(electronic music)
- Welcome, this is a real
pleasure for me to get
to introduce Robert Frank and
to both engage in a Q and A
and then take your questions.
Robert was an undergraduate
at Georgia Tech
and did his masters in
stats and his PhD in econ
here at UC Berkeley, so we can
berate what's changed and that
sort of thing at some length.
And has been a long time faculty member
in the Johnson School at Cornell.
During this time he has
been massively prolific
in both research articles
and in books that both look
in detail at what we're
learning from microeconomics,
macroeconomics, and a lot
of behavioral economics,
and applying that to all
kinds of interesting systems.
We'll get in a second to his latest book.
But in terms of past books,
he wrote "Principles of
Economics" with Ben Bernanke
who occupied the office next
to me at the Wilson School
for a while before moving
on to other jobs in DC.
"Choosing the Right Pond",
something I think we'll
bring up a little bit later
on, "Passion Within Reason",
"Luxury Fever", "The Economic Naturalist",
which a friend of mine
got confused with a number
of the sort of "Freakonomnics"
sorts of literature
at a couple of different levels.
"Success and Luck", and
today's "Under the Influence".
And for those reading
"Under the Influence"
thinking about climate change
which is how I jumped in.
I was, in some ways,
incredibly pleasantly surprised
that you don't actually get
to climate until well over
half the book, and it
really highlighted to me
one of the many things
I hope we'll talk about,
and that is there's been
a very dogmatic look
at energy and climate issues
of which some of us on stage,
not you, are guilty of.
But one of the real key lessons
that I think has come out
of the last sets of effort
from Greta Thunberg,
efforts from the Extinction Rebellion,
from the efforts to think
about Friday's for the Future,
is to put this in a much larger context.
And the Green New Deal is
one of the topics in the book
as well as many of the
ways that we have used
and misused our understanding
of behavioral processes
in general to sort of
understand where we are.
And so I'm keen to hear the
run through about the material,
but in particular for me
when I went through the book,
what really struck me
was the breadth of which,
if you think more broadly about how
we can transform behavior,
climate change is a critical
piece of that, it often
occupies a very large part
of the story in terms of
what the campus community
on energy and climate think
about, but that bigger context
is absolutely critical
to try to understand
where we've head a few
successes but where we've had
just a litany of failures
and really being able
to communicate more broadly.
And so I want to welcome
you to Berkeley, welcome you
to the Goldman School, I
should say welcome you back
to Berkeley and look
forward to you launching in.
And again we'll do about
25 minutes of presentation.
About equal amount of some
dialogue back and forth
and then we'll open it up to questions
and use that as a segue into
the refreshments and snack.
And once again, thank you
and welcome to campus,
thank you so much.
(applause)
- And thank you Dan, it's a real honor
and a pleasure to be back,
I always love coming back
to Berkeley, I spent four fond years here.
And it's different each time I come back,
but it's always fun to
see how it's evolved.
I'm excited especially to talk
to you about the new book.
The core premise of the book
is completely uncontroversial,
I hope people would agree.
It's that the social environment
is the most important
determinant of what we
do in most situations.
The psychologists have a
saying, it's the situation,
not the person.
The tendency is to explain
why somebody does something
by asking what kind of person she is,
what kind of values she holds,
but really the psychologists
are on very firm ground when
they say you should really
look at the social matrix the
person finds their self in
when you're trying to predict what she'll
do in that situation.
So for example, if you're
worried that your daughter,
your teenage daughter
will become a smoker,
it really doesn't help to know
if she's a science fiction
buff or whether she's good or bad at math.
What you need to know is
the percentage of her peers
who smoke, that's the
uniquely best predictor
of whether she will.
And it's a big effect if that
number goes from 20 to 30%,
she's 25% more likely to become a smoker.
It's by far the biggest
influence on that decision.
That's widely accepted as a
true fact about human behavior.
I think it's also uncontroversial
but less widely noted
that the social environment
is itself a consequence
of choice we make, so
what's the proportion
of smokers out there
that influences whether
a person will smoke?
It's in part a consequence
of whether or not
I choose to smoke.
And yet, I have never met anybody who said
I was thinking about
smoking but decided not to
because I was worried I might
encourage others to smoke.
That's just not a step most people take,
mostly because of the effect
that we have on the social
environment is minuscule
for all practical purposes,
so the world would be the
same whether we thought
about that or not.
But collectively, the fact
that we don't think about it
has consequences, we have
an interest in the social
environment since it affects us profoundly
in terms of what we do, often for ill,
as in the smoking example,
but sometimes also for good.
And so if we could steer
people towards being concerned
about how their own choices would affect
the social environment,
that would be a good thing.
If we could do it without
incurring costs too high
in the process.
I came across this tweet in an
economist I follow on Twitter.
She writes, "there is
this amazing Tumblr post,
"presumably from a high schooler somewhere
"that I think about often, it just says,
"I've always been told not
to give in to peer pressure,
"but I've never been told
not to pressure my peers."
And so the thesis of the book
in a very simple statement
is that there are steps
policy makers could take
that would encourage
us to act as if we care
about the social environment.
And these steps are neither
invasive, nor costly in other
ways, many of them have
beneficial side effects
as I'll explain.
And so why wouldn't we want
to think about policies
to encourage people to
act as if they cared
about the social environment?
And so far as I've been able to discover,
there's been virtually no
serious attention given
to that question at all by policy makers.
And my colleagues in economics,
most of them are very
smart, much smarter than I,
why haven't they written about this
is a question I cannot yet
answer, because it just
seems like what the
investors call a Green Field.
It's like when the iPhone
came out, there were all these
scores of products and services
that couldn't have existed
until then, but then it
was a gold rush to see
who could bring them to
market the most quickly.
Here we've got a Green Field
in the public policy domain,
there are so many things
we could do that would make
people behave in ways
that either make benign
social environments more prevalent
or malicious ones less prevalent.
Let me start with an
example of why the social
environment is more important
than most people think.
More important certainly
than I used to think.
I see enough people who know
what the "Candid Camera"
show used to be, maybe it's
still available on YouTube.
If it is, you should watch some
of the old episodes, they're great.
He had a film that he did in the 1970s,
and it was like the episodes
on the TV show but in one
of them he posted an
advertisement for a spectacularly
good job, it paid really
well, it didn't have any
complex requirements,
the hours were short,
good travel opportunities.
How could there be such a good,
so of course people contacted
the number in the ad
and wanted to come and interview for it.
Scheduled interviews, people
would arrive for the interview
at the appointed hour, they'd
be shown into a waiting room
where there were four
people already seated,
told to sit and we'll
let you know what's next.
So the five of them are sitting there,
the camera shows them, they're
not talking to one another,
they're all sitting there silently.
The film goes on about its
business to other scenes,
coming back occasionally
to see the five guys
still sitting there, then
comes back one last time
and zooms in on the subject's
face, the subject being
the last guy to arrive.
He doesn't know, but we
know, that the other four
are confederates of Funt,
they're working with
the filmmaker, and so
at no apparent signal,
the other four stand
up and begin taking off
all their clothing.
And you can see the bewildered
look on the subject's face,
what's going on here?
But then you can see a look of resignation
come onto his visage, he
stands and he starts taking off
all his clothing, we see
him as the scene ends,
they're all standing there naked,
waiting for what comes next.
And you want to say, I wanted
to say when I saw the film,
I wouldn't have done that, no
way I would have done that.
And I don't know how many
people Funt had to run
through this experiment
to get somebody to do it,
but there were more than
one in the film who did it.
And I think it's meant
to be an illustration
of the folly of being too
influenced by your peers,
but think about it from the
perspective of this guy.
It's a great job, he arrived
the last of the five,
he doesn't know what comes
next, he doesn't know
if they do or not, but if
anybody knows it would be them,
not him, they seem to
know that now's the time
to get up and start taking
off all your clothing.
And they've made a decision
obviously that it's worth doing
and so he does it too.
And it's very hard for me
thinking about it in those terms
to find fault with his
decision to do that.
It might have been
better to say screw this,
I'm not gonna do it, but
to be influenced by peers
who seem to know what they're doing,
is a totally understandable
and almost certainly
adaptive impulse to have.
They don't know individually
maybe any more than you do,
but together they probably
know much more than you.
And if the group is
acting in a certain way
and they seem to know what you're doing,
you would ignore that queue
systematically at your peril.
So I show in the group there's
quite persuasive evidence
I believe that peer
behavior, social influence,
has profound impacts on
a variety of problems
in the social domain,
these are all negatives.
I'll mention some positives momentarily.
Problem drinking is
very heavily implicated,
sexual predation, the
Me Too movement was one
of the most vivid examples
of behavioral contagion
that we've seen of late.
Cheating, the effect is
particularly strong here
because most people want
to do the right thing,
but when they see other
people cheating and profiting
and not being punished,
then they feel like chumps
and so there's an explosive
tendency for cheating
to increase in an
environment where there's
no obvious punishment for doing it.
Bullying has been shown to be
highly socially contagious.
Obesity, if the military
sends a family to a new post,
a county where the
obesity rate is 1% higher
than where they were, the
adult members of that military
family are 5% more likely to become obese
while they're in there new post.
The two very most profound
effects of contagion
and the only other ones
I'll talk about are the way
they influence what we spend.
The influence here is both
profound and the number is big,
I estimated in the book,
back of the envelope,
the fact that we spend
in ways that are shaped
by what our peers spend causes us to waste
probably upwards of two
trillion dollars a year
in the US economy alone.
All of the inefficiencies
that I call attention
to are of the same general ilk.
It's analogous to the
situation where all stand
to get a better view,
no one sees any better,
than if everyone had
remained comfortably seated,
you're not irrational to stand,
you don't regret standing.
You don't see it all if you don't stand,
but it would be better
if none of us stood.
In the climate domain, our
tendency to buy heavier vehicles
to buy bigger houses to
have destination weddings.
I've never heard of a destination wedding
when I got married, now my
kids are going to destination
bachelor parties, even far away places,
and it's just a matter of
trying to stage a celebration
that meets the standards of
the particular time and place
so take the example of
these heavy vehicles.
The engineers laughed,
the very guys who designed
these vehicles were
astounded that they sold
in such quantities.
Why did people need off road
vehicles, they wondered.
The only time they go off
road is when they miss
their driveway on a Saturday night.
It's not necessary to
have an off road vehicle,
nor a high riding vehicle,
nor a 7,000 pound vehicle.
But if others have these
vehicles and you don't,
then you can't see when you're in traffic
if you get hit by one, you're more likely
to be injured or killed.
And so if they built
bigger or they buy bigger,
it makes sense for you to do likewise.
But the rub is when everybody has bigger,
the risk of injury and
death goes up, not down.
It's counterproductive and yet
it's not palpably irrational
to have done what the
individuals were doing.
On the positive side, we
know that if you install
a solar panel on your
rooftop, that's the very most
important predictor of whether
your neighbor will do that.
This is Project Sunroof.
Google will show you your
neighborhood shot from the air.
They identified the houses
that have solar panels
on the rooftops with red dots.
Note the pattern, if
a house has a red dot,
it's next to another house,
or very close to another
house that also has one.
If it doesn't have a red
dot, it's in a cluster
where none of the neighbors
have red dots either.
And you can talk to the
Renova CEO, that's our company
in Ithaca, he'll tell you,
oh he put in a new unit
on Hanas Lane and then he
can show you the six units
that in the next two months were installed
is a direct result of the installation
that he first mentioned.
So I'm gonna just do a quick
metaphor for wasteful spending.
There's much more to say about this,
but I think this captures the idea.
And I'm gonna couch it in the
form of a thought experiment.
We've got two parallel worlds,
one is a high tax world,
one is a low tax world.
And in these two worlds,
the low tax world,
you can think of it as the US.
The rich are awash in after tax income,
so they buy the Ferrari
Berlinetta, that's the car
of choice for wealthy drivers in the US.
In the high tax world,
you can think Norway,
if you want to have a tag for that one,
they have much less after
tax income, and so they make
due with the lowly Porsche 911
Turbo, only 150,000 dollars,
a third of a million in the low tax world.
The question then I'll pose
in this thought experiment,
who is happier, the wealthy
drivers in the low tax world,
or the wealthy drivers
in the high tax world
if all other dimensions of the two worlds
were exactly the same?
And here we don't have an
experiment to give us direct
evidence, but there's a lot
of indirect evidence that
there would be very little
measurable difference
in the happiness levels of the drivers.
Partly that's because by the
time you get to the Porsche
911 Turbo, that car's got
every feature that has
any material impact on
handling and performance.
Many drivers would say
in fact it's a better car
in absolute terms than the Ferrari.
Set that to one side, just
imagine that the Ferrari is
better, if it is, it's only
epsilon better than the Porsche.
And at each local environment
since they don't touch
one another, the drivers
of these cars would have
the knowledge and satisfaction
that they were driving
the best cars on the road
there, so I think it's
a reasonable conjecture
that they would be equally
happy in these two environments.
But the fact is since the
tax laws are so different
in the two environments,
there will be much more
tax revenue in the high tax world.
Take whatever jaundiced
view you'd like of how
wasteful government is,
and the private sector
is wasteful too, mind you.
We build bigger houses
than we need because others
are building bigger, we build
heavier vehicles than we need
because there's waste there too,
but let the government be wasteful.
They don't waste everything,
and some of the money that goes
to them in the form of higher
tax revenues is gonna be spent
on road maintenance.
And so here's the question
then on the happiness front,
who's happier, the people
that drive their Ferraris
on roads like we drive on,
or the people that drive their Porsche's
on well-maintained roads?
And that's not even an
interesting question.
Of course the Porsche
drivers will be happier.
Find me a guy that would
defend that position
in front of this smart audience.
He would embarrass himself more
than even some of our public
figures have been embarrassing themselves
arguing in the forums of late.
So it's clear that if
the rich in this example
allowed themselves to
be taxed more heavily,
they would be happier
because then they would drive
cars that cost less,
but would still deliver
what they're really looking for.
And they would drive them on
roads that would be vastly
better than the roads they
actually do drive them on.
So the claim is higher taxes
don't hurt the rich at all.
That's my claim.
So I've been arguing this for a long time.
And I wish I had had the
wit earlier in my career
to tackle the obvious
question, if you're so smart,
how come you're not rich
question, which is, if we would
be happier if we taxed
ourselves more heavily
and invested more vigorously
in the public sphere,
why don't we elect
people who would do that?
That's a great question.
That's the question I'm gonna
try to grapple with here,
in the last minutes I'll
spend on the presentation.
So my answer or my attempt
at an answer to this question
is that the wealthy, the
people who think that higher
taxes would be injurious
to their wellbeing,
hold that position because they
suffer from what I'm calling
the mother of all cognitive illusions.
We've got here in the
room, one of the pioneers
in cognitive illusions, I
hope he'll agree at the end
of the talk that this is a big one.
What's the mother of
all cognitive illusions?
Let me say a little bit first
about cognitive illusions
generally, if you are influenced by them,
if you reach faulty
judgments because of them,
it's not because you're stupid.
That's important to recognize.
So here is the so-called
checkered shadow illusion.
I've given away the
central point by calling
it an illusion.
Here's the question.
Which square is darker, A or B?
How many of you think A is darker?
How many of you think B is darker?
How many of you think they're the same?
If you're smart, which
everybody in the room
obviously is or you wouldn't
have taken the time out
to be in this environment
in the first place,
you know it's a trick so
you're guessing that the right
answer is the same.
I'll say this, if you
think they look the same,
if you think that, then you
should schedule an appointment
with your neurologist as soon as possible.
There's something amiss in your circuitry
that is making you think
they look the same shade.
The explanation of why B looks lighter,
which to the normal brain
it does, it's plausible,
it's interesting, it's
that the two squares send
exactly the same value of light to us
to the eyes and brain, but
the brain has an additional
piece of information,
namely that the square B
sits in a shadow.
So that's telling us
that it's really sending
less light out.
So the brain wants to make a correction,
we're not cognitively aware of the fact
that it wants to do that,
but in an effort to tell us
the true relationship between A and B,
it's telling us that B is
lighter than it appears.
It's in a shadow that makes it darker,
but the true color of it
is lighter than it appears.
Boy I thought that explanation
sounded exactly right,
but then I looked at the
diagram again, and I said no,
I still don't believe that
they're the same color.
Until I saw what the diagram
looked like when I joined
squares A and B with a
strip of uniform gray,
and there's zero detectable
contrast between A,
B, and the strip anywhere in the diagram.
Only on seeing that strip
and the lack of contrast
was I able to accept
even that the two squares
were the same shade of gray.
I showed this to my wife,
I said boy this is a really
humbling experience, and she says good.
We need more like that.
So the reason I show it to
you is just to make plausible
the idea that you could
believe something for sure
to be true when in fact it's not true.
I believe A is darker than B,
I believe that with certainty
to be true, it's not true.
The rich believe that if
they had to pay higher taxes
that would be painful for them.
That seems almost obviously
true, it is not true,
and here is why it's not true.
So you're a wealthy person
and they've got a tax
proposal, they're gonna tax
your income a little bit more
heavily because we need
to decarbonize the economy
and for anything less than
what, two trillion a year,
we have no hope of doing that.
So yeah, we've got to
raise the money somehow,
we're not gonna get it
from the poor people,
we're gonna tax the well to
do people, they've got it.
Yeah, we're a 20 trillion
dollar economy and most of it
is up there, so we can get
it if we can persuade them
to part with it.
They don't want to part
with it 'cause they think
it will be painful.
How do they come to that belief?
They think back, the normal
way to think about any event,
how's it gonna affect me, is
try to remember the last time
an event like that happened,
how did it affect me?
So when's the last time my taxes went up,
how did you feel then?
You can't think of an event
like that if you're a wealthy
person alive today.
In World War Two, the
top tax rate was 92%.
By the time I graduated from
Georgia Tech in 1966, 70%.
Reagan's first term, 50%.
Now 37%, a couple of minuscule
increases along the way,
too small to notice or even remember.
So you can't think about
how a higher tax rate
would affect you in the usual way,
how do you think about it?
What you do is you say
all right, higher taxes,
I know for sure that means
I'll have less money to spend.
Am I worried they're not
gonna let me buy what I need?
No, there's no tax proposal on the table
that would have that effect.
I'm worried that I won't be able to get
the special extras I want.
Well what are those?
Those are the things
that are in short supply.
Special is just inherently
a relative concept.
How do you get those things?
You have to bid for them, so
I'm worried the tax increase,
because I'll have less money,
will make me less effective
at bidding for those things.
And so when I think about
how I felt about times
when I had less money,
even the most charmed life,
there are examples like that.
So maybe had a bad business year,
maybe your kid got arrested
for something serious,
you had to hire a high profile
lawyer to deal with the case,
maybe you had a divorce,
maybe you had a home fire.
Here that's not unlikely that you would
have had a home fire.
A health crisis, there are
many things that would make
you have lower disposable income.
Each one of those things
generated an intensely bad memory
so when you think about
them, you think oh,
higher taxes, less
income, I don't like that.
But what each of those events
has in common is they cause
you to have less income, but
the other people like you
had the same amount of income as always.
And so when you come to
think about what it takes
to buy the things you want, in New York,
everybody wants the penthouse
overlooking the park,
there aren't very many of those.
You get them by outbidding
other people who want them,
and if your tax rate goes
up, if you were a contender
for that apartment and the
people like you also experienced
an increase in their tax
rates, that apartment goes
to the exact same bidder as before.
And so I think if Mike
Bloomberg or Tom Steyer
could hire Pixar to make a 10 minute video
that they would run during
the halftime of the Superbowl
explaining why if you're
wealthy and you're thinking
about the extra revenue
you'd need to pay in
to enable us to decarbonize the economy,
he could, either one of those guys could
pay for the campaign that
would convince you that it
wouldn't cost you anything
at all that you care about
to do that, and that
would be a good thing,
if we could do that.
I'll close with something
that generated a much stronger
reaction in the conversations
I've been having about
the book than I anticipated
when I started on the tour.
Economists and climate
people have long been hostile
to the concept, I shouldn't
say all climate people,
'cause that's not true, to
the concept of what they call
conscious consumption.
Oh I'll save the environment,
I'll buy a Prius.
Oh I'll save the environment,
I'll eat meat less often.
I'll save the environment,
I'll bike to work a few
times a week instead of driving.
They say that's just noise.
If you do that or if you don't do that,
the climate's going down
the toilet unless we enact
robust changes in public policy,
a really stiff carbon tax
and multi-trillion dollars
worth of investment
in infrastructure to
decarbonize the economy,
not just eventually, but quickly.
So you're thinking about buying
a Prius to save the world,
you're barking up the wrong tree.
I tell people, the only
thing that's gonna matter,
I've long told people, is to
write checks to the people
who are gonna vote for the
policies that are gonna
make a difference in the
environmental crisis that we face.
But I've gone soft on this
objection in the last year,
working on this project, for two reasons.
The least important one
is that if you buy a Prius
or if you adopt a different
diet or if you fly less
or whatever you might
do in your own effort
to impose smaller costs on the planet,
you have an effect, it's a small effect.
If you don't do it, the
world will be the same
as if you do do it, but
the effect you have through
your own actions are only a small fraction
of the total effect you have,
because when you do something
other people see you do
it and they do it too.
So I think one vivid example
of that is the Prius.
There was a Honda Civic hybrid
introduced in the same years
that the Prius came out.
The Civic hybrid looked
just like the Civic
gas engine version, and no one bought it.
- We bought it, but.
(laughter)
- Only people who knew
the facts and cared about
the facts bought it.
Most people wanted to
engage in virtue signaling,
many of them, wanted
others to know that they
were doing their part,
maybe they didn't care,
maybe they liked the
odd shape of the Prius,
but it was the shape that mattered.
Others could see that
you had taken that step
and this car by many orders of
magnitude outsold the Honda.
It's one of the clearest case studies
of behavioral contagion.
And so that's one reason
that conscious consumption
matters, because it has
a much bigger impact
than you imagine it would happen.
Have, because of the indirect effects.
But I think far more
important is the second reason
that I've gone soft on this
objection, which is that
you aren't born into the
world being a certain kind
of person, you become the
kind of person you are
through what you do.
Aristotle was very much focused on this.
We are what we repeatedly do.
So if you want to become an honest person,
if you want others to think
of you as an honest person,
how do you do that, you
just be honest all the time
and you become an honest person,
and there's something different about you
that others can tell.
If you take these steps,
you become climate advocate
in the process.
And if you become one, then
you were much more likely
to vote for candidates
who will enact the robust
policy changes that the
climate community insists
are the only way we're
gonna solve this problem.
You're more likely to write
checks to their campaign
headquarters, you're more likely to go out
and knock on doors to
help get them elected.
It really matters if you do these things,
because not just of the
small effect you have.
Yeah if you buy a Prius or you don't,
the world's the same just from the impact
of that one decision, but
it's a much broader impact
than most people are aware.
And if you do that you feel
like you're in the game.
It's a crisis moment as Dan
an describe more accurately
than I can, and you may
not think your little
step will matter.
I love this picture of Greta
Thunberg, she's I think
14 in this slide, she's 16 or 17 now.
But she was just setting out
on her Save the Planet crusade.
I'm sure she hoped but didn't
expect that her crusade
would make a big difference.
Pleasant surprise, it has
made an enormous difference.
There are young people all
over the planet that may be,
the leverage that gets actual
policy movement on this issue.
So if you're in the game,
that's an important part
of being alive in this particular moment.
And I am delighted to
have written all the books
I've written, there's some of them.
I'm proud of each one.
I hoped each one would make a difference.
I have to say I maybe didn't really expect
that they would make a difference.
Although the first one, I
imagined there would be bills,
it came out in the winter, I
imagined there would be bills
wending their way their
way through both houses
of Congress by the fall session adopting
my policy recommendations.
Of course that didn't happen.
It didn't happen with
any of the other books
I've written in the meantime.
I've never regretted any of those books.
I have really deep hopes
that this book might
make a difference in helping
launch a conversation
about what we do about the fix we're in.
I have to say I don't really
expect with any high confidence
that it will make a
difference, but if it doesn't
make a difference, I won't
be sorry to have written it.
It will be the next step in
trying to make a difference
in some other way.
So it's bad moment we're in.
Samuel Johnson said "it's
within the power of any man
"not to act."
Yes, we can drop out and take no action,
but we also have the power to act.
Why choose despair when we
could actually become part
of a solution?
And I love the last line of
Katherine Wilkinson's talk
to a climate group,
she's a climate advocate
in Marin County.
She said "it's a magnificent
moment to be alive
"in a time that matters so much."
The next years are the
make or break years.
So unless you have something
really much more pressing
to do, you should get
involved in this battle.
And I hope as many of
you who can will do it,
even only through changes
in your own behavior.
So I probably consumed too much time.
- No that's perfect.
Thank you so much.
(applause)
So I've got a long list of
questions, but I'm gonna
try to steer them less
to the Milgram experiment
and the quotes from George Washington
and a variety of fascinating
things in the first part,
but try to steer a little
bit more to the second part,
and I'm gonna pick up on one
that you highlighted well
before we get to Greta and her efforts.
And that is you mentioned the Tom Steyer
and the debate over billionaires.
And I'm gonna jump right
in on something where
these lessons on contagion play out.
We have some candidates
saying that I won't take
money from billionaires,
that's very much the Sanders
category, and then we have
some billionaires saying
I should be taxed much more.
Steyer has said it even a
little more so than Bloomberg,
but they've both been in the conversation.
If they were to each read your book,
so on the one hand, Bernie Sanders,
on the one hand, Tom Steyer.
What would you advice each
of them as the Secretary
of the Treasury for what's
the best thing to do based
on what you've got here?
And I say that because
Steyer is very much saying
my tax rate is too low, people
like me should be giving
much more, and Sanders is
steering a campaign designed
to be the presidency for
labor and against this.
So just compare what your
advice would be if you're
the same person in each of their cabinets?
- Well Steyer and
Bloomberg, I actually have
given advice, I don't
know if they've heard it.
I just sent it out into the ether,
maybe somebody passed it
along to them, probably not.
But my advice to each of
them was that the biggest
impact they could have in
the short run would be to pay
the fines of the felons in
Florida who won't be able
to vote in 2020 unless
their fines are paid.
That referendum passed by 60 odd percent
to re-grant the franchise
to felons in Florida.
There are a very large number of them,
and a good percentage of
them will not be able to vote
in 2020 because of the
legislatures move to strip them
of that newly granted power until
they paid their back fines.
That's a small investment.
If you're Sanders and Warren, you need to,
as you say, there are many
billionaires that are already
well aware that it would be
better if people like them
were taxed more heavily.
I think if the country knew
that it wouldn't involve
any sacrifice at all on
the part of the well to do
if their tax rates went up,
it would be easy to vote
for people who would
campaign on a platform
of doing exactly that.
I think the fact that we're
shy about taking things away
from people, the status
quo has an enormous
presumption of validity.
We've been told again and
again that if the tax rates
go up the economy will go
to hell in a hand basket.
If we can just mount the
campaign that would make clear
to those people that no such
effect would happen at all.
Steve Jobs says I want to
make a dent in the universe.
Except for that, why even be here?
He doesn't care what the tax rate is,
he wants to make something happen.
And that's what most of
those people care about.
And they would put out
the same yeoman effort
one way as the next.
The wealth tax that Warren has proposed,
there are implementation
questions but she's got smart
people advising her and I think that's
a very popular proposal,
notwithstanding what the people
on Wall Street say about it.
So I would say, think that through fully
and then if you can get
the votes for it, do it.
- So one of the features, I'm
not sure that any candidate
is gonna want to campaign on
the fact that they're gonna
invest in convicts, although
I can really envision
that could be a fun platform.
- They can just write a check,
they don't have to campaign,
and they could do it in the dead of night.
- They could do it in secret.
But one version of that
might be we have seen a bit
of a revolution in terms
of the people are running
for office, much more
diversity, more women running.
One of the things that when each of Steyer
and Bloomberg got in, you
heard a lot of the negatives
about them saying well
I'm glad you're interested
in the issue, but why
aren't you for example doing
everything you can to find all of these
down ticket candidates and
really getting involved
in being the supporter, as
opposed to running yourself?
Is one of the lessons here that you,
that there's a real
upside to be in that .1%
and being a climate supporter?
Is that part of the dynamic
that's made this interesting?
- We're not talking the top 1% here,
we're talking the top.
- [Dan] Fractions of a percent.
- One millionth of 1% in
the case of Bloomberg.
They asked Bloomberg, how does it feel,
the prospect of two New York billionaires
running against one another?
And he said who is the other one?
Went over my head the
first time I heard it too.
The fact of being a
billionaire, a multibillionaire
in Bloomberg's case, 50
or 60 billion dollars
gives you enormous leverage to do good
if you choose to do good.
So I think if you look at
the people in that category
who have accepted that they
don't need any more money
to spend on themselves,
how can I leave the world
a better place than how I found it,
hats off to them and I
think in Bloomberg's case
he's data driven, he's
at least asking how best
to spend the money, so he's
running ads in the right places.
He's not running ads in the
places that would benefit
his candidacy most, he's
running them in the places
that would tip swing states the most
and influence the debate
the most central way.
So yeah, I think they seem
to be going about it in a way
that I admire.
I'm sorry that it's displaced
a couple of very worthy
candidates from the debate
stage, and it's hard to feel
that that's the best feature
of democracy to celebrate,
but there are good sides
and bad sides to it.
- So one aspect of the story
that you've written about
in some previous books
is the degree to which
we don't always make decisions that look
like the economic rationalist.
We stick with marriages,
we do a variety of things,
even if the data indicates otherwise.
So go back to some of the
previous work you've done
to highlight, what aspects
of the climate issue
should we be doing because bottom line,
there's maybe more jobs in clean energy
or we're gonna have less
of those externalities,
better infrastructure,
versus things that we do
because we actually just
think it's a good thing?
We can't make that
economic rational argument.
- No that question is
exactly pointed toward this,
what for me I think was a slow
awakening to the potential
value of conscious consumption.
Even if you don't think
it will have any effect,
it feels good to be doing what you feel
you ought to be doing.
My early work was much of
it about how honest people
might emerge and prosper
even in a world without rules
and sanctions and if
there's something about you
as an honest person that
other people can detect,
that differentiates you
from people who are more
opportunistic, and if you
can identify that same spirit
of trustworthiness in
them, then you can interact
selectively and you get the
high payoffs that correspond
to successful cooperation.
The defectors are stuck
interacting with themselves.
So I was very much a
celebrant of this can
all happen all by itself.
But I think as I've gotten
further into the weeds on this
I've realized that enforcement
is just such a huge element
of the picture.
The IRS cut its budget, it
was Republicans in Congress
who voted for these cuts in 2011.
Every year, further
cuts in the IRS budget,
the audit rate is about
half what it was in 2011.
And now people are getting
to understand that others
are cheating and getting away with it.
We've always been a high
tax compliance nation.
We're not like the Italys and the Greeces
that are far down on the list.
It's a huge disadvantage
when your citizens
don't pay their taxes, and
that's where we're headed
if we cut back on the
enforcement budget further.
In fact, the IRS just
from the direct effects
of their enforcement reduction,
says for every one dollar
we would spend extra on enforcement,
we'd get four dollars back.
That's the tip of the iceberg.
That doesn't take any
account of what happens
when people understand
that others are getting
away with cheating and
how they respond to that.
- So one of the issues that
Berkeley has been debating
hotly is the evolution of what you do,
about you local policies
in the face of national
or international effort.
And so California, we
like to think we built up
a pretty good mix of things,
and when Obama came in
there was a lot of detailed,
thoughtful hand wringing here.
Should we hold back and kind
of let the feds catch up
and then be on that wave, or
should we keep sticking it
to pollution because of local benefits?
And everyone in office is
delighted, a sigh of relief,
that California didn't let
up when we went from what was
a very good regime to a bad regime.
So "Under the Influence"
in terms of policy making
is another part of the story.
How does one set of good
policies egg on a another here?
- Yeah, policy is contagious,
one jurisdiction to another.
The New York City congestion
fee got voted down again
and again, the mayor in Ithaca favored it.
Politicians in Albany were against it,
they say what do you
mean, only rich people
can drive into the city?
The New York congestion fee
has now formally been adopted,
it will be implemented in due
course in the months ahead.
And there are five other
cities in the US that now have
congestion fees moved to
the top of their to-do list
precisely because of New
York having done that.
Stockholm did it a few years ago.
It was very controversial,
nobody thought it would
be a good idea, the
sponsors of the measure
almost bailed out at the last minute.
But they thought it was
based on sound reasoning
and so they did it and they
took heat in the process.
But within months they had
solid majorities in favor of it.
Now the people who pay the most
in terms of congestion fees.
A big majority of that
group also is in favor
of making them permanent.
So it's very contagious,
and full speed ahead
California I think.
Many of you weren't here,
don't remember what happened
in the old days.
The UC system was getting gutted,
the roads were going to hell.
- Still being gutted, but
we'll get back to that.
- I thought they were
finally getting the budgets
back on track.
But Brown raised the top
tax rate by 50% amid cries
that the wealthy would
move to Oregon and Nevada.
The Stanford study I saw
recently estimated that the top
1% migrate out of California
at a much lower rate
than any other percentile
position on the income scale.
So this usual protest that
we're gonna kill the geese
that lay the golden eggs has no
empirical foundation whatsoever.
- So you need to keep saying
that because even though
many of us think that there's
no empirical foundation,
this one still pops up all the time,
that we're gonna lose jobs,
we're gonna lose clean
energy projects, we're
gonna lose all these things.
So this one definitely needs
a great deal of attention.
But let me turn to Greta,
because one of the interesting
features of the process that
we've seen over the last
couple of years has been that
there's been a very technical
physics community, economics community,
analytic debate about climate
change and the last couple
years that's been turned
on its head a little bit
by this youth movement
which has highlighted
dramatic changes of behavior
and not waiting for adults.
It's not clear we're giving
them much space to do the
things they want to do,
but this contagious effect
among young people is
just massively different
than certainly the
climate change, the IPCC,
the technical briefs written
by a NRDC kind of world view.
And so optimistically and pessimistic,
maybe start with pessimism.
There are some negatives if
the youth don't get a space
to express this more than
just their personal choices.
- Yeah.
- What's the downside of
"Under the Influence",
if we don't give influence a space
to really be decision makers?
- Well the young people
have influenced one another,
I think the rate at which
they've bought into the claim
that we need to do something
major and we need to do it
quickly, it's really quite
remarkable the extent
to which that generation of
people is on board with that.
We can say in time they will
age into being a majority
and then it will happen,
but we don't have that time.
- Clearly that's there for us.
- So the fact that they're
as intense as they are
and willing to gum up the
works at personal costs
to themselves in order to encourage action
on the part of the people who still have
their hands on the levers, I think on
balance is a good thing.
We have a Sunrise Movement in Ithaca.
The city council is very frustrated
with the Sunrise Movement.
They want to add bureaucrats
to the city payroll,
they want to have, the
things they're lobbying for
are not in the considered
judgment of the city council
the best things to be
spending that money on
in the next round.
But they are in the thick
of things, they're at all
the meetings, they're making a fuss.
And I think, I've been
negotiating for opportunities
to speak to several chapters
of the Sunrise Movement
and I think it would be good
for the Sunrise Movement
to think about how to
focus their policy demands
in a slightly different
way than sometimes they do.
But no, the energy and the
determination to make something
happen are indispensable.
- So let me do then
the full positive side.
So youth are changing more
quickly in terms of diets
and no question the
debate about air travel
is something that really
came out of news after,
not just Greta doing the sailboats one way
and that kind of thing, but
there is a huge set of pressures
which weren't there
even a couple years ago,
even if we knew the numbers.
So radical change or
evolving change coming out
of "Under the Influence".
At some level if all your friends
are smokers and you're not
and then you start to
smoke or everyone decides
they're going to not only not eat beef,
but then they're gonna
question the Impossible Burger
because maybe it's not as
clean as doing other things.
How much can these sort
of dramatic shifts,
because certainly the
decade, 12 year time horizon
that we're seeing might
work for evolving change
when these 15 year olds get into office,
but you can argue that we
have made many of the choices.
If the infrastructure
analogy you put up there
doesn't happen tomorrow.
- I don't see that as
a dichotomous choice.
I had the pleasure to listen to Ezra Klein
interview Cory Booker
a couple of weeks ago.
It was just before he dropped
out of the presidential
race, and Booker as most of you may know,
is a vegan, and the question
was did he think everybody
should be a vegan?
And his answer was no,
he didn't think that.
He thought if he urged
everybody to be a vegan
he would lose his audience in a heartbeat.
It was much much better
for him to urge people
to think about altering
their diets at the margin,
eat meat maybe two or three times a week
rather than every day.
If you urge them to do that,
and if 60% of them did that,
the reduction in meat
consumption would be orders
of magnitude greater than
if you urge them to become
vegans and 2% of the population
followed that advice.
So if you can encourage
people to take a small step,
then it's very much easier
to take the next step.
So yeah, start in small
ways, reach out for something
that's within your grasp
to do, knowing full well
that unless we have radical
change we're all cooked.
It's kind of having to
hold two contradictory
notions in your head at once.
- So let me go back to
earlier, the middle section
of the book is this
series of case studies.
And I mentioned that climate
doesn't really come up
in them, but they're about
food and and marriage and sex
and all the things that are
kind of part of our normal life
as opposed to the climate
story which for a long time
was seen as an extra add-on.
Is part of the contagion to
make this a top level thing?
I don't just mean in terms of
political campaigns by Steyer
but is there a path to make
the climate choices we make
as core as eating well, or are we still
a long way from that?
- The order of topics in
the book isn't an accident,
and I will say that climate
doesn't come up for the first
time in the last half of the book.
I mentioned the essence of
the argument in the prologue
and in chapter one, but
I think until I feel
that enough is on the table
for people to have a firm
intuitive grasp of how powerful
the contagion impulse is
and how easy it is to shift
its course, can we really
get full buy-in on the
possibility that hey,
we could apply that in these
two really big ticket arenas.
The two big tickets are where
are we gonna get the money
to pay for the Green New Deal.
The Green New Deal is like
mobilizing for World War Two,
the sponsors admit that.
We did that so we know
it's possible to do that.
Where can we get the money to do that?
Part of the mission of
the book is to show where
you get the money.
Simple changes in tax
policy can make the mansions
grow less rapidly, it could make
the vehicles actually constrict.
We could harvest two
trillion dollars a year
without much difficulty
from the revenue stream.
And then the idea that
these changes in policy
would actually create contagions
that would have wholesale
effects on the way we use energy
and the way we generate it.
- So last question
before we throw it open,
and that is you're back in the room with,
not one of these Democratic candidates,
but in the ugly world, in my opinion,
where Trump is re-elected.
What is a strategy to use
contagion that moves the needle
at all, because we certainly
cannot afford four more years,
if under the unfortunate situation
of which many people think
Trump stays in office?
How do you use this to
craft a, I don't even want
to call it a conservative
ground, I've already called
it an irrational ground, but
how do you try to influence
someone like this?
- The last chapter in the book
is devoted to the question
of how you can have a more
productive conversation
with someone on the other side.
Those conversations are
notoriously unsuccessful.
When Al Gore would make an
announcement of a new study
showing that the climate
trajectory was worse
than previously thought, the
people who didn't like the idea
of climate change became more
firmly rooted in their belief
that it was a myth, that we
didn't need to worry about it.
So really it's very difficult
to make a connection
of any kind with people who are in
a different camp from you.
And there's actually
some interesting research
on this question, and
the common thread in many
of the studies is that if
you try to explain something
to somebody on the other side,
that almost always is counterproductive.
They dig in, they get
defensive, they become resistant
to whatever message you're trying.
If you can listen attentively,
if you can ask the right
question, that's the one
step that has a bigger
impact than any other.
And I don't have a good list
of exactly the right questions
for the climate domain,
but I can give you,
I have two, I think compelling
examples from my experience
in early debates, one was
involved in the debate
about the Affordable Care
Act, the opponents of it
were viscerally outraged by the mandate.
They thought the government
had no right to make
you buy insurance if you didn't want to.
And you could try to explain
to people why if you didn't
have a mandate the whole
insurance pool would collapse,
but they wouldn't listen, you
would get nowhere in a hurry
with that approach.
I just stumbled onto the right question,
I was convinced it was
effective just by seeing
how it played out.
I finally started asking
people, what do you think
would happen if the government
required home insurers
to sell fire insurance at
affordable rates to people
after their houses had
already burned down?
And the question doesn't spark outrage,
it's a neutral kind of thought question.
People would think about it,
and it wouldn't take them
very long to respond correctly
that if the government
did that, fire insurance
companies would go bankrupt
in short order because nobody
would buy fire insurance
until after his house
had already burned down.
That's exactly the right answer.
And then by themselves
they would, if you had been
talking about the mandate,
they would see that the guy
with pre-existing conditions
is exactly that guy
whose house has already burned down.
And they're not wondering any
more why you need a mandate.
It can't work unless you have a mandate,
unless you can get everybody in the pool,
the insurance pool can't
provide coverage to people
with pre-existing conditions.
Which they all thought the
government should require.
So that's one.
- So that's contagion, right?
- I asked people about
lucky breaks they'd enjoyed
on their paths to the
top, successful people.
Obama tried to remind
business owners that if they'd
succeeded, remember the
teacher that helped you,
remember the roads you
shipped your goods through.
The business owners got
bent out of shape big time
when they heard that.
Oh that's the, you
didn't build that speech,
he was dissing them for
not earning their lofty
spot in society.
Don't remind people they
were lucky, ask them if they
can recall times when they were lucky.
And they're not threatened
at all by that question,
they think of an example,
their eyes light up,
they want to tell you about it.
Telling you about it kindles
the memory of a second,
then they tell you about that example,
and then suddenly why
aren't we investing more
in the schools, they're asking you.
But you can't push them to that, ask them.
The chapter title is Ask, Don't Tell.
And I'm working on the right
questions for these other
arenas, I don't have a good
laundry list to recite to you.
- And pay it forward, right?
- Pay it forward, pay it forward.
- So let me open it up so we can do some
of those questions, and I
will get ancy if someone
makes their question
into a long statement.
But let's just start over
here and keep questions
and keep them coming.
- [Man] Thanks so much
for your presentation,
it's inspiring and wonderful.
I wonder if you'd comment
on the potential role
of a carbon tax in
addressing the climate crisis
and its potentially regressive effect.
- And maybe carbon tax and
the social cost of carbon
to kind of broaden this out.
- Yes I think if we had
enacted a stiff carbon tax
in 1924 we probably wouldn't need to do
much else besides that.
If we enact a stiff carbon
tax now and do nothing else,
then we're not gonna solve the problem.
I think nonetheless we should enact one.
I think it is political
malpractice of the very highest
order that the people
who have enacted them
or who have proposed
enacting them have not taken
the trouble to educate the
public on what a revenue
neutral carbon tax would be.
A revenue neutral tax is, as you all know,
one that collects all the
revenue from the people
who buy goods with carbon footprints,
takes that revenue, and then gives it back
to the people who paid it in.
And what we know is that
worldwide the top 10%
of the income distribution
uses 49% of all energy.
It's not that skewed in the
US, but it's skewed here too.
Most of the revenue coming
in will be from high income
voters, they will pay in the
lion's share of the revenue.
Even if you gave it back in
equal monthly rebate checks
to everybody, just on a head count basis,
it would be strongly in
favor of middle and low
income families since they
pay the least in carbon taxes
and will be getting back,
but you could make it
progressive in the rebate scheme.
Don't give anything back
to the people at the top,
tell them about the mother
of all cognitive illusions
and reassure them that
they're still gonna be able
to buy what they want,
and they're gonna benefit
more than anyone else
from cleaning up the air.
And so they're a winner on that score too.
But if you could get 70,
80, 90% of the voters
getting more money back than
they paid in in a carbon tax,
how much of a political
genius would you have to be
to get people to vote for that?
It's of course, you have the
big oil running campaigns
to oppose it, so you've got
to communicate the message,
but that's the kind of message
that Steyer or Bloomberg
could explain to people without
any difficulty whatsoever.
- And yet we've been
remarkably unsuccessful.
There was the Republican
effort, there's been
the Democrat effort, these
have been remarkably hard
to package in something
close to a bumper sticker
or whatever version.
- I have never recalled
any occasion when I wished
that my net worth was 50 billion dollars.
But on that ground alone, I wish it was,
because I think I could
persuade everybody in the world
that that would be a good idea to do,
if I had 50 billion dollars.
- I like that.
Maybe the one reason to do PayPal.
- [Man] Thank you very much.
Mixing some of this work with
some of your previous work,
I wanted to throw out a wild
idea and hear your thought.
What would you think of making
the very very high marginal
tax rate a positional good itself?
What I think here it's,
what if 400 people pay a tax rate,
390 people pay a tax rate
that is slightly higher
so they can show off
that they are in the 390
as opposed to the 400
or something like that.
How would you react to that?
- You can color code the tax forms.
- Yeah, I can't remember who it was,
it was somebody that Richard
and I know who was from Israel
and they used to publish how
much tax you paid every year
and her father had a bad business hear,
but he paid the same amount
of tax he would have paid
in a good business year so
people would see that he wasn't.
- That he was doing well.
- So yeah, selling position as a sort of,
that's easy pickings,
that's low hanging fruit.
We ought to enable people
to buy more position
in ways like that.
- In Thailand of course,
they do the reverse,
they have the shame index.
And so they publish people's
names who got speeding
tickets and didn't pay in
their home taxes and things.
So there's an alternate
version of this as well.
So let's keep going.
Well I'm gonna jump in if no one, okay.
- [Man] So in your writing
you parallel the smoking
cessation movement and climate change.
And how sort of the herd
mentality helped us solve
or helped us solve much
of the smoking crisis.
But smoking had a critical event.
And that was when the
Japanese Wives Study showed
the impact of second hand smoke.
So Americans didn't respond
much when you were just
killing yourself, but
when you were killing
other people, that
became a critical event.
And so I'm wondering what
is that trigger event
in climate change, 'cause
some of us would have thought
we've had those, and the
world just ignored them.
Whereas somehow in the smoking world,
there was a trigger event that mattered.
- You know, if the
Australia fires don't prove
to be a triggering event
in Australian politics
in the next round, I'm gonna
be deeply discouraged by that.
If not that as a triggering
event, then what?
Those fires spewed nine times
the amount of CO2 into the air
as the California wildfires
of 2018 which have been
the record culprit up until then.
So yeah, there are, the
second hand smoke trigger
actually is bogus.
We don't like regulation
in the United States,
we don't like taxation, so I
think whenever we do regulate
or tax, we reach for John
Stuart Mill's harm principle.
The only legitimate
reason for the government
to tell you you can't
do what you want to do
is to prevent harm to others.
And he must have meant undo
harm because you can't do
anything without harming
somebody in the real
or imagined way, so the second
hand smoke was the trigger
that regulators seized
on as their rational
for here's why we need to do this.
If we don't do this, people
will be harmed in ways
that they have no recourse.
You can't move away from second hand smoke
in most situations.
The damage from second hand smoke is real,
as you cite the Japanese
study, there have been
many other studies since then.
But it is minuscule compared to the damage
caused by smoking itself,
to you in particular,
but we say it's not the
government's job to protect you
from harming yourself.
That's a more interesting debate
than I think Mill realized.
I think the behavioral
literature has opened that
premise up to interesting
counterarguments in the century
or so since.
But the idea that we regulate
because of second hand smoke
is a total,
the harm it causes is
minuscule, not only to the harm
smokers cause themselves,
but the harm they cause
by making other people
more likely to smoke.
So that's something where
the Mill people can say
well they have recourse,
it's not the government's job
to tell you which behaviors to
copy and which ones to avoid,
that's your responsibility.
Okay, I like that sentiment.
But what about the parent?
Does anybody ever recall
hearing a parent say
I hope my kid grows up to be a smoker?
But most people who smoke
which they hadn't started,
they try to quit, usually unsuccessfully,
it's one of the most addictive
and harmful substances
in our arsenal.
They don't want their kids to smoke,
they try to persuade them not to.
My parents both smoked,
they tried to persuade me
not to smoke, I smoked anyway at age 14
for two and a half years.
If others around you smoke, you smoke.
And if you want to say we
don't care about the harm
to parents who don't achieve
their goal of raising
their kids to be non-smokers
okay, but that's real harm.
If you want to raise a kid,
there's a lot of grunt work
along the way, you've got
to care about that kid.
And if you invest a big
slice of your life raising
your kid and your kid goes off and damages
his health willy nilly,
that's harm to you.
Would you want people to be
raising kids who didn't care
that much about their kids?
I mean the utilitarians, some
of them will say you pull
this lever, you kill your son.
You pull this lever,
you kill two strangers.
You ought to pull the first
lever to kill your son
because one person dying is
better than two people dying.
I would pull the second lever.
I'm guessing most people would do that.
And if you thought about it,
you wouldn't want to live
in a society where the people
who raised the kids who
populated that society
were ones that would pull
the lever that killed their kid.
You've got to care about your kid too much
to be willing to do that.
And so the harm you caused when you smoke
is you make other people's
kids more likely to smoke,
and that's real harm, and
we ought to care about it.
Unless there was some
reason not to care about it,
which I can't think of one.
The other reason they offered
for regulating smoking
is that we needed to spare the
poor taxpayer who has to pay
for the health costs of the smokers.
False, the smokers die
younger, they don't collect
pensions for nearly as
long, they die of illnesses
that kill them more
quickly, they don't draw big
Medicare bills down year after year.
Smokers are a net plus
to the government budget.
- [Man] So if I.
- To the microphone, so we
can get it on the record.
- [Man] If I go to the supermarket,
(coughs) and I take out a
can of beans and eat them,
I deprive the rest of
the world of those beans
and I have to pay a dollar and a half.
And nobody I know would
call that charge a tax.
It's a charge for the
resources I'm consuming
and depriving everyone else of.
If I use the atmosphere
by putting carbon into it,
shouldn't that be called a carbon charge?
And I'm not quibbling
because Bob as you said,
we don't like taxes, but guy
who bought that 300,000 dollar
Ferrari didn't think that
it was unjust that he had
to pay for it.
- Yeah, exactly right, and we have a
right wing congressman in
our district and he's open
to the idea of a carbon fee and dividend.
He is 100% opposed to a carbon tax.
That those two are isomorphic
is not of any concern
at all to him.
- It's the paradox of Tompkins
County, is what this is.
- [Robert] Marketing matters, yes.
- Let's go up to the front.
- [Man] Information on the
potentially catastrophic effects
of climate change and a plethora
of seemingly catastrophic
news events, as we've discussed already,
has been available for some time,
so presumably people are
discounting the importance
of this information, and
in an economic sense,
discounting the potential
benefits of fighting
climate change in the future.
This could, from a
microeconomic point of view,
be construed as rational behavior.
You've talked about fighting
this through information,
but if information is already available,
what recourse do we have?
- I was with you right
along the way until you got
to the point where you
said this can be construed
as rational behavior.
When you have the
information about it's worse,
much worse than you
think, and you do nothing,
even though there are
things that you could do
that would not be burdensome to do,
that is not comfortably
within my conception
of rational behavior.
I think it is primarily
an information problem.
The people in the youngest
generation of voters
are all already there,
they understand the gravity
of the problem and the need
to act quickly to solve it
if even they don't
understand all of the nuances
of the policy choices that we face.
The group above them is closer
to them than to the Boomers
but still not quite there yet.
And so I think, any way
you can get new information
into the system and start
conversations by asking questions
or getting people to reconsider.
So you don't think climate
change is a problem?
I don't think we're
gonna see anybody willing
to say publicly that
that's what they believe.
- Except for you talked
about Ian Hoff in your book
and the snowball, and he
certainly said, so there are some.
- He said it in 2015, I bet
he wouldn't say it today.
- I like to hope you're right.
- In two years from now
I'd be willing to bet
a hefty sum that it would
be very difficult to find
a public figure wiling to
say anything remotely like
what he said in 2015, but
that's the conversation.
You can't do it all by
yourself, but you can play
a meaningful part in
starting a conversation.
Same sex marriage was one
of the issues I talked about
in the chapter that
Dan mentioned on cases.
1989, Andrew Sullivan writes
a very persuasive argument
that if we permitted it,
it would have nothing
but beneficial effects
on the social structure,
there would be no harm,
it was very well argued.
12% of the population thought it was okay
to permit people to marry
whom they please at that time.
Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton were publicly on record
against same sex marriage
when the referendum was fought
in 2008, 2009 here in California.
Six years later comes
Obergefell, the Supreme Court
decision everywhere in
the country it's the law
of the land now.
Now more than 70% of the people, yeah,
why should we tell people they
can't marry whom they please.
So you can get big movement
in a short span of time
through essentially behavioral contagion.
- Let's do one more down
here, and then we'll ask you
to wrap up a little bit.
- [Man] Thanks very much.
You mentioned on several
occasions that basically
the demographic message
is in, that the younger
generation is on board.
In your studies of, you just
mentioned same sex marriage
and other areas where
we've had this change,
did you see a quick tipping
point where suddenly
there was a windfall of change of opinion
of activism or did it come very slowly?
- Great question, and the answer is that
it's always idiosyncratic.
Tim Baccharin has a great
book about the importance
of information cascades of various kinds.
And a point he makes is that
although there were some
cranks who every year for
many years had predicted
that the Soviet Union
countries were gonna dissolve
this year it never happened,
but then with no serious
pundit predicting it, they
all fell within the span
of 12 or 18 months.
And it was just a matter of
it being dangerous to speak
out against a regime.
Some people are crazy, they'll
speak out no matter what.
Others are more cautious,
the obvious equilibrium
for a long time was only
the nutcase spoke out,
he got punished, nobody else spoke out.
But what people believed
and what they said publicly
were not the same thing.
Something happened to make the
next guy in the queue speak
out and that made the proportion
of people speaking out
just high enough to tip the thing,
and then bang, like a row
of dominoes, down it went.
Other times it takes a long time.
The slavery debate played
out over a long long time.
No young person today
could summarize the issues
in the slavery debate.
They all believe passionately
that slavery is wrong.
Why do they believe that?
Because everybody else believes that.
They don't know what the
details of the argument,
what kind of pro side
arguments people offered
back in the day, because
it's a settled issue to them.
But it didn't get settled
quickly, in that case
it took a long time.
And the one thing about contagion dynamics
is that prediction is very difficult.
I did a Twitter thread, I tried
to help get the conversation
started by putting threads
out on Twitter of examples
of this sort, and one
of the threads I put out
a couple of weeks ago
was that the trajectory
of the impeachment
conversation was more uncertain
that most pundits seem to think.
I'm not gonna say 67
senators are going to vote
to acquit Trump.
But if you can make a
small goal your first step,
well I guess the obvious
would get the four to vote
for additional evidence being
admitted into the discussion.
Nobody knows what comes next.
And if it tips, it'll tip overnight.
It Was Until It Wasn't was
the title of the chapter
that I summarized a lot
of these case studies in.
- You certainly miss 100%
of the shots you don't take.
- Exactly.
- So that is a definite start.
So I want to thank you
for coming and welcome you
to the Goldman school again, thank you.
(applause) We'll have some
drinks and thank you all
for the great questions.
That was perfect.
(light music)
