I can’t disagree that policy (aka threat of violence for non-conformers) changes things faster than reasoned thought.
I _DO_ disagree that it improves the world more than reason does. Recycling is a great example—the status quo had massive subsidies for undifferentiated garbage collection, so consumers could not see how much savings, if any, there would be from separating their recyclables. Moral suasion that directly contradicts daily experience (in paying my garbage bill) is going to have very low effect. So we passed laws, causing people to go to significant effort and _STILL_ see no benefit. Now we have a common pattern of separating and rinsing our recyclables, and a bad feeling that it all goes to the same place, and no evidence of actual savings or reuse.
So we’ve spent a bunch of energy in changing laws and in wearying consumers on the topic, but have not achieved the effects we might have if we’d just been transparent about the costs we are concerned about (by charging sufficiently for landfill and charging less for clean recyclables).
I didn’t make the second claim, that [policy] improves the world more than reason does. In fact, I don’t think I discussed reason—I discussed moral suasion.
But for recycling, you’re making a theoretical libertairan argument about the impact of imposed costs versus regulation. I’m generally sympathetic to using costs rather than regulation, but I’m pragmatic. As a factual point, this has been studied in various contexts, and sometimes imposing costs is more effective than regulation, and other times it is less so. For recycling, imposing small costs on consumers, such as bottle deposits and fees for trash collection, seems to have changed almost no behaviors, while fines for not separating recycling have, in my view, been incredibly potent. If there is research showing the reverse, I’d love to see it, and if other people have a different perception, I’d be happy to hear that as well.
When it comes to recycling, I understand the argument of why throwing batteries into the regular trash is bad.
On the other hand nobody made a convincing case to me that there’s a high utility in other standard recycling behavior.
A large portion of the “recycled” garbage simply went for many years to China till China didn’t want our trash anymore. Another portion gets recycled by burning much more energy than it would take to produce the products from scratch (and energy means more burned coal).
I think you’re reading some heavily motivated sources. See my reply above. There are significant environmental gains from recycling aluminum and cardboard, and some gains from glass, paper and some plastics.
And China does do a lot of recycling for US plastics—they weren’t throwing it all away. Some of it was low quality and discarded, but at the very least numbers 1 and 2 (PETE, i.e. water bottles, and HDPE, like milk jugs,) are valuable. (But yes, 3-7 are too expensive to recycle, and get discarded with the garbage—feel free not to recycle them.)
I can’t disagree that policy (aka threat of violence for non-conformers) changes things faster than reasoned thought.
I _DO_ disagree that it improves the world more than reason does. Recycling is a great example—the status quo had massive subsidies for undifferentiated garbage collection, so consumers could not see how much savings, if any, there would be from separating their recyclables. Moral suasion that directly contradicts daily experience (in paying my garbage bill) is going to have very low effect. So we passed laws, causing people to go to significant effort and _STILL_ see no benefit. Now we have a common pattern of separating and rinsing our recyclables, and a bad feeling that it all goes to the same place, and no evidence of actual savings or reuse.
So we’ve spent a bunch of energy in changing laws and in wearying consumers on the topic, but have not achieved the effects we might have if we’d just been transparent about the costs we are concerned about (by charging sufficiently for landfill and charging less for clean recyclables).
I didn’t make the second claim, that [policy] improves the world more than reason does. In fact, I don’t think I discussed reason—I discussed moral suasion.
But for recycling, you’re making a theoretical libertairan argument about the impact of imposed costs versus regulation. I’m generally sympathetic to using costs rather than regulation, but I’m pragmatic. As a factual point, this has been studied in various contexts, and sometimes imposing costs is more effective than regulation, and other times it is less so. For recycling, imposing small costs on consumers, such as bottle deposits and fees for trash collection, seems to have changed almost no behaviors, while fines for not separating recycling have, in my view, been incredibly potent. If there is research showing the reverse, I’d love to see it, and if other people have a different perception, I’d be happy to hear that as well.
When it comes to recycling, I understand the argument of why throwing batteries into the regular trash is bad.
On the other hand nobody made a convincing case to me that there’s a high utility in other standard recycling behavior.
A large portion of the “recycled” garbage simply went for many years to China till China didn’t want our trash anymore. Another portion gets recycled by burning much more energy than it would take to produce the products from scratch (and energy means more burned coal).
I think you’re reading some heavily motivated sources. See my reply above. There are significant environmental gains from recycling aluminum and cardboard, and some gains from glass, paper and some plastics.
And China does do a lot of recycling for US plastics—they weren’t throwing it all away. Some of it was low quality and discarded, but at the very least numbers 1 and 2 (PETE, i.e. water bottles, and HDPE, like milk jugs,) are valuable. (But yes, 3-7 are too expensive to recycle, and get discarded with the garbage—feel free not to recycle them.)