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Political
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Political: Collective Action Problems
Video transcript
(intro music) Hi! My name is Jonny Anomaly, and I teach
at Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill. Today, I'm going to talk about
collective action problems. Suppose you're in the market for a new car
car, and you have a choice between buying a fuel-efficient compact car and a gas-guzzling truck to drive
around Los Angeles. The car will save you money
and emit less pollution, but the truck will be safer
if you get in an accident. Your contribution to the amount
of air pollution in Los Angeles, or to global climate change, is
insignificant, even if it's true that if everyone chooses the truck, we
get more pollution and less safety. The example is a typical
collective action problem, which arises when people acting
independently produce a worse outcome than they would if they could
find a way to coordinate. Collective action problems are diverse, but one of the most common occurs when
everyone in a group shares a goal, but achieving the goal requires only some
members of the group to contribute. Examples of this are preserving
a clean atmosphere by reducing air pollution, organizing a beach cleanup to remove
trash from the sand, and saving an endangered
species from extinction. While collective action
problems are ubiquitous, not all of them are as serious as
decisions that produce toxic air pollution or risks of fatal accidents. Consider the case of
cosmetics and high heels. In some cultures, women are expected to
buy expensive high-heeled shoes, which can be painful
to wear, costly to buy, and can make it more difficult
to run away from attackers. The main advantage to high
heels is that they supposedly give women's legs a
more attractive shape. If each woman within a certain social group is expected to wear heels rather than flats, the outcome is that no woman in the
group has any particular advantage, but all of them bear a higher financial and physical burden from wearing high heels. Each faces the following problem. If I wear heels and others don't, I'll be a bit more attractive
than those around me, given the prevailing
standards of attractiveness. If others wear high heels, I'd better wear
them too, to keep up with my peers. So, no matter what other women
do, I should wear heels, even if all of us would be better off
if heels had never been invented. It's important to recognize that not all
collective action problems can be solved, and not all of them are worth solving, since the cost of collective
action can exceed whatever benefits it might bring. The same point applies to prisoner's
dilemmas, public goods, and commons tragedies, which often have a
similar underlying structure. Still, there common ways of addressing
collective action problems, including social norms, legal
sanctions, and tax incentives. In the case of local air pollution, fuel
taxes can reduce consumption, lead people to purchase more
fuel-efficient cars, and encourage manufacturers to create cars that
use less pollution-emitting energy. In the case of global pollution, like greenhouse gases that
cause climate change, a carbon tax would likely lead
consumers to reduce their use of carbon-intensive energy, and lead
producers to search for and develop less carbon-intensive substitutes. Social norms can also
help reduce pollution. For example, in some communities, people
use bumper stickers to signal to other people that they drive
a low-emission vehicle. They presumably do this to promote a norm in which people take pride in reducing
pollution and feel ashamed of buying vehicles that pollute the environment. But when a population
is large and diverse, so that interactions with the same
people are less common, social norms usually can't get people to make large sacrifices to achieve a
collectively beneficial goal. Back to the heels example. In some groups, especially small ones, social norms already solve
the problem quite well. For example, some feminists might refrain from wearing heels because they
believe high heels and cosmetics are part of a system of unfair
expectations that men have of women. Agreements to reject high heels can
be enforced through social sanctions, like public shaming, and through
private feelings like guilt over violating a social norm. We could also impose a tax
on high heels, and if that didn't work, state legislators might make
buying, selling, or wearing heels a capital crime, punishable by death. But the cost of solving the problem through legal sanctions is,
for most people, too high. First, some people enjoy wearing high heels, regardless of any
social pressure to do so, and they would lose the liberty
to dress as they please. Second, all taxpayers would
have to finance the prosecution of people who
are caught wearing high heels. The upshot is that even if we
can imagine a social welfare improvement from banning high heels, it is not obvious that states
should attempt to do so. This conclusion is universal. While norms, laws, and incentives can solve some collective action
problems quite well, pollution for example, not all collective
action problems are worth solving. Here's a challenge for those of you
who made it to the end of the video. Think of two separate
collective action problems: one that is worth solving, and one that is not, because of the problems that
attempts to solve it would create. Subtitles by the Amara.org community