Student economics: Why are student kitchens so messy?

Impossible Dream? Source: Ryan Wilson

The Yorker’s politics team recognises that economics is not the easiest topic to get your teeth into. Yet we also feel an understanding of economics can benefit everyone. This column aims to demonstrate why. Cutting through the jargon, we hope to provide economic solutions to everyday student problems.

Why are student kitchens so messy? It is a feature of almost all shared kitchens that they are, by in large, disgusting. And everyone agrees that it’s disgusting and some people will complain loudly but this rarely changes anything – yet it’s in everyone’s interest to ensure that the kitchen is tidy. So is this irrational behaviour just pure laziness, or can economics give us an answer?

The problem is that a clean kitchen is what an economist calls a public good. A public good has two properties: first it is “non-excludable” which means that you can’t stop people using it. Whilst some student kitchens have locks, it would breach tenancy agreements to stop a tenant entering the kitchen so a clean student kitchen definitely is non-excludable.

Second, public goods are “non-rival”, which means that one person enjoying the clean kitchen doesn’t diminish someone else’s enjoyment of the clean kitchen. If I’m sat in the clean kitchen, enjoying the environment, my housemate coming in and enjoying the environment too won’t stop me enjoying it. As with all economics, an assumption is required here; namely that your housemate is a generally pleasant person with no body odour.

So we’ve got that it’s a public good, but why does this create a problem? The issue here is what economists call a “free-rider problem”. This occurs because the benefits of washing up to the individual doing the washing up are less than the benefits of that washing up to the “society” i.e. the property’s tenants.

Indeed, the benefits of a clean kitchen to the society are no doubt greater than the costs of doing the washing up (time, energy etc), yet to the individual, if they haven’t run out of cutlery, the costs almost certainly exceed the benefits. Therefore a rational individual will not wash up and will instead free-ride on the benefit gained from others washing up, accepting the minor inconvenience of their own dirty pans. The problem that students face is when all residents free-ride as you end up with a messy kitchen.

So what solutions do economists propose? Ronald Coase, a British economist working in Chicago, suggested that the society should band together to ensure the kitchen was clean. This would suggest students could club together to pay for someone to wash up their dishes. Yet this is probably out of reach of the student budget. However, if the per-person cost was small enough this may make the costs less than the benefits of the clean kitchen to the individual. The government will often use taxes to provide public goods in a similar way.

As the clean kitchen will always remain a public good, the only remaining option is for some sort of regulation. In small student households, an agreement could be made for everyone to do the washing up on a certain day, thereby decreasing the regularity of the washing up and gaining from what economists call “economies of scale”, it is quicker for one person to do all the washing up than four people doing a quarter of the washing up. This will decrease the individual cost of washing up as it takes up less time in a week.

Alternatively, the costs of free-riding could be increased, with penalties for those who don’t do the washing up. This could be financial (a charitable donation) or social (social exclusion). Ultimately, the community must find a way to decrease the costs of washing up or increase the costs of free-riding.

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