Changing societal norms leading to policy change, which leads to even faster-changing societal norms
Portrait of an Extraordinary Musical Dog, Philip Reinagle, 1805
—
Every now and then I’ll read something in a book or an article in which the author at least seems to come to a conclusion about the power of social movements independently from the field of movement building. With an entirely different field as a starting point, they’ll work their way through a body of research, and the conclusion that spits out is: social movements create transformative change. The latest example of this was Robert H. Frank’s book Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work, in which he reaches this conclusion by way of his nearly 50-year career as an economist, specifically his pioneering work in behavioral economics.
Frank’s motivation for writing his latest book came largely from his concerns about climate change, and he’s supportive of the Green New Deal, but his entire framing of the problem is one of economic incentives, tax policy, and reaching a better understanding of why we make the decisions we do.
At the core of the book’s thesis is the idea that, contrary to most economic theory, our decisions are often less a matter of individual self-interest and are far more influenced by our social circumstances than we realize. And if we were to govern based on this understanding, we could unlock cascading beneficial behaviors, and end senselessly harmful behaviors that put human civilization at risk. While there is one part of the book’s argument that I tend to disagree with, Frank makes a compelling case for the power of social forces to create sweeping change, with either profound negative or positive consequences.
Competing Freedoms
A lot of his underlying arguments about why this is the case can be read as a matter of challenging the gospel of competition and individual choice in economics. He dispels misconceptions about the father of his field of study, who is often used to justify free markets above all else: “Adam Smith…is often cited in defense of the claim that competitive markets produce the greatest good for the greatest number. But that was never Smith’s position. His signature insight was that the pursuit of narrow self-interest often leads to socially beneficial outcomes, but not always.”
In fact, he points out, unencumbered markets often create horrible outcomes for the group, outcomes that each individual would actually never have wanted. Some metaphors he uses include a crowded theater in which everyone stands up to see better, so then nobody can see. Or a business district in which everyone wants to make a bigger sign advertising their stores, so you end up with a cacophony of signage useless to everyone. I first wrote about his ideas in Crisis Palace #48, one of the more popular issues you guys liked it:
Sky-high taxes on cigarettes actually didn’t change most smokers’ behavior. They liked smoking, after all, and it was a cool thing to do. But a small minority did quit as a result, and that sparked “behavioral contagion,” which is what actually drove down smoking rates over the years in the US. Over time, laws prohibiting smoking took hold, but the social attitudes changed first. Smoking is now anything but cool and when people who are definitely not me sneak a drag they do it in shame and isolation.
In Under the Influence, he expands on the smoking metaphor, pointing out that, while the danger of second-hand smoke was used to convince politicians and voters concerned about personal freedom to support laws restricting the act (smoking wasn’t just a personal matter, you see, it was actually hurting other people), it was actually kind of a uh smoke screen. It’s true that smoking does hurt other people, but the second hand smoke threat is tiny compared to social impacts of smoking. In part because of the famous Framingham study I pointed out in the earlier issue, we know that if you smoke, other people you know will too, and other people they know will too, and many will get sick and die from it. That’s the real reason for regulating smoking, and if we accept the importance of social circumstance in our decision-making, we can come up with more powerful and responsible policy solutions.
The way Frank contends with personal liberty is one of the book’s strengths. For someone who is arguably making the case for the nanny state, he genuinely cares about personal freedom and needs, but shrewdly points out that in our relentless protection of individual choice and disregard for social forces, we frequently create a world in which all of our hands end up being tied, forced by competitive markets to make decisions we would not actually want for ourselves and that don’t serve anyone particularly well (more on this in CP #77).
When legitimate aspirations are in conflict, people’s freedom to do as they please will be limited no matter which way we turn. … Clearer thinking about behavioral contagion requires careful analysis of the trade-offs between competing types of freedom, which in turn requires difficult conversations about free will and other thorny philosophical issues.
The vast majority of smokers, he points out, now wish they had never started smoking and now they can’t stop because they are addicted. Is that freedom? Even if we don’t pass laws outright banning such activities, we can at least acknowledge the profound social harm in allowing it without restraint, and pass policies that give all of us something of an edge when it comes to making beneficial decisions.
The Arms Race
Another big strength in Under the Influence is the way it frames emergent social phenomena as a concrete force we must understand and direct. Despite the book’s subtitle, the term “peer pressure” strikes me as insufficient in describing it, calling to mind schoolyard bullies. In fact, one argument against regulating for behavioral contagion is that it’s the job of parents, not the state, to teach their children to resist peer pressure. Similarly, social forces are also often dismissed as a form of vanity or superficiality, “keeping up with the Joneses.”
Neither is a fair description of what is happening here because 1) social pressure is not always a bad thing that kids or adults should resist (consider antivaxxers), 2) the poor decisions we make as a result of social forces are often completely rational and made because of very real consequences and incentives that are often out of our control. Our decisions are highly dependent on our frames of reference—what we can see around us and what our peers are doing—and that’s not necessarily a personal failing or misjudgment.
One powerful section of the book is when he describes how negative behavioral contagion creates harmful cascades, even though the decisions that lead to it are not necessarily frivolous or misguided.
For example, look at the growing size of Americans’ homes over the years—the median new house built in the United States grew from 1500 square feet in 1973 to more than 2500 square feet today, and fewer occupants means we now have twice the living space. You might argue, oh families just want to impress other people with their fancy McMansions, and there is definitely a level of selfishness that guides antisocial behaviors. But real estate values also dictate the quality of schools, meaning parents frequently buy houses they don’t need in neighborhoods they can barely afford as a rational decision to give their kids a better education. This leads to bidding wars, anxious comparisons to other neighborhoods, and ballooning housing costs that make everyone collectively less happy, as research has found after a certain point, bigger houses stop making people happier.
Another example is car sizes. The sport utility vehicle was virtually non-existent before 1966. In 1975, it accounted for just 2% of total vehicle sales. In the 90s, that all changed. By 2014, SUVs had become the highest-selling passenger vehicle category in the United States, vehicles whose nominal purpose is almost never used by consumers, whose size and design make roads less safe, and that spew greenhouse gases at higher rates, putting human civilization at risk. (Frank doesn’t make this point, but there’s a perception of personal safety in larger vehicles that is self-defeating when all vehicles become larger.) There is basically no explanation under traditional economics as to why SUVs are so widespread, other than the very fact that more people started to have SUVs. There was a spark of popularity, and behavioral contagion took care of the rest, Frank argues.
He describes these buying habits and more as the equivalent of a military arms race, in which the expansion of individual countries’ weapons stockpiles do not make anyone safer or more secure, quite the contrary. The decisions are made to improve each actor’s relative positioning, but looking at the overall picture, all parties are worse off.
This leads to enormous cascades of overconsumption, overuse of resources, wasteful spending on things that make life worse instead of things that would make it measurably better, such as improved infrastructure, education, healthcare, etc. Rising economic inequality only makes this dynamic worse, as the highest end of excess tends to pull everyone else’s frame of reference up toward increasingly unrealistic and wasteful levels of spending.
The Spark
Of course, the opposite can be true too. Frank’s big positive example of behavioral contagion is the simple fact that when one house gets solar panels, neighbors are far more statistically likely to do so, as are their neighbors, and so on and so on. That applies to all kinds of climate friendly decisions. But he is not advocating for individual lifestyle changes as the answer to climate change. Rather, the cascade he describes is a loop of changing societal norms, leading to policy change, which ideally leads to even faster-changing societal norms, accelerating at a pace that we initially never would have thought possible.
In fact, Frank is advocating heavily for one policy in particular—so-called Pigouvian taxes. These are taxes on activities that have negative externalities on society, like a gas tax, which then would reinvest funds in Green New Deal style infrastructure and technology. This would disincentivize bad behavior and allow new technology to catch fire in ways that would rapidly spread. Such taxes would need to be coupled with subsidies for lower and middle income people so as to not be regressive. For example, Massachusetts did just that last time we raised our gas tax which was way back when grunge was the most popular style of music. It makes it kind of a roundabout version of a wealth tax, but one that also influences behavior.
This is kind of where I start to lose enthusiasm for Frank’s argument, although this is really his big finale. Not that I’m against carbon taxes, which can be progressive as he describes, but I have a hard time buying how passing such a tax is the spark that sets off a cascade of behavioral contagion, turning the tide on climate change. New taxes are unpopular, after all, because people with money hate giving up their money and people without money know that they usually end up getting screwed over by tax policy.
Frank’s solution for getting past that distaste is that we must get better at explaining the idea of behavioral contagion, using strategic forms of persuasion. Specifically, he argues, we must convince the public, especially the wealthy, that paying Pigouvian taxes won’t actually have a noticeable negative impact on their lives, because their purchasing power relative to others would remain the same.
As an example, Frank points to the slow-then-fast acceptance of same-sex marriage as one of the big case studies of positive behavioral contagion, but he points to rational, repeated arguments in favor as one of the main reasons that the cascade began.
This strikes me as at best an incomplete understanding and exposes what Frank-as-economist is really missing in his analysis—power. Cascades of transformative change are prevented, not just because people don’t understand the issue properly. Rather, it’s powerful interests intentionally wielding their power to prevent the cascade from getting started. Overcoming that power takes more than just a good persuasive argument, although that’s part of it. It also takes emotion, disruption, leadership, commitment, relationship-building. It takes organizing.
This brings to mind that recent climate paper calling for “catalytic cooperation,” and the parallel research that found what is preventing climate action is not so much a collective action problem where nobody wants to act first. It’s more attributable to a range of domestic power struggles that need to be won on the ground.
That’s how I think the contagion starts, and that leads to policy that feeds back into it. That policy could very well be a Pigouvian tax that Frank suggests. But it could be any number of other policies as well, because by then the explosion has already started and possibilities are expanding. What if it was a completely different economic system! It’s almost like the carbon tax he envisions is simultaneously thinking too big and too small.
That said, I quite like Frank’s description of what it looks like after the catalyst has been set off. How social forces can create both profound harm and good, and how policy can leverage those forces for rapid change. I think he’s just missing a piece—the thing that sets off the spark, which I would say is building local power to win individual battles. Add that spark to the fire of behavioral contagion, and that’s a formidable theory of change.
—
—
Links
- “You see all of the kids around me, they’re just kids,” the girl said, pointing to a group of younger children. “Why would you just send a missile to them?”
- “Just because Bill Gates puts on a pastel sweater and says he’s donating money to good causes doesn’t mean that he’s actually helping the world.”
- The fact that Massachusetts’ army of progressive teens (aka “the Markeyverse”) made the New York Times is amazing. This article does have some problems though, including only quoting white kids and not pointing out that Dana Depelteau is a complete fucking clown.
- Working long hours is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year by increasing risk of stroke and heart disease. I used to work at a nonprofit that worshipped long hours (which was and to some extent is still the norm in the sector) and I feel so guilty and ashamed of it.
- John Kerry’s statement that 50% of emission cuts will come from new technology is a form of climate delay that is similarly harmful but more insidious than climate denial.
- Sea level rise as a result of climate change added $8 billion in damage during Hurricane Sandy.
- Arizona’s Corporation Commission nearly passed a 100% carbon-free electricity plan but then a Republican commissioner sabotaged it by changing mandates to goals at the last minute. This was incorrectly blamed on partisan divides, when really it was just the GOP fucking it up.
- Tucson’s ambitious goal to plant 1 million trees.
- The Hoover Dam was once proof that humanity could bend nature to its will through engineering. Now it’s proof that we can’t.
- Climate change has redefined what we call “normal” weather. These sliding graphics of heat and precipitation over the century are brutal.
- Stephen Graham Jones pens an open letter to conventions hosting Native writers. “Do they get cold sandwiches from that vendor in the hall like everybody else, or do they bring a beaded parfleche of pemmican in with them…”
- ANOHNI on NFTs: “I think it’s shit. They won’t stop until they have sucked the life and value out of every remaining shred of organic life and every last gasp of analog craft or thought and crammed it into Elon Musk and Grimes’ patented space dildo, headed for Mars to reauthor the future of sentience in their own psychotic and ethically bankrupt likeness.”
—
Watching
Still on the personal film festival and there have been some good ones lately including Spring Breakers, Howl’s Moving Castle, and a rewatch of Spirited Away. But one I want to highlight is this super weird French movie from 2012 called Holy Motors. It’s very hard to describe, but the director Leos Carax who is kind of a Jodorowsky sort of figure says, “It’s trying to have the whole range of human experience in a day” so there you go. The whole thing is totally unique very worth watching if you can track it down, but one of the best parts is this musical intermission:
—
Listening
Let’s keep it weird and French with this psych pop band called La Femme that I have always enjoyed especially 2013’s Psycho Tropical Berlin, kind of retro bachelor pad music with an edge. But their new release Paradigmes is truly bonkers, with songs in Spanish but French accents, English with French accents, banjos, horns, like 10 different vocalists, all over the map. I love this song that is randomly about Colorado.
—
I endorse
Seltzer. I’ve been joking around a lot lately about cheugy, a kind of new word that means basic or vanilla or coming to a trend late or sticking with a trend too long. I obviously have a fair amount of cheug in my life, but I was contemplating cheuginess the other day as I do, and how it’s often synonymous with objects of comfort. Comfort being, by definition, not new or cutting edge, but something that has had its edge fully worn soft, and we keep coming back to it for solace. In the winter, my comfort cheug of choice is scented candles. In the summer, it’s seltzer. Can after can. Especially cheugy is Polar’s “mythical” flavors like Unicorn Kisses and Mermaid Songs, which taste like weird blends of movie theater candy and fruit. Cheugometer malfunction cannot process too cheugy explodes.
—
Well, whoomp there it is, as the Tag Team used to say. That’s what I got today. This one was honestly kind of boring but you got a good picture of a dog playing the piano. I missed you all last week, but I did get the second vaccine dose and then had a very nice birthday celebration at Castle Island, which in true New England fashion, is of course not an island. It was a beautiful day and everyone was in a good mood, we saw some friends get together and even hug each other. Some masshole family camped out too close to us and went on and on about how they chaahge too much faah pickles but you know what. We didn’t even care.
I hope this newsletter is like your version of Castle Island and even though there is some boring tax policy junk on the island this week, it is still a sanctuary of joy and clarity, even if it is not really an island.
Tate