MRI Brain Scans Can Solve Eternal Social Problem of Freeloading
The problem of people who take more than their fair share of public services is as old as public services themselves. On a small scale, the problem merely blends into all the other inefficiencies in the system. But if freeloading becomes too pervasive, it can imperil the entire society. This may seem like an abstract economics or social sciences problem, but the tendency of people to request social services without demanding that they pay a fair amount for those services led directly to California bankrupting itself. Now, scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) claim they have figured out how to avoid the problem of free-riding by using an MRI machine to read people's hidden feelings about a particular public service. Imagine a business designing a lunch plan for its employees. The fairest way to charge for the lunch would be to make...