Can PTR Choose to Survive as an Honest Viable Industry?

I was reading something the other day in Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive that reminded me a lot of what's going on in the Get Paid industry.

The third stop on the road map to failure is the most frequent, the most surprising, and requires the longest discussion because it assumes such a wide variety of forms. Contrary to what Joseph Tainter and almost anyone else would have expected, it turns out that societies often fail even to attempt to solve a problem once it has been perceived.

Many of the reasons for such failure fall under the heading of what economists and other social scientists term "rational behavior", arising from the clashes of interest between people. That is, some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behavior harmful to other people. Scientists term such behavior "rational" precisely because it employs correct reasoning, even though it may be morally reprehensible. The perpetrators know that they will often get away with their bad behavior especially if there is no law against it or if the law isn't effectvely enforced. They feel safe because the perpetrators are typically concentrated (few in number) and highly motivated by the prospect of reaping big, certain, and immediate profits, while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals. That gives the losers little motivation to go to the hassle of fighting back, because each loser loses only a little and would receive only small, uncertain, distant profits even from successfully undoing the minority's grab.

Diamond goes on to identify a few variations on this theme, such as "good for me, bad for you and for everybody else" which I think is a good way to describe a lot of the selfishness that goes on in PTR, and the well-known "tragedy of the commons" which also has some relevance to PTR, even though it might be hard for a lot of people to understand the "shared resource" that's being depleted.

When he discusses ways to solve the problems, it's easy to see why it isn't likely to happen in PTR any time soon:

The remaining solution to tragedy of the commons is for the consumers to recognize their common interests and to design, obey and enforce prudent harvesting quotas themselves That is likely to happen only if a whole series of conditions is met: the consumers form a homogeneous group; they have learned to trust and communicate with each other; they expect to share a common future and to pass on the resource to their heirs; they are capable of and permitted to organize and police themselves; and the boundaries of the resource and of its pool of consumers are well defined.

PTR fails in nearly every case. The group of people involved is far from homogeneous. In fact, it's damned near impossible to find anything we all have in common. If anything we're learning to trust and communicate with each other less, not more. And in many cases, for very good reasons. It's difficult to trust and communicate with people who constantly lie and manipulate people for their own personal gain. S

It's possible that we could organize and police ourselves to a certain extent, but highly unlikely. I think this is due to the lack of trust, creating a sort of prisoner's dilemma, and also because of stubbornness and selfishness that pervades the industry.

The boundaries of the resource are totally undefined, and in many cases the consumers are completely unaware that there are boundaries or limits. In fact, I think they have very little awareness of the resources they are consuming because they don't fully understand the nature of their business.

And they're certainly not interested in sharing a common future. Most of them seem to be in the business for short-term gains, which is why their collective actions tend towards what I call the "plague of locusts" effect. They find a resource (a source of revenue) and devour it completely, and then they move on to the next one.

Can these many obstacles be overcome? Of course. Will they? I doubt it. For all the reasons I've already mentioned, plus one recently mentioned by Rod Baker -- it's more profitable to cheat than to do things honestly and properly in this industry. And I guess he would know.