Rethinking the Tactics of Politics

As can be read in any economist’s books -- from Levitt’s/Dubner’s Freakonomics to Sowell’s Basic Economics -- economics, although the study of limited resources with alternative uses, is really about identifying the incentives that will cause a population to conduct themselves in a manner of your choosing. This is why mountains are made of molehills so that the voting public can hearken to a call-to-arms, thus allowing politicians to draft omnibus stimulus packages and healthcare legislation which are then signed into law with the support of the screeching, idealistic voting public who have no idea the repercussions of the politicians’ actions.

This happens on both sides of the political aisle. Republicans decry the Boogie Man around the corner, sneaking up on your hidden cache of shotguns or enticing your daughters to get abortions. We cringe at the cadaverous image of Dr. Kervorkian and imagine his hands on our wives or daughters and demand that abortions be made illegal. We celebrate Charleton Heston for bravely telling the limpid left that they’ll have to go over his dead body to get his guns.
We need crises and heroes. It’s imbued into our sense of cultural norm from a very early age. In two hours Sean Connery (or Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan or Daniel Craig) go from a leisurely romp with a lovely lady, to a sudden awareness of the earth’s or freedom’s impending doom, to a daring thwarting with equally racy escape, back to another leisurely romp with a different casual female acquaintance. We have a crisis and a hero, and in the middle a heart-warming, stomach-settling resolution. All in two hours. It must be done this way. That’s the formula. Bruce Willis and company took just over three hours to save Earth from the asteroid, but give them some credit. They needed the extra hour for the shuttle trip.

For centuries, humans have put more stock into the immediate gratification causation than the long-term gratification causation. Even more absurd is that we prefer long-term gratification based on correlation to long-term gratification based on causation as long as the causation gives us the warm-fuzzy. In the first example, tribes in Africa and early America kill a goat or cow and eat its heart and drink its blood as a guarantee of a successful hunt or battle. And even if they don’t kill much in the hunt or in battle, they merely chalk it up to not enough blood-drinking or that the gods were just in a bad enough mood to not accept their offering. But this simple concept has reached new heights.

So when did politics get to be so darn entertaining? I remember my parents watching the State of the Union Addresses. That was just one more reason to read – early 80s TV didn’t offer much for a 10 year old. But to answer my own question, I have to blame political drama on Reagan. He was an actor, after all…and a lover of economics. So the man with a flair for theatricality and an understanding of incentives is easily the one to reset the baseline or raise the bar. My current rambling is not meant to denigrate Reagan – in my opinion, one of the finest Americans to have ever lived and who should be celebrated for a love for his wife so deep even Alzheimer’s couldn’t kill it. (If you’ve ever heard the story about him ambling along, deep in the latter stages of Alzheimer’s, flanked by his Secret Service agents, picking flowers from a stranger’s yard, you will know what I’m talking about.)

My rambling here will address the deep knowledge of incentives and the relative lack of knowledge on how to effectively use them across the political spectrum. I think it was in Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing where I read that people who have already made up their mind on a given issue or subject will continue to promote or support that idea in the face of overwhelming evidence, despite that their original judgment was most likely based on a gut feeling. Whatever evidence supports the gut must be true, and all else is irrelevant, incorrect, or generated through suspicious methods in an effort to discount the contrary viewpoint. This creates a problem for someone or some group trying to change the minds of those who do not already believe. The problem is that unless someone has never before been exposed to the issue, they already have made their decision. (This is why it is so important to fix our educational system.)
So let’s take Global Warming. In the truest sense of the word “science,” there is no “proof” of Global Warming or Anthropogenic Climate Change. Take into consideration that Einstein claimed time (and I’ll paraphrase) was illusively unproveable, and yet it still remained a universal constant. EINSTEIN couldn’t prove TIME existed. He (as well as folks like Stephen Hawking) also claim that their “proofs” are only around as long as it takes someone to disprove them. Their proofs were never the be-all, end-all. They were merely stepping stones to a greater truth, which could only be achieved through more time, wisdom, and technology and would invariably be disproved.

As far as the scientific method is concerned, they are correct. A scientist may prove his hypothesis, and others may replay his experiments, all which support his original hypothesis, but if a single solitary scientist proves it wrong, then the original “proof” is called into question. Moreover, the original hypothesis might be incorrect, not just the data accumulated during the experiment to prove that hypothesis.

So with Anthropogenic Climate Change, there is about a 50-50 split in scientists. Half believe it; half don’t. Having 50% of scientists disproving it far outweighs the single solitary scientist needed in past centuries to disprove a previous scientist’s “proof.” But people persist, because they want to. Their gut tells them it’s true, so they side with the 50% of scientists who believe the Earth will melt.

So, if you were a Climate Changer and wanted people to do more “green” stuff, how could you make that a reality? Not by squawking into every TV camera you see about the world melting or being covered in water and warm weather (sounds like the Caribbean to me). You merely reaffirm your core supporters and turn off opponents. The 50-50 split doesn’t change. The non-Climate Changers don’t believe that the world will melt or become a gigantic Caribbean landscape, but you don’t need them to believe, you just want them to act.

That’s easy. Make “green” stuff cheap enough, and it will be done. Left-leaning politicians love to use incentives to disincentivize people. Make NOT going green hard enough, and people will do it. Problem with that is that as soon as the people discover a work-around, they’ll do it. By truly catering to their desires, you (the Climate Changers) can get people to act according to YOUR desires.

You want people to drive green cars? Make electric cars affordable. And not through government subsidy, because that just pisses people off. They see it, accurately, as cheating. When the technology is advanced enough, those cars will become incredibly affordable, and of course people will buy them, because they will pay less in gas. Right now, those cars are so much more expensive than comparable gasoline-powered cars that over the car’s entire lifespan, they will not recoop the extra money spent on the car with lower gas expenditures. If they could, they’d buy the Hybrid.

I’m all ready to buy solar panels, but at $30,000 for a residential set-up, it’s not cost effective for me. The break-even point on my return on investment (ROI) is 12.5 years down the road. Not bad, but taking into account the solar panels are only under warranty for 10 years, I don’t hold out much hope that they will last until my break-even point. If they lowered the cost to, say, $15,000, I could break even in just over 6 years…if there is enough sunlight to generate the power to cover all my power needs. And I could purchase power-friendly appliances, but those cost more than non-power-friendly appliances and can be a bit lifestyle-cramping. Take for instance the energy-efficient refrigerators offered by companies like SunDanzer. $1129 for an 8-cubic-foot refrigerator? I paid half that for a refrigerator three times that size. So I would then need my solar unit to provide that much more efficiency to reach my break-even point before it craps out.

So then how does a Climate Changer get the self-centered right to go green? Simple. Stop taking all those Post-modern Feminist Culture courses at your liberal arts college and take some engineering classes. Become part of the solution by actually developing a solution, not just a slogan.