patent portions of a collaborative technology leaves any global sustainable value from this partnership currently gridlocked.

(source: http://www.nerc.ac.uk/press/releases/2011/22-spice.asp)

The Connection: The Tragedy of the Anti-commons

Both of these stories share some common threads. Both involve the management of shared resources and both involve multiple individuals being able to restrict access to others from using the full resource; e.g., competing patent holders claiming ownership versus owners of portions of shared land with competing preferences over how it should be used. Forty years ago, Garrett Hardin coined the phrase the “tragedy of the commons” to identify collective action problems where open access to shared limited resources results in ruin because of the commons being exhausted beyond its ability to restore itself (e.g., fisheries, forests). However, what happens when the resources remains shared (or in common) but users can restrict its access to others? We come then to another collective action problem that Michael Heller termed the “tragedy of the anti-commons”. Whereas the tragedy of the commons is a tragedy about overuse, the tragedy of the anti-commons is tragedy about underuse: because one person can restrict another from utilizing the shared resource to its fullest, the added value of using the entire shared resources is never realized. The resource lays gridlocked (in Heller’s words).

No Way Out? A Dual-sided Dilemma at a Lake

To leave you with a fascinating puzzle, consider the following situation facing some family members of mine. Many years ago a miner acquired a large portion of land around a lake, which he parceled and sold off until only a few acres remained. From what I understand, these acres he bequeathed to his six children, each with equal ownership, no specifications were given regarding how the property was to be maintained, and a clause in the land’s trust stating that any changes to the property or trust had to be agreed upon by all owners of the property.

 (Source: http://www.state.nj.us/dep/wms/bfbm/lakes.html)

What is the result of such a property rights scheme? The property is under-developed in terms of updates and usability compared to the surrounding properties owned by single families or a company. In fact, some of the siblings have to foot the bill for maintaining the property while the other siblings come and go from the property as they please without contributing to its maintenance. (Nobel Prize winner Moncur Olson warned of this collective action outcome forty years ago: those that love a resource or cause the most will shoulder the load while others standby and free ride.) The catch however is that the only way to make the property better (e.g., improve the two-roomed cabin, put in a water system, or even impose fines for not helping to maintain the property) is for EVERY owner of the property to say “yes”. Thus this beautiful little piece of heaven remains gridlocked AND under-developed. In the end, a few family members have shouldered the weight of caring for the property but cannot make substantial changes to it without consent and a lot of their own money. To make matters more interesting, as these six siblings pass away they will leave their ownership rights to their children thus starting an exponential increase of owners. If six people cannot reach consensus, then what about 36 or eventually 96? Is there no way out?

Bibliography

Cressey, D. 2012. Geoengineering experiment cancelled amid patent row, Nature: News.

Daily Mail. 2011. Machines that suck up CO2 and aerosol injections into the sky: The geoengineering techniques that have got support of the public. London, UK.

Graham, W. J., & Cooper, W. H. in press. Taking credit. Journal of Business Ethics: 1-23.

Heller, M. A. 2008. The gridlock economy: How too much ownership wrecks markets, stops innovation, and costs lives. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Marshall, M. 2012. Controversial geoengineering field test cancelled, NewScientist.

Olson, M. 1965. Logic of collective action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Press.