What Would Happen If Everybody Did It?

Numbers game

"What would happen if everybody did it?" "Then I'd be a fool to do otherwise, sir." Joseph Heller, Catch-22

If everyone in the world is convinced that it is better to give than to receive and that we should live for others – we’ll be stuck for ever going “After you, Cecil! No, after YOU, Claude!”

Stop looking for the love of your life and they will find you. (But you just told us ALL to stop looking… How can he find me if he's stopped looking?)

Your happiness consists in giving happiness to others. (But only if everybody plays.)

If we all buy property in Hackney because it’s cheap, prices will go up and it won’t be cheap any more. (And there won’t be any property left.)

If we all go and work all day in a café and buy only one coffee, the café will go out of business and we will have nowhere to work.

If none of us gives to beggars because they earn £30,000 a year, they won’t earn £30,000 a year. If we all become beggars because they earn £30,000 a year, we’ll all earn 0p a year. Also, if all beggars earn £30,000 a year, where is it coming from?

Plumbers are in demand and earn a fortune. Let's all quit journalism and become plumbers!

Everybody can have a professional career - but there aren't enough to go round, and besides we need people to do ordinary jobs and have babies.

Cars mean we can travel everywhere fast – but only until everybody gets one.

If all mothers in India have five sons, there’ll be nobody for them to marry, no dowry, nobody to care for you in your old age.

If the working classes stop having so many children there’ll be nobody to do working-class jobs.

If all the girls go to university to get a husband, there won't be enough boys to go round.

If you don’t get your kids immunised they’ll be OK – just as long as all other parents get their kids immunised.

If you write about an “unspoiled” destination, people will go there and spoil it (and fill up the “empty” beaches). But the travel company gave you the freebie to attract people to the empty beaches.

If all Chinese country girls get a job in the big city, there’ll be nobody for farmers to marry, and nobody for the girls to marry because they now outnumber city men. And there are so many spare girls that men don't need to get married. (See Sex and the City.)

If crowds don’t come to blockbuster art shows and stand between you and the pictures the museums can’t afford to put on the blockbuster art shows.

If we turn all redundant industrial buildings into art galleries we’ll have nothing to put in them, and nobody will visit them.

If we all go blonde because blondes get paid more and marry wealthier men…?

It's great to be the working class kid who gets a degree and makes it into the middle class, but what would happen if....? ("Social mobility" implies that only some individuals will make it. And they have to work for it – we're not going to make life better for an entire class of people. In fact, it's our old friend "equality of opportunity".)

We can all become president – except only one person can become president.

It's getting harder and harder to make a living as a writer, so writers are teaching creative-writing courses, and turning out more would-be writers... (Beware courses claiming "You can make a living doing this!". The trainers make the money, and those training the trainers make even more money.)

We can’t all pick up social skills “by osmosis”. We can’t all imitate our peers. (Remember the islanders who lived by doing each other's washing?) We can’t all be good listeners – nobody would ever say anything.

For four of the last five years the numbers of children enrolled in fee-paying schools in the UK have fallen to just over 500,000. Part of the reason for the fall is that the average annual private school fee is now £14,000, and one of the reasons it is so high is because the numbers are dropping. (Guardian Feb 2014)

"With a far greater proportion of young people attending university, there is an oversupply of graduates and an undersupply of positions. This is driving down the price of graduate salaries meaning holding a degree isn’t as lucrative as it used to be." Nicholas Jollie on LinkedIn
More illogic here.