You're missing the larger picture. Things like this do work in small scale. There are restaurants that let you "pay whatever you want"; there are musicians that make a decent living selling music that one can get for free either from them or from third parties. People obey traffic signals even when nobody is around to enforce them. Churches survive despite the option of stealing from the collection plate as it goes by. So this sort of thing can work and in many places does work. The main question here is whether one can establish a social norm that encourages more cooperation than defection. For that to work, defection has to garner shame and social disapproval. Hence the reaction you see here.

> about a card that lets rich people buy overpriced coffee for other rich people! (And let's be completely clear, if you are in the position either to use Jonathan's card or have it used for you, you are almost certainly quite well-off.)

The exact thing being shared is irrelevant to the principles involved because if you got it work, it could scale. Something that starts by providing the public good of coffee-sharing might grow to provide other public goods. If the idea isn't strangled in its crib by a wise-ass.

Related analogy: the internet might once have best been described as something that "lets overeducated rich people talk to other overeducated rich people! (And let's be completely clear, if you are in the position to make use of the internet or have it used for you, you are almost certainly quite well-off.)"

When I used to use "mapquest" to print directions or use "google" to find answers to some question, that was once a novel thing that only strange nerdy people did. But because the people who used it benefited back then, everyone benefits today. Almost every new innovation helps "the rich" or well-connected before it helps the masses. At the time silk stockings were invented, the queen of england was among the few who could afford them. TVs were only for rich people when they were invented; ditto VCRs, radios, microwave ovens, cars... So saying "this only helps well-off people!" as an excuse to dismiss an innovation is something most nerds just intuitively reject. So obviously wrong as to be not worth explaining. Hence (I suspect) your downvotes.

Thank you for the response! I was quite disappointed with the downvotes.

The examples you give do not convince me that my statement, "this only works because it is novel", is not correct. People obey traffic signals out of habit and / or fear that there may in fact be someone around (and even if they didn't, it would be out of concern for safety, nothing to do with this give-some-get-some principle); the "pay what you want" restaurant in London was a month-long promotion (and it now charges again), and many other incarnations struggle (see this NY Times article for information on several failed versions of the scheme: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/us/21free.html); the vast majority of church funding (millions of dollars!) does not come from collection plates, and, even if it did, collection plates are dissimilar to this example because everybody watches what you do with the plate -- the social cost of stealing is far more obvious and pronounced (and, unlike Jonathan's Card, taking from a collection plate is unequivocally stealing, making the example even less relevant); and, finally, if there are musicians who make "a decent living" out of selling free music (as opposed to a profitable sideline) then I don't know of any. One counter example is Radiohead's "In Rainbows", where 62% of the people downloading paid nothing at all (see: http://www.globalnerdy.com/2008/10/16/radioheads-in-rainbows...). The album still made money, due to Radiohead's brand power, but they have not continued the experiment with new albums.

There are no good examples of a Jonathan's Card-type scheme working for any length of time in the real world.

The problem with the response in general, and I think your response in particular as well, is this quote from you:

> If the idea isn't strangled in its crib by a wise-ass.

The very fact that the idea was strangled in its crib by a wise-ass, coupled with the dearth of similar ideas out there in the real world, seems to demonstrate fairly well that this is not a good idea.

You then give a bunch of examples of expensive technology which eventually became cheap technology (stockings, the Internet, cars, etc). This is a completely unrelated to Jonathan's card -- nobody is going to deny that expensive technologies become cheaper and, in doing so, benefit more people! However, Jonathan's card doesn't rely on expensive technology -- it relies on all participants being altruistic. And in the real world, given a sufficiently large number of participants, not all of them will be altruistic. Jonathan's Card is particularly bad in this respect because one "wise-ass" can take so much value from the system -- contrast this with a hypothetical successful musician putting her album online, where the worst that a single defector can do is take the album for free.

In addition to Radiohead, I was thinking of Jonathan Coulton. Many of his songs are still available for free, but enough people choose to buy them or to pay to see him perform live that he grossed half a million dollars last year. For instance, here's one of his songs with three options: (1) buy the song, (2) download the mp3 (without charge), (3) send a donation:

http://www.jonathancoulton.com/wiki/Chiron_Beta_Prime

> The very fact that the idea was strangled in its crib by a wise-ass, coupled with the dearth of similar ideas out there in the real world, seems to demonstrate fairly well that this is not a good idea.

Whether something "is a good idea" depends on context, which changes. This wouldn't have been a good idea a few decades ago because the technology wasn't there to enable it. As society gets wealthier and smarter we can afford to support more free-riders and it becomes less and less important to rigorously charge for stuff. "serve yourself" soda refills is an example, as is the institution of unlimited free napkins, toilet paper, and use of the restroom. Any of those could be crippled by wise-asses too.

> a hypothetical successful musician putting her album online, where the worst that a single defector can do is take the album for free.

Something a single defector can do that's worse than that would be to (1) take the album for free, (2) put up a website encouraging others to do the same and expressing contempt for all the suckers who choose to pay, (3) get this website highly ranked on social media sites.

If that happened and nobody spoke out against it, it would significantly harm the prospect of name-your-own-price albums. That's basically what happened here.

The examples you give are always so consistently different from Jonathan's Card that I can't help but wonder if others feel the same way, with the same examples, and that this disconnect between made-up examples and the reality of Jonathan's Card is the cause of the outrage.

Jonathan's Card is nothing like free soda, free napkins, or free restroom time. If someone sits in McDonald's and repeatedly takes all the napkins from the dispenser, he will be asked to leave, and if he persists he may have to deal with the police; the economic cost to McDonald's is minimal, and the inconvenience to other customers minor and localised. Ditto someone choosing to sit in the restroom all day, someone coming in and siphoning all the soda out of a machine, etc. For each of these examples, there is minimal economic cost or inconvenience to other patrons or the business involved, but a lot of inconvenience for the defector -- he has to physically gather up the items, sit in the restroom, etc, for minimal benefit to himself (what, he's going to eBay a million napkins?)

Compared with this, the Jonathan's Card scam provided an effective income of $130 per hour, at a cost of sitting in a comfy couch at Starbucks drinking coffee. There is no immediate social censure (unlike what would happen to a dedicated napkin-grabber) and indeed the defection is undetectable unless the person involved chooses to blog about it. And, as hinted above, it is easy and convenient to convert Starbucks gift cards into money.

These circumstances make defection a lot more tempting. Let's recap:

1) No social censure (unless you decide to tell people)

2) The return is not just fungible but is easily converted into actual money

3) Low effort required

4) Low time investment

5) High per-hour return

The confluence of these factors makes Jonathan's Card a bad idea -- far worse than free soda.

Part of what makes this particular defection so egregious, I think, is that he didn't just take the value in the card for his own use. Doing that might almost be understandable, at least if the person doing it had (a) no better income options, (b) few personal scruples. But going to the trouble of taking the money just to piss it away on some random charity does not constitute, as you say, "getting a high per-hour return" on one's effort. In exchange for destroying $650, all Sam got is the warm fuzzy of knowing he's "done something nice" in giving to charity. Offset with the cold pricklies of knowing he's "done something rotten" in stealing money from others for a use the donors didn't intend, it's at best a wash. He inflicted a cost of $650 on others without them or him receiving any compensating benefit!

Which brings us back to the analogy: A committed vandal could easily do $130/hour worth of damage to random companies or people with minimal risk - if, as Sam did, they had no intent of personally profitting from it. That's what Sam was: a vandal, more than a thief. Like the teen who throws a rock through a window when nobody is watching or destroys bathroom fixtures.

An awful lot of what makes civilization work is our tacit agreement to the code immortalized by Wil Wheaton: "don't be a dick." The fact that you can do something nasty and damaging to other people doesn't mean you should. The fact that in some circumstance it's particularly easy to steal from others doesn't give you a moral obligation to do so; quite the reverse.

Some people are very trusting. They might leave doors unlocked or purses unguarded. They choose to go out in public without armed guards and trust that a random stranger on the street isn't going to be a mugger or rapist or kidnapper.

When somebody who is especially trusting gets taken advantage of by someone unscrupulous, people generally find that especially worthy of criticism. The first thing we think of isn't to blame the victim for being too trusting, but to blame the scammer or thief for taking unfair advantage of trust.

Completely agree. Wasn't JC a Starbucks marketing op in the first place? This guy giving the money to charity was stupid, but so was people feeling altruistic by participating in a commercial coffee chain's latest astroturf viral ad campaign

No, someone made the accusation that it was a marketing op. No real proof was ever shown.