Giving in to small vices
When I was in Seoul three years ago to visit a friend, I was not impressed by the city. The people there were always in a hurry, and struck me as generally unfriendly. When you apologise for accidentally bumping into someone, your apology will usually be coldly ignored. There are also very strict social rules in place. E.g., on the trains, there are seats specially reserved for small children, elderly people, and the physically disabled. If you do not fall into any of these three categories, you are not allowed to take any of those seats, even when you are travelling during the off-peak hours and there are few other passengers. Of course, there are no laws in place to forbid you to do so, but you will be met with (silent) disapproval from the South Koreans. Or so my Korean friend warned me.
Another thing that struck me was the fact that the streets were strewn with litter everywhere. It was very unpleasant. How can one go about resolving this issue? After all, the lack of civic-mindedness is something that takes time to address, but you want clean streets now. Maybe you are thinking of making the act of littering legally punishable. That will certainly teach those litterbugs to be more considerate. So you pass a law saying that those who are caught littering will have to pay a fine.
This sounds like a good idea. After all, the advantage is that fining people for littering is a quick and easy way of filling up the governmental coffers, and so you instruct policemen to strategically station themselves in busy areas. But using manpower from the police forces to ensure public cleanliness seems like a colossal waste of all the specialised training all these policemen have received in preparation for their jobs.
What to do then? Maybe during the first two weeks after the ratification of the law, you delegate the assignment of catching litterbugs to a few policemen, to send the message that you mean business. After the fear of getting caught has been sufficiently instilled in the people, you surreptitiously transfer the policemen to resume their former responsibilities. You trust that there will be little littering now, because what matters is not the actual presence of the policemen, but the belief that those policemen are present, even when they are not.
But this might not work in the long run. People are not oblivious to their surroundings—soon they’d realise that no one is actually enforcing the no-littering law, and they’d return to their old ways of leaving trash on the streets. So, periodically, you will have to make sure that there are policemen stationed in busy areas to deter littering. But over the long run, it would still lead to a huge waste of the police forces’ resources and manpower. Besides, the policemen might not be so happy about having their other responsibilities interrupted just because they have to catch litterbugs. It is more important for them to catch thieves instead of fining people who throw away used napkins on the streets.
So what can you do? After all, you would really like to punish those litterbugs for their lack of civic-mindedness.
I would say that it is the wrong way of thinking about things. No doubt that littering shows a lack of civic-mindedness. But littering is also generally a small vice. My suggestion is perhaps rather unorthodox: Instead of punishing it, I suggest that we go out of our way to accommodate it. Accommodation does necessarily not mean that we have to continue living with the unpleasant effects of these small vices. Simply place so many rubbish bins on the streets of Seoul that there would be absolutely no reason for littering. Of course, there will probably be a few people who enjoy littering out of malice, but I believe that most people litter simply because they are too lazy to carry their trash with them if there are no rubbish bins within proximity.
Accommodate their laziness. By placing lots of rubbish bins along the streets, you are telling them, “I know that you are lazy, but instead of punishing you for it, guess what? I am going to make things easier for you!” Sure, you will have to spend quite a lot on money on the purchase of so many rubbish bins, but over the long run the benefits far outweigh the costs—those who live in Seoul will get to enjoy a much cleaner living environment, and instead of hiring cleaners to work long shifts cleaning dirty streets, you can just hire them to empty and replace the trash bags, which takes a much shorter time.
Passing a law to punish litterbugs would also detract from people’s ability to enjoy going out—e.g., they would wonder whether to buy food from roadside stalls, because they would fear having nowhere to properly dispose of their trash, and at the same time they have no wish to carry the trash with them long periods of time. Placing lots of rubbish bins along the streets, on the other hand, makes it a lot easier for them to enjoy going out.
Our first reaction to vices is usually the desire to criticise or to penalise. Certain vices no doubt deserve such hostility. But it is important to pick your battles—focus on combating certain vices, and give in to the rest. In fact, sometimes, going out of your way to accommodate a small vice would surprisingly end up making things better for everyone involved. This principle is useful in all aspects of life, and it is useful in both interpersonal relations and policy-making.
Decide for yourself what you can forgive and what you cannot. For big vices, it is important to ask, “What is right?” For small vices, it is perhaps more important to ask, “What works?”
Placing a rubbish bin is cheap. But you also have to send a person to collect the rubbish, put it in a truck, and take it to the landfill, incinerator, or recycling facility. You have to discover how often to collect it: once a day might be enough on a normal day, but during a festival or street fair, once an hour might not be enough. The route taken by the additional garbage-truck needs to be planned, too.
One approach would be to look at whatever system is currently eventually collecting the litter. Is it the storeowners? The street sweepers? How could the rubbish-bin improvement take advantage of tacit information currently possessed by whoever is currently cleaning the litter?
Different kinds of policemen do different kind of work. Some of them chase killers. Some of them regulate traffic. Some of them investigate computer or economic crime. They are not replaceable. So if some policemen are sent to punish littering, of course you don’t pick them from those who chase killers or investigate computer crimes. That would be a waste. But there are others. Or you hire new policemen, very cheap ones, for this task specifically. And you don’t need a lot of them. For example I would use a very small team, patrolling every few days in a different part of the city. They would make an impression, and then go elsewhere.
Also it is not “either—or” situation. You can put many rubbish bins and legislate a high fine. Actually, it would be very good to do both things at the same time; more people would notice. And the rubbish bins which stay there would remind people of the fines even after the policemen are gone.
(In my experience—but I don’t want to generalize too much from one country or maybe only one city—a typical failure mode is to legislate fines for something, and then not send the policemen to actually fine people. When people complain for a few years, increase the fine, but again, not send any policement. So even if the fines are sometimes high, nobody really cares, because nobody ever heard about anyone paying the fine. Again, this may be specific for my city or country.)
One advantage of fines: if the problem gets serious, you automatically get more money to fight it.
There is also an important category of people who litter if and only if they see other people doing it, regardless of convenience. How big this category actually is, I don’t know. They would not litter out of malice, but simply because they see other people doing it, therefore it is no big deal. Even if you had a rubbish bin every meter, for some people even walking half meter would be too much if they see that it is not necessary, because other people ignore it.
However, if you have a homogenous city, the best thing to do would be a scientific experiment.
Even without seeing people littering—throwing some trash onto an already littered street would be seen as less of a big deal than throwing the same onto a previously very clean street, I’d guess.
Disney did a lot of research on littering, actually. Part of the research actually involved handing people lollipops on the opening day of Disney Land in order to determine where to place trash cans.
A couple of things he discovered (about US culture, at least, but it would surprise me if it weren’t exportable to other cultures to some degree):
People will generally carry trash ~30 paces before discarding it.
People will litter more once there’s already litter on the ground. (Similarly, people will mess up clean bathrooms less than already-dirty ones.)
A couple of things from my experience working as a custodian at Disney World, which sees a large amount of foreign traffic:
People will, in fact, use trash cans. People will, in fact, continue stuffing trash into trash cans far past their capacity. People will spend two-three minutes trying to get trash into a totally full trash can when totally empty ones are twenty paces in either direction.
The same trash can will overflow ten times a day while the two on either side of it will require emptying about once a week.
Teachers are the messiest group of people, judging by conditions after their conventions. Christian student groups are the most likely to leave used condoms in the brush. Attorneys are the most likely to leave used condoms in the parking lot.
Smokers frequently have trouble telling the difference between stainless steel trash cans and cigarette receptacles, unless they’re teachers, inwhichcase they use neither and make massive piles wherever they happen to be standing.
Men are -significantly- cleaner in public restrooms than women. (I was responsible for probably the only women’s bathroom on the entire Disney property that was cleaned by a man; generally they’re cleaned by women. This one was particularly remote and so both bathrooms were included.) [ETA: This should go without saying, but when I refer to men and women, I mean on average.]
A surprising number of people don’t notice when they drop money on the ground. This can rescue the lunch of a custodian who forgot to pack a lunch one day.
*shudder* One can miss from that close?
As I understand, part of the problem is many/most women don’t want to sit on the seats, and do something referred to as “hovering”. And I speculate that many women don’t want to touch themselves in the act. Which combine to form a peculiar kind of self-reinforcing strategy; since women won’t sit down, their toilets are messier. Since their toilets are messier, they don’t want to sit down.
But garbage was another problem. There were trash cans installed on the wall of each stall, and yet trash would still be discarded on the floor. That’s not really a fair comparison, though, since men don’t have such trash to dispose of in the stalls, and outside the stalls the cleanliness levels were approximately the same.
(Incidentally, restrooms aren’t that bad to clean, even at their worst. My worst stories as a custodian involve trash cans left too long in the sun or vomit (vomit, if not cleaned immediately, has a propensity to multiply rapidly, particularly when it’s in a line/queue). The worst story I’ve ever heard involved a trash can being used as an emergency restroom, though. Sometimes even quadruple bagging isn’t enough.)
Since we are trading stories… I’ve seen guys use urinals for #2, because all the stalls with toilets were occupied and the nature wouldn’t wait.
#2 also affects toilets. I worked as a janitor at a pool once. I was struck by the difference in cleaning men and women’s bathrooms+locker-rooms: the women’s bathroom was usually a low grade of appalling, with all sorts of garbage and hints of body fluids etc, but relatively consistent from day to day; the men’s bathroom, on the other hand, was usually pretty clean and easy to handle—except that every once a week or month, you would walk in and there would be something truly appalling like feces smeared all over a toilet. And then we would have to spend half an hour cleaning it up, bleaching it thoroughly (we used those same toilets, after all...), and mopping everything up.
My first thought was “How do you smear—Never mind, I’m actually happier not knowing that.”
That’s what industrial-grade misuse of caustic cleaning chemicals was invented for!
Far from unorthodox, I have the impression that your suggestion is pretty much the most mainstream idea among people who actually care about such things. In fact, my first reaction wasn’t “Let’s punish!” It was “Okay, there are probably not enough rubbish bins. Put more of those, stick up some posters to shift public opinion towards littering looking low-class, and make sure to clean the street to make sure no one wants to be the first person to litter there.”
That said, I can’t think of anything to link without tricky searches, so I guess a full explanation may be somewhat novel.
I felt the exact same.
Decreasing cognitive load in general makes people more rational. Joshua Greene cites that under a cognitive task, people are more likely to eat cake than an apple. There is less resource left for high-order cognitive tasks, like ‘avoid cake’.
Meaning that hurrying Koreans are dedicating less cognition to “to litter or not to litter” and if bins were around, they simply wouldn’t have to do that.
Australia seems to have cracked training people not to litter. When they removed bins from train stations in Sydney for the 2000 Olympics (so terrorists couldn’t threaten to put bombs in them), people were outraged, because they’d have nowhere to put rubbish. And multiple Australians I know have observed you can always tell the fresh Australian in the middle of London: they’re the ones carrying a piece of litter for miles, desperately looking for a proper bin to put it in.
(I note also the Australian anti-littering campaign is “Keep Australia Beautiful”, while the UK one is “Keep Britain Tidy.”)
So, yeah: give Korea lots of bins, public service advertisements suggesting it’s just not the proper thing to do, propagandise the children. Worked for us. Oh, compulsory deposit on all cans and bottles (minimum currency unit, 5 cents; now 10 cents) does spookily well in South Australia and Northern Territory and I’m surprised the other states never adopted it.
Generalising to other small vices, a combination of incentives and propaganda.
Same thing in the US back in the 70s. There was a public awareness campaign about littering. Once upon a time, the window of your car was the opening to a big trash bin—roll down the window, and throw shit out. The public campaign really worked and changed that attitude.
You have to change attitudes. There will never be enough bins if people just don’t care. The ground is always closer and easier to find than a bin.
EDIT: Shame on me. It wasn’t a government program at all. It was a non profit started by evil corporations in 1953, among them the Great Satan, Phillip Morris. The iconic ad campaign was started in the 70s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful
Notice the identical slogan to “Keep Australia Beautiful”. The Brits should have stuck with the franchise. “Keep Britain Tidy”. Sounds like grandma scolding the neighborhood kids.
“Don’t Mess With Texas” seems to have been pretty successful as anti-littering slogans go … maybe too successful, seeing as it is often not recognized as being about littering at all.
Well, within limits. I’ve worked volunteer cleanup for roadside parks...
Indeed. It was decades ago, but I’ll never forget that man I once saw dropping his plastic cup right on the ground, while he was leaning against a streetlamp that had a bin attached.
Having visited downtown Sydney for New Year’s Eve 2011, I’m sort of shocked to hear someone claim this. Sydney was definitely subpar compared to my home towns (Seattle, WA and Portland, OR, both in the USA), and I was shocked how few rubbish bins there were. It genuinely bothered me a few times to be in such a gorgeous city and see it marred by litter.
The problem did seem localized to downtown—I didn’t see much of any litter out in the suburbs. I was down there for a couple weeks (Christmas through to ~7th January), so it wasn’t just the New Year’s messes I saw (and that mess was still worse than I’d expect from a similar event in Seattle)
What’s the difference?
I suspect by “what works” the OP means what works in the short term for solving this particular problem. By “what’s right” one would also take into account long term effects of things like perverse incentives and related TDT/UDT-type issues.
This is correct. Thanks for explaining it more succinctly than I could.
You mean perverse incentives like: If you like to litter, just do it consistently ignoring all the costs, because sooner or later someone will propose the “give up” policy?
Do CDT or EDT not have ways of referencing perverse incentives or knock-on effects?
That depends on how you define things—but for most people, asking “What’s right?” leads to different ways of thinking than asking “What works?”. Don’t underestimate the effect that the wording of a question can have on people’s answers.
How does it make their thinking differ exactly? Why should we only ask “what works” with small vices?
In this case, asking “What is right?” entails thinking about long-term solutions—specifically, how to foster civic-mindedness; asking “What works?” allows you to be more pragmatic and focus on on solving the problem of maintaining clean streets without tackling the much bigger and trickier issue of teaching good manners.
For certain values of “right” and “work”, approximations (e.g. Newtonian physics when everything you’re talking about is much slower than light and much larger than an atom) are not “right” but they do “work”.
So, when dealing with big vices, we should use quantum physics or general relativity?
In this analogy (which IIRC has been made before, including by myself), “pure” consequentialism corresponds to whatever the correct unification of QFT and GR is (it is what’s ultimately right, but it’s unfeasible for humans to directly use it on a daily basis), whereas something consequentialism plus a bunch of quasi-deontological rules corresponds to Newtonian physics (it is not exactly right, but it does work for most practical purposes).
Consider Saudi Arabia which even today implements the Sharia policy of cutting off the hands of those who steal, especially those who steal during prayer times. I have heard anecdotal stories, that even jewelry shops in Dubai are left unlocked during prayer times. The fear of punishment is so high that no one dares steal.
Does this policy work? Yes. Is it right? Debatable. I would argue that asking people to lock their shops is a smaller cost to society than the cost of fear and of the possible loss of limbs from this procedure, and the benefit—being able to keep shops open—is small. Of course, there is another implicit benefit, that of being consistent with other Sharia values which I think outweighs all the other points here.
There are a lot of costs to disproportionate punishments.
There is the cost due to the inherent uncertainty in determining guilt. There is the cost to the power this gives to those who would lie, whether as citizens or as part of the state apparatus. There is the natural friction when segments of the society disagree on whether the action is criminal, or disagree on the severity of the penalty, which escalates grievance, retribution, vendetta, and the desire and need to control the state apparatus.
Disproportionate punishment escalates violence and the fight for domination.
So, for small vices it’s okay to have disproportionate retribution?
I don’t think that’s what the OP meant.
The costs you mentioned are also small. If the deterrent works few hands actually need to be cut off. Furthermore I would argue fear if being punished for theft (which presumably mostly applied to thieves) isn’t a significant cost to society. Furthermore, I think you’re underestimating the benefits of high implicit trust.
My reply is an answer to “Is there a difference between what’s right and what works?” I’m not trying to open the can of worms labelled “Are draconian deterrents justified?”, merely trying to show through example that what works may fall in moral grey areas. To briefly answer your comments--
The effectiveness of strong deterrents is questionable#Effectiveness). Considering the links mentioned above, some cases do spring up despite the deterrent, in this particular situation. Speculatively, someone who is unable to make enough money to feed his family otherwise may take this risk.
There are definitely reasons that the system continues to exist. The “trust” induced by harsh laws is one of them.
Relevant article: Right vs. Pragmatic
Thanks for sharing!
So, instead of seeing rubbish on the streets as a problem with the virtue of the people, see it as a problem with the cleanliness of the streets.
Is that a fair intermediate summary?
Why is it different for big vices?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
This is a bit like the “look before you leap”, “no, who hesitates is lost” game.
I don’t think it makes much sense to separate what works from what’s right in either case. If doing what works is important for the small stuff, why would it be any less important for the big stuff?
This small problem seems to me to be a symptom of a much larger problem that is not limited to Koreans. Placing small rubbish bins & encouraging people not to litter is great, but it seems to miss the bigger picture. Why are people rushed, inconsiderate, unfriendly, strictly abiding by irrational rules, & lazy? It isn’t an easy question to answer, but I think trying to resolve it will get much more mileage than putting a bandaid (plaster, for you Brits) over the minor scratch of little pieces of garbage on the ground.
You don’t address the biggest problem people have with tolerating this behaviour, which is presumably that people will develop more and more vices over time. More and more resources will be dedicated to accommodate these vices, when we should have simply not tolerated them in the first place.
This is not at all obvious. Is there any evidence for this hypothesis?
The broken windows theory might be relevant.
Edit: Just realised that someone else on this thread has already shared it.