Free Rice?

Hardly.

Someone recently informed me of www.freerice.com.  If you haven’t caught on to this massively popular slacktivist website, let me tell you… it’s a doozy.  Briefly, it’s a vocabulary building game where for each question you answer correctly, the site will donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.  Great idea, right?  For doing virtually nothing, you could be feeding the world, no?  It almost sounds too good to be true. 

Well, yes and no.  It’s actually pretty simple.  The site has sponsors who put banner ads along the bottom of each question.  Each click earns the site money from these advertisers, which is where the money comes from to buy this rice.  There’s really nothing magic about it.

But what gets me is just how little people are really doing when they think that they’re really doing something great.  The concept itself doesn’t bother me so much… I actually admire the ingenuity and creativity of the creators of the site, but I think people are falsely thinking that they’re making a real difference when their time (and money) could be spent much better in doing so many other things.

If you know me, you know that two of my biggest pet peeves is 1. People taking advantage of others’ ignorance for personal gain and 2. Slacktivism.  Now, I’m not accusing freerice.com of victimizing the populace, but they’re definitely taking advantage of the general desire of people wanting to feel like they’re doing something seemingly great while putting forth minimal effort (i.e. slacktivism).

I think people get the warm-fuzzies seeing all that rice collecting out to the side and imagining some poor person somewhere thanking God in heaven that you knew that the word “phlegmatic” meant “sluggish.”  But I don’t think they realize just how much of a royal waste of time it really is.  In ten minutes I was able to procure 700 grains of rice.  I think I have a pretty extensive vocabulary, so I think this is a fair rate (the site adjusts to your level of vocabulary, actually).

So, as I’ve said so many times before… let’s do the math:

• One pound of long grain rice = 29,000 grains (source: http://www.riceassociation.org.uk)
• Wholesale price of rice per pound = 10 cents (source: http://www.fsa.usda.gov)

So for my ten minutes of work, I donated the equivalent of… $0.002 – or two-tenths of one penny.  If I had played for a whole hour, I would have broken the ONE penny milestone.

“So what?” you may ask… “at least it’s SOMETHING,” you may say. 

Not really.

Let’s do some comparing…

• If you donated ONE measly dollar of actual money for this cause, it would be the equivalent of playing this game for about THREE DAYS straight… no bathroom breaks, no eating breaks (and I’m sure after three days of not eating, you’ll want to donate some of that rice to yourself).
• You are actually burning calories while playing this game.  If you eat about $12 of food per day, your caloric spending rate is 50 cents per hour on average.  So by playing this game, you are actually LOSING over 48 cents per hour… or a return of -97% on your investment.
• If, instead of clicking a mouse for an hour, you worked at MINIMUM wage ($5.85/hr) and donated that money to buy rice, you could have donated over 58 pounds of rice… or the equivalent of playing the game for over 400 hours.

You might think it’s harmless, but I believe that it’s actually harming real efforts to make a real difference.  This kind of thing makes people think they’re doing something when they’re really not.  People are ambivalent enough as it is, but something like this makes people falsely believe they’re not.  It satisfies our consumer mentality of receiving the good feeling of activism without any real cost.

Now, I know that it’s not completely worthless… according to their website, they’ve donated the equivalent of almost 4 billion grains of rice so far.  But imagine the millions of people it took to get that total, who may have had an opportunity to do something more worthwhile.  In economics, lost opportunity is a cost… and, again, this one is a doozy.  Four billion grains of rice would cost about $13k… not peanuts, but if you gathered a million people and could only collect enough money to buy a nice used car, how sad is that?