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TV made the have-nots want the things the haves had, even if it meant stealing them.
maybe it had nothing to do with the kids at all; maybe Mom and Dad became derelict when they discovered that watching TV was a lot more ent...
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Americans in particular are famously generous, donating about $300 billion a year to charity, more than 2 percent of the nation’s GDP. Just think back to the last hurricane or earthquake that killed a lot of people, and recall how Good Samaritans rushed forward with their money and time.
In addition to scrutiny and selection bias, there’s one more factor to consider. Human behavior is influenced by a dazzlingly complex set of incentives, social norms, framing references, and the lessons gleaned from past experience—in a word, context.
Most giving is, as economists call it, impure altruism or warm-glow altruism. You give not only because you want to help but because it makes you look good, or feel good, or perhaps feel less bad.
It was the doctors who were responsible for puerperal fever, transferring “cadaverous particles” from the dead bodies to the women giving birth.
the law of unintended consequences is among the most potent laws in existence.
The big fear was a collapse of the agricultural system.
Because cows—as well as sheep and other cud-chewing animals called ruminants—are wicked polluters. Their exhalation and flatulence and belching and manure emit methane, which by one common measure is about twenty-five times more potent as a greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide released by cars (and, by the way, humans). The world’s ruminants are responsible for about 50 percent more greenhouse gas than the entire transportation sector.
Even the “locavore” movement, which encourages people to eat locally grown food, doesn’t help in this regard.
buying locally produced food actually increases greenhouse-gas emissions.
More than 80 percent of the emissions associated with food are in the production phase, and big farms are far more efficient than small farms.
For a variety of reasons, global warming is a uniquely thorny problem.
First, climate scientists can’t run experiments.
Second, the science is extraordinarily complex.
externality.
It’s what happens when someone takes an action but someone else, without agreeing, pays some or all the costs of that action. An externality is an economic version of taxation without representation.
If you happen to live downwind from a fertilizer factory, the ammonium st...
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Gore is appealing to our altruistic selves, our externality-hating better angels.
not all externalities are negative.
A single volcanic eruption practically reversed, albeit temporarily, the cumulative global warming of the previous hundred years.
Pinatubo created some other positive externalities too. Forests around the world grew more vigorously because trees prefer their sunlight a bit diffused. And all that sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere created some of the prettiest sunsets that people had ever seen.
In the darkened conference room, Myhrvold cues up an overhead slide that summarizes IV’s views of the current slate of proposed global-warming solutions. The slide says: Too little Too late Too optimistic
Too little means that typical conservation efforts simply won’t make much of a difference.
Too late. The half-life of atmospheric carbon dioxide is roughly one hundred years, and some of it remains in the atmosphere for thousands of years.
Too optimistic. “A lot of the things that people say would be a good thing probably aren’t,”
atmospheric aftereffects of Pinatubo were undeniable: a decrease in ozone, more diffuse sunlight, and, yes, a sustained drop in global temperature.
Budyko’s Blanket.
So Budyko’s Blanket could effectively reverse global warming at a total cost of $250 million.
And there lies the key to the question we asked at the beginning of this chapter: What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common? The answer is that Gore and Pinatubo both suggest a way to cool the planet, albeit with methods whose cost-effectiveness are a universe apart.
Budyko’s Blanket may simply be too repugnant a scheme to ever be given a chance. Intentional pollution? Futzing with the stratosphere? Putting the planet’s weather in the hands of a few arrogant souls from Seattle? It is one thing for climate heavyweights like Paul Crutzen and Ken Caldeira to endorse such a solution. But they are mere scientists. The real heavyweights in this fight are people like Al Gore. And what does he think of geoengineering? “In a word,” Gore says, “I think it’s nuts.”
But if you think like a cold-blooded economist instead of a warmhearted humanist, Gore’s reasoning doesn’t track. It’s not that we don’t know how to stop polluting the atmosphere. We don’t want to stop, or aren’t willing to pay the price.
Most pollution, remember, is a negative externality of our consumption.
In the wake of this report, hospitals all over the country hustled to fix the problem. Even a world-class hospital like Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles found it needed improvement, with a hand-hygiene rate of just 65 percent.
For one, they acknowledged, doctors are incredibly busy, and time spent washing hands is time not spent treating patients.
Sinks, furthermore, aren’t always as accessible as they should be and, in patient rooms especially, they are sometimes barricaded by equipment or furniture.
Doctors’ hand-washing failures also seem to have psychological components. The first might be (generously) called a perception deficit. During a five-month study in the intensive-care unit of an Australian children’s hospital, doctors were asked to track their own hand-washing frequency. Their self-reported rate? Seventy-three percent. Not perfect, but not so terrible either.
nurses were spying on them, and recorded the docs’ actual hand-hygiene rate: a paltry 9 percent.
This news was delivered by Rekha Murthy, the hospital’s epidemiologist, during a lunch meeting of the Chief of Staff Advisory Committee.
They pressed their palms into the plates, which Murthy sent to the lab. The resulting images, Silka recalls, “were disgusting and striking, with gobs of colonies of bacteria.”
lunch meeting.) It may have been tempting to sweep this information under the rug. Instead, the administration decided to harness the disgusting power of the bacteria-laden handprints by installing one of them as the screen saver on computers throughout the hospital.
Hand-hygiene compliance at Cedars-Sinai promptly shot up to nearly 100 percent.
The dangerous bacteria that patient receives are a negative externality of the doctor’s actions
microeconomists
They seek to understand the choices that individuals make, not just in terms of what they buy but also how often they wash their hands and whether they become terrorists.
Chen now introduced price shocks and income shocks to the monkeys’ economy. Let’s say Felix’s favorite food was Jell-O, and he was accustomed to getting three cubes of it for one coin. How would he respond if one coin suddenly bought just two cubes? To Chen’s surprise, Felix and the others responded rationally. When the price of a given food rose, the monkeys bought less of it, and when the price fell, they bought more. The most basic law of economics—that the demand curve slopes downward—held for monkeys as well as humans.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, Chen saw something remarkable. One monkey, rather than handing his coin over to the humans for a grape or a slice of apple, instead approached a second monkey and gave it to her. Chen had done earlier research in which monkeys were found to be altruistic. Had he just witnessed an unprompted act of monkey altruism? After a few seconds of grooming—bam!—the two capuchins were having sex. What Chen had seen wasn’t altruism at all, but rather the first instance of monkey prostitution in the recorded history of science.
