From the “just wait until they hear about Al Gore’s 24 hour demand for a carbon tax” department comes this story from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology
People don’t put a high value on climate protection
Without further incentives selfish behaviour will continue to dominate
People are bad at getting a grip on collective risks. Climate change is a good example of this: the annual climate summits have so far not led to specific measures. The reason for this is that people attach greater value to an immediate material reward than to investing in future quality of life. Therefore, cooperative behaviour in climate protection must be more strongly associated with short-term incentives such as rewards or being held in high esteem.
Would you rather have €40 (about $55 USD) or save the climate?
When the question is put in such stark terms, the common sense answer is obviously: “stop climate change!” After all, we are well-informed individuals who act for the common good and, more particularly, for the good of future generations. Or at least that’s how we like to think of ourselves.
Unfortunately, the reality is rather different. Immediate rewards make our brains rejoice and when such a reward beckons we’re happy to behave cooperatively. But if achieving a common goal won’t be rewarded until a few weeks have gone by, we are rather less euphoric and less cooperative. And if, instead of money, we’re offered the prospect of a benefit for future generations, our enthusiasm for fair play wanes still further.
An international team of researchers led by Manfred Milinski from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology has shown how poorly we manage collective risk. “Our experiment is based on an essay which Thomas Schelling, the Nobel laureate in economics, wrote back in 1995”, explains Milinski. Schelling pointed out that it was today’s generation which would have to make the efforts for climate protection, while it would be future generations who would gain the benefits. So the people of the present have little motivation actually to do anything. Does this gloomy theory withstand experimental scrutiny?
To find out, the researchers had to convert this problem into a simple experimental situation. They had the participants play a modified public goods game. Such games are very common in behavioural economics and always follow the same pattern. The participants receive a certain amount of money and are invited to donate a proportion of it over a number of rounds. The donated money is doubled and this amount is divided equally between the players. Anything which was not donated goes directly in the player’s pocket. The most profitable behaviour in such games is to donate nothing at all and simply benefit from the altruism of the other players.
The researchers modified the rules to incorporate averting impending climate change into the game. Each player received a starting fund of €40 and, playing over ten rounds, was able to decide how much of it to keep or donate. The donated money was invested in a climate change advertising campaign and was thus a simulated investment in climate protection. There were also bonus payments: those groups which donated more than half of their total fund were symbolically able to avoid dangerous climate change and were paid an additional €45 per participant. If the group donated less, all the players had a 90% probability of losing their endowment.
Three scenarios were devised to model the fact that the benefits of saving the climate are only felt in the future. Players from successful groups were paid their endowment either on the day after the experiment (scenario 1) or seven weeks later (scenario 2). In scenario 3, the endowment was not paid out to the players at all, but was instead invested in planting oak trees and thereby in climate protection. Over their lifetime, the trees will absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and their wood will be a valuable building material for future generations.
However, not one of the eleven groups which was offered the prospect of planting oak trees achieved the donation target. On average, just €57 were paid into the climate account instead the objective of €120. That’s less than half of the target amount. In the first scenario, seven out of ten groups were successful, the participants donating on average €108, while the players in the second scenario still donated €83 (four out of ten groups were successful). “The result of our experiment paints a gloomy picture of the future”, summarises Milinski. “We were unfortunately able to confirm Schelling’s prediction – it’s a disaster.”
Climate change is the largest public goods game that has ever been played and the whole of humanity are its players. The problem is that while we are now making the payments, the fruits of our efforts will only be enjoyed very much later and they will be shared among the whole of humanity. We ourselves or our children will thus benefit only very slightly from any restrictions we place on our lives today and our motivation actually to do something is correspondingly low.
These results make it clear that if people are to invest in climate protection, they must have short-term incentives to do so. “It’s not enough simply to point to the benefits future generations will enjoy”, says Jochem Marotzke from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the authors of the study. “Climate protection will only be effective if the people making the effort will also be able to obtain a short-term material benefit from doing so, for instance by exporting climate-friendly technology.”
Related articles
- No ‘instant gratification’ in climate makes for a poor motivator (wattsupwiththat.com)
Each player received a starting fund of €40 and, playing over ten rounds, was able to decide how much of it to keep or donate.
Did they inform the players that the “free money” was taken from the players and only after the government cut, given back to themselves?
Would you rather have €40 (about $55 USD) or save the climate?>/b>
Save it from what????
Dinner for 2 accomplishes something. It feeds hungry people. €40 towards a myth only enriches those not hungry.
So many things wrong here but craziest of all is that one of the outcomes doesn’t even do what they think it does.
The microsite where the oak tree was to planted was not a void! SOMETHING was growing there absorbing Co2. Grass uses more C02 than trees if I’m not mistaken. The idea that nature is +1 by planting anything shows just what one-dimensional thinkers these people are. They only look at one side of the balance sheet. (Unless you actually create new productive land somehow.)
A similar type of thinking imagines that government can “create a job” They only look at one side of the balance sheet and ignore what the money could have done before the state took it. Such a similar deficiency in thinking. I wish before these people preached at me they would get out of the city and spend some time in the bush and learn something about how the world works.
Obama campaigned telling us that “we” were irresponsible with our savings, credit cards, mortages, spending, etc….
…this is just another spinoff on that
..and a handbook on how to trick us again
Would you rather have €40 (about $55 USD) or save the climate?
The writers conclude that people are bad at getting a grip on collective risks.
False. What the people heard was:
Would you rather have €40 (about $55 USD) or give it to a fraudster?
The correct conclusion is… people are good at smelling a rat!
DD More beat me to it:
“Would you rather have €40 (about $55 USD) or save the climate?”
Save the climate from what?
I’ll take the $55 and enjoy it. I feel reasonably certain we will have climate when I wake up tomorrow.
Probably will continue to have climate next week, months from now, and maybe even years. Heck, there is a higher probability of an AEE (Anthropogenic Extinction Event) over the next few centuries than there is that we will no longer have climate. Although, in the event of an AEE, no one will much care about the climate.
Probably.
I have news for them: not only is “saving the climate” not worth the price of dinner for two, but it is a big net negative. It actually hurts people, especially those who can least afford to be hurt.
The dinner for two on the other hand, except, perhaps for the la-la land these climate “researchers” must live in can only be considered a good thing, both for the diners and for the economy.
DD More says:
October 23, 2013 at 11:47 am
Save it from being exploited by the likes of Al Gore.
Save it from the inane science-activism of Michael Mann and his ilk.
Save it from wind turbine farms that destroy the esthetics of the land and contribute precious little electricity.
Save it from shutting down coal-fired power plants and threatening the renaissance in atmospheric CO2.
Save it from biofuels that are starving many poor people worldwide.
Keep your money and make the world a far better place.
A nonsense study. As others have noted above the authors assume that everyone spending a few Euros will “save the planet” somehow. And on the topic of dinner and selfishness, Adam Smith said:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.”
The Wealth Of Nations, Book I, Chapter II, pp. 26-7, para 12.
Janice Moore: “1. Acting in one’s self interest is not, per se, “selfish.” “Selfish” is when one serves one’s own interests to the significant detriment of another’s.”
At how many Kevin Bacon’s of externalities? At zero Kevin Bacon’s theft cannot be guaranteed to be a detriment to another; unless you’re currently making off with one of their kidney’s. Without limitation to Kevin Bacon’s then running off with a garden gnome someone despised could effect the market for garden gnomes. And as this changes expressed preferences in the market, will effect both the interstate market and the global market. And as this incurs societal costs in dealing with the (thankful) absconding of garden gnomes then there will be less international funding available to educate the planet. And so we will all die, you greedy bastard. And that’s just 4 or 5 hops in the chain, depending how you want to count it.
If you take a zero-externality model with a standpoint of “Not yours, don’t touch” then you’re still dealing with the idea that the Earth isn’t yours either. So you’re a bad monkey, Curious George, since you ate the banana you were given as food.
Self interest *is* selfish in every case. The point is, people crying about selfishness are doing so out of their own self interest also. So why you should care, and if you should care, is your problem. Not theirs. Unless they’re politically connected.
What’s driving them barking mad is that no matter how much starter fluid they spray up the nose of their ‘moral equivalent of war’ thingy, it won’t fire up. People will make great sacrifices to fight wars, but they won’t be herded into secular jihad. Shrincologists are baffled.
JohnWho: “Save the climate from what?”
Dinner, apparently.
RockyRoad says:
October 23, 2013 at 12:35 pm
DD More says:
October 23, 2013 at 11:47 am
Would you rather have €40 (about $55 USD) or save the climate?
Save it from what????
Save it from being exploited by the likes of Al Gore.
Save it from the inane science-activism of Michael Mann and his ilk.
Save it from wind turbine farms that destroy the esthetics of the land and contribute precious little electricity.
Save it from shutting down coal-fired power plants and threatening the renaissance in atmospheric CO2.
Save it from biofuels that are starving many poor people worldwide.
Oh, in that case – where do I send my $55?
This represents my greatest objection to Climate Science and is the root of my participation in A Watt’s blog.
Climate Science undermines real science.
Science itself as an analysis tool is being threatened by cartoon super hero sci-fi abuse of the mechanism of the scientific method.
What they left out of their game was the real situation, where donated money has an insignificant effect on climate change, due to the committed non-donation of major players like China and India. If China decides to engage in expensive pollution controls, it will start first with the particulates that are creating killer smogs in its cities. After they’ve spent a trillion and ten years on that, then maybe it’ll think about CO2 reductions–but only for a minute or two. India and China would face massive pubic displeasure if they attempted to impose energy austerity on their populations. Here’s what P.J. O’Rourke wrote in “Don’t Vote” (copied from a recent poster here):
I find this study to be fully valid and with merit, because everyone plays Monopoly identically to how they manage their investment portfolio
It’s not 40 Euros once off. We could handle that. It’s 40 Euros a day for the rest of your life.
If they want to stop the climate from from changing they’d be better off buying $55 dollars worth of old Star Trek episodes and try to make one of those weather control machines that many United Federation of Planets seems to have had.
“Therefore, cooperative behaviour in climate protection must be more strongly associated with short-term incentives such as rewards or being held in high esteem.”
=============
And when would the punishments for not complying begin ?
Once we start down this slope.
Paul Westhaver: “Science itself as an analysis tool is being threatened by cartoon super hero sci-fi abuse of the mechanism of the scientific method.”
Depends how you define Science. There’s the ‘method’ that is a somewhat stylized description of the absolutely basic day-to-day process with which we approach the world. There is the ‘paper’ that is, traditionally, just a logical proof with a missing step; filled in with: Here’s how you construct the experiment and complete the proof. And then there’s ‘theory,’ which is the same as any other Philosophical notion; only distinction being that Scientific theories are philosophical theories discussed by science professionals.
And then there’s ‘studies.’ Which are logical fallacies. They either do not contain instructions on how to complete the proof. Or the proof fails for other reasons that are completely normal absences of reason. These are most commonly known as: ‘Peer-reviewed papers.’
But like or lump, the practice of Scientists is to produce peer-reviewed papers. That’s how they put food on the table.
Would you rather have $55 USD or save the climate?
Well clearly the only logical choice is to have $55 USD now, since we can not ever “save” the climate, and indeed it does not need “saving”.
Who are these buffoons?
Agent K from Men In Black:
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.
Study: People are bad at getting a grip on collective risks.
The only thing governments are good at are getting a grip on people.
People collectively know that danger.
Mike Smith at 12:19 pm nails it when he points out that
A person can be fooled, but people are good at smelling a rat.
“You can fool all the people some of the time,
and some of the people all the time,
but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” – Abraham Lincoln
Such is the story of CAGW.
= = = = = = = = =
That is the old ‘lifeboat ethics’ meme trotted out to create the idea that it represents the whole moral context and economic context. It does not even apply to the comprehensive context.
Here is their ‘lifeboat ethics’ meme but condensed down {my words – JW},
Lifeboat ethics is a morality fable used as a tool to create fear and guilt; it is the intellectual level of the boy who cried wolf. Max Planck is dishonored by the institute that bears his name.
*** d) or do we call bull$hit to the whole premise behind the false lifeboat ethics ‘dilemma’ which is the false ‘a priori’ premise that burning fossil fuels must be a fundamental net harm to the Earth System of which humans are an integral part.
I suggest we do option d) above.
John
“Would you rather have €40 (about $55 USD) or save the climate?”
My answer would be “from what?”
John Whitman: “Lifeboat ethics is a morality fable used as a tool to create fear and guilt; it is the intellectual level of the boy who cried wolf. ”
Hrm, not much a fan of the paper itself, but the basic diagnosis of the difference between a ‘spaceship ethic’ and a ‘lifeboat ethic’ is not in any way wrong:
“Without a true world government to control reproduction and the use of available resources, the sharing ethic of the spaceship is impossible. For the foreseeable future, our survival demands that we govern our actions by the ethics of a lifeboat, harsh though they may be. Posterity will be satisfied with nothing less.” — Conclusion from Hardin’s paper.
Hardin’s paper begins with notion that Environmentalists are loons for approaching things in the Spaceship model. Or, exactly what activists are doing with regard to the banning of plant food. To wit:
“A true spaceship would have to be under the control of a captain, since no ship could possibly survive if its course were determined by committee. Spaceship Earth certainly has no captain; the United Nations is merely a toothless tiger, with little power to enforce any policy upon its bickering members.”
Putting aside the topic Hardin chose, or his preferences in outcomes or what counts as a human ‘need,’ his conclusion is that robustness, contingency planning, and heartlessly telling others to piss off about those notions, is the best we can do. Where ‘we’ represents each nation on Earth, the each of which being a lifeboat.
The rather plain statement of the Lifeboat ethic is: “Suck it, we have to look for ourselves first.”
But the Climatatrsophy crowd wants to directly harm the people of the lifeboat that the Climastrologist is currently on. Which is not only loopy, and counterproductive, it justifies by the lifeboat ethic that we should kick them off the boat for harming our survival.
As a point of starship ethics, or reducing the number of lifeboats to just one spaceship, then the onus is on the Climatrastrophy crowd to answer as to how they will succeed at this task. Since the UN is just a central ambassadorial complex for high-brow folks to jaw-jaw at, it is meaningless unless you are willing to head off killing people and breaking things.
So which nations are we going to nuke if they commit the sin of coal?
If the answer is none, then kick the crunchy granola people off the lifeboat.