I’ve had this idea bouncing around in my head that I call the 100 Cookie Problem. I’m not sure it proves anything, and there are probably economists who can explain why I’m thinking about it all wrong, but it keeps leading me to questions I find interesting.
Start with two people sitting at a table and put two cookies between them. They each get a cookie. There really isn’t much to discuss. Now put ten people in a conference room with ten cookies. One person doesn’t like cookies, so there is an extra. I suspect the other nine figure out what to do with it pretty quickly. Someone eats it, they split it, or it sits there until the meeting is over. Nobody needs to create a set of rules.
Now make it a picnic with 100 people and 100 cookies. This is where I start wondering what actually counts as fair. There are adults, teenagers and little kids. Some people are hungry and some aren’t. Somebody brought 20 of the cookies. Somebody else showed up without bringing anything. Do we still hand everyone exactly one? Maybe the little kids only want half. Maybe the person who brought 20 thinks he should get two. Maybe someone hasn’t eaten all day and everyone is perfectly happy to let her have another. There are still enough cookies for everybody, but dividing them fairly isn’t quite as obvious anymore.
Keep going and imagine a village with 10,000 people and the ability to make 10,000 cookies every day. Now somebody has to grow the ingredients, somebody has to bake the cookies and somebody has to distribute them. Some people will do more work than others. Some won’t be able to work. A few probably could work but won’t. At some point we’re going to make rules about who gets what, and people are going to disagree about those rules.
That’s the part of this that interests me. The supply hasn’t changed. We’ve had one cookie available for every person throughout the entire experiment. What changed was the size of the group and, somewhere along the way, our idea of what constitutes a fair distribution became a lot more complicated.
I don’t know exactly where that happens. Maybe that’s the question. If we know there are enough cookies for every person to have one, at what point do we decide there are circumstances in which someone shouldn’t get one? And why does that decision seem easier to make when we’re talking about 10,000 strangers than when we’re looking across a table at one other person?
That’s where I want to pick this up in Part 2.