My Capitalist Room mate

A caller in a recent Free Talk Live^[1] show claimed that a roommate system which most people follow is a very good example of a Socialist society(and egalitarianism) in work. Although there are huge scalability problems with this example, I would not go into a critique of this system and instead suggest an alternate system, a more Capitalist roommate system. Feel free to absorb, use improve upon it. You won’t find it on any other site.

Problem:

The existing “Socialist” (maybe egalitarian would be a better term) roommate system is insufficient to meet the demand of modern individualist people. There are numerous issues among roommates on whom should be doing the job, people don’t perform well, everybody complains about the other one not doing their duties properly. The whole house/room suffers from the “tragedy of the commons” where because a property is deemed to be owned by everyone, gets overused and undercared compared it how it would have been if it had one single owner.

More problems come in when there are tasks which nobody wants to do and they don’t need to that frequently like cleaning toilets, or taking trash out.

Although compared to that a marital household, or an atomic family household is quite successful, but the main reason is that usually there is only one person who earns and everybody knows only he has to earn. The bread-earner of the family is the only person who is expected to earn. He does not get offended or dissents if the other member does not do his part, moreover the bread earner of a family is also the leader of the family, he has the authority. These things cannot be applied to a voluntary association of two individuals who just wanna live together.

Solution:

The Capitalist room sharing system would start out with equal share of the rent among all the roommates. So if the rent of the room is $1000 and there are 4 room mates then they start out by owing $250. Now take all the tasks which are shared among the roommates, like cleaning the toilets, taking the trash out, even cooking, buying groceries etc etc, and hold auctions of those tasks. That is, the roommates bid on these tasks on whom will be doing for how much money.

For example lets take the task of keeping the toilets clean. Nobody wants to do this task. The bidding will start from say $50. Now does anybody want to do this job for $50 a month? If yes then they will bid for that price. Now if roommate A is willing to do that job for $50 a month and nobody else is willing then roommate A wins the bid. Now lets say if roommate B thinks that he might be willing to clean the toilets for less than $50, say $40 then he can bid that amount. If now A thinks that he might be willing to do that same job for $30 per month and that he needs it more than B, then he might bid that amount and might end up being the winner. That means now every month roommate A will get $30(essentially he will pay $30 less from his monthly share), and other roommates will pay a total of $30 to A(that means B, C and D will pay $260 per month).

If say no roommate is willing to do a task for $50 a month, then the bidding is automatically increased to $55, $60 and so on, until some room mate is incentivized enough to do that job.

Similarly this approach will be adopted with any task which requires allocation of labor to it. For example vacuuming the whole house can be considered as a task. Eventually it could happen that the room mates end up paying the same amount of money as they were to in a complete egalitarian distribution, but the difference would be that in this case they all would be doing the task they like to do the most.

This system gives a more relaxed classy room mate an opportunity to do less work by simply paying more rent, and a room mate with more financial needs an opportunity to reduce his expenses.

This solution is actually very open-ended, you can make it into anything as long as there is no compulsion of “everybody must pay equal rent and everybody must do equal job”. For example you can have a weekly or per-task auction. You can have task sharing for example a friend of yours find that your room mates are paying too much to have the snow cleared off the drive-way so he might agree to do that job for less.

The jobs which can be subjectively judged by the quality or nature, like cooking can have a choice of the room mates. For example if one guy is a really good cook, and he can cook most variety of stuff then the room mates might vote for him to do most of the cooking over a cheaper less dexterous cook room mate.

If you find a problem or an issue with the above suggestion do write down in the comments section. If have a better more Capitalist solution then again feel free to write down we will cover it in an update and credit it to you.

1. Free Talk Live A Libertarian Talk Show [↩]