Climate Change Again

So, I have yet to post on my big issue, health care. However, climate change also appears to take the stage, so I figure why not.

We do have a political problem as both Ezra Klein and Nate Silver (in an attempt to out wonk the other, which I find incredibly amusing to no end) point out. However, the polling data reveal something I think that is missing. We do not fully understand how people are thinking of the issue, nor the psychological shortfalls we are up against. Indeed, as one of my mentors points out, perhaps we think that people are rational, and even in the behavioral economics world we still sort of hold onto this idea, that people have preferences and there is a will acting on them and they choose. Perhaps though we need to look more deeply at the situational forces at work.

Furthermore, it is really hard, even under a dispositionist model to get people to feel things in their bones. We do not assign proper discount values. Everything is fuzzy. And the time horizon is so long that we cannot conceive of that (this is also a reason why I think evolutionary theory in biology is so difficult to understand, rarely do we see new species appear before our own eyes). We are thus going against our wiring. Even I, as someone who on the side cares about the issue, finds this difficult to think about.

So, what do we do? I do not know. But, perhaps we do need to look at ways in which we can better message. Again, tell a story. Do not make this some sort of moralistic I'm better than you effort (which is something that I hate and a reason why I often say, I do not care about the issue, even though I clearly do). Try to look into how the psychologists who believe this. And perhaps work on showing people the faultiness of these complex arguments around efficiency and distrubution, and make people of all stripes (including these free-market types) that they really do want in the end some sort of paternalism, as Duncan Kennedy wrote (this is another one of those must read articles, though less easy than the now famous Atul Gawande piece on doctors and health care spending).