Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Robert H. Frank, a professor of management and economics at Cornell University, thinks economists who dismiss the idea of a surge in electric vehicles are ignoring the phenomenon of “social contagion”.
How peer pressure can help stop climate change
Buying hybrids and solar panels persuades other people to buy them. That dynamic can help stop climate change.
By Robert Frank
FEBRUARY 20, 2020…
Economists are generally skeptical of self-sacrificing behavior because of what’s known as the free-rider problem. Since costly individual acts of self-restraint have only negligible environmental impact, economists predict that rational, self-interested individuals won’t take them. For instance, if someone buys a Toyota Prius hybrid — which costs several thousand dollars more than a comparable vehicle with an internal-combustion engine — and no one else does, there’s no discernible effect on overall emissions. She has spent the extra money for no reason. Alternatively, if everyone else buys a Prius but she doesn’t, she reaps the environmental benefits for free. Many solutions to environmental problems follow this logic and would therefore seem to require that we make decisions collectively, not individually.
Economists have other reasons for rejecting conscious consumption. Although the Prius emits about 50 percent less CO2 than similar non-hybrid cars, even greater reductions in CO2 could be achieved by buying a cheaper vehicle and using the savings to purchase carbon offsets — sponsoring carbon-absorbing reforestation, for instance. It may feel better to drive the Prius, but cold economic logic seems to favor offsets.
But these traditional arguments start to break down once you bring social contagion into the picture. That’s because the direct effect of owning a Prius is only a small part of its total impact.
Human nature is more complex than assumed in the simple models once favored by most economists. Our judgment about whether a house is adequate, for example, depends not only on its absolute features but also on how it compares with surrounding houses. We also value our reputations. It’s when we consider the effects of our behavior on our peers, and vice versa, that the consequences of individual decisions to reduce carbon use start to grow in importance. We know, for example, that decisions about car purchases are influenced by the actions of neighbors. In a 2008 study, economists from UCLA and Helsinki examined Finnish records of more than 210,000 vehicle purchases (new and used) from 1999 through 2001. They found that people were 12 percent more likely to purchase a car on a given day if one of their 10 nearest neighbors had purchased one during the preceding 10 days.
…
Keeping global warming at bay will indeed require a massive social movement — one that defeats climate obstructionists resoundingly at the polls — just as critics of conscious consumption have long insisted. But those critics fail to see how small, individual choices can set in motion the mighty revolution they envision.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/20/how-peer-pressure-can-help-save-planet/?arc404=true
Read the full article for the “infectious disease” quote.
The problem with Professor Frank’s theory is an unspoken assumption that climate action is actually possible, that renewables are a viable replacement for fossil fuel, that there is enough lithium and wealth to build everyone a Prius.
That social revolution Professor Frank talks about – climate activists won that a long time ago. With the exception of President Trump, pretty much every leading politician on Earth genuflects to climate activism. Billions of dollars, likely trillions, have been poured into renewables, carbon trading, every imaginable scheme to ween the world of fossil fuel.
And there is nothing substantial to show for any of it. After all that effort, all that treasure, renewable energy is still a bit player. Where renewable adoption is high, all renewables have managed to deliver is electrical network instability.
How can all this will to act and investment of wealth possibly not deliver more substantial results? The answer of course is the goal is unattainable.
When google engineers tried to find a viable path for the world to switch to renewables in 2014, they discovered to their horror that no viable path to a renewable future exists.
Google didn’t advocate giving up – the people who ran the study were committed greens. But they had no idea what the next step would be.
When committed Democrat Film Maker Michael Moore dived into the renewable rabbit hole, to expose the big oil conspiracy everyone said was holding back renewables, Moore discovered a network of lies and false promises, but not the big oil conspiracy he expected.
My suggestion Professor Frank, you have the economic skills, take your own trip down the rabbit hole. Go dig up the Google study and figure out where they went wrong. Because if you find a way to make renewables affordable, to make renewables an economically viable replacement for fossil fuel, in the current socio-political environment fossil fuel will vanish as soon as we figure out how to live without it.
“… we are losing the battle to stop climate change because we are following environmental leaders who have taken us down the wrong road—selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America …”
– Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans” film homepage
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From the quoted text in the box in the above article: “They found that people were 12 percent more likely to purchase a car on a given day if one of their 10 nearest neighbors had purchased one during the preceding 10 days.”
Assuming that is true, it has actually has very little relevance to the thrust of the above article, which is that social pressure (“keeping up with the Jones”, virtue signaling, saving the world, etc.) will cause “contagion” in the desire for everyone to buy EVs (as opposed to ICEs). What is missing in the Finnish study statistic is a statement that the car purchase was almost identical in type (e.g., new, used, compact, standard, van, truck, SUV, economy, luxury, 2WD, 4WD, etc.) compared that purchased by one of the buyer’s 10 nearest neighbors in the preceding 10 days.
It is ridiculous to say that (a) the increase in probability of one person buying a “vehicle” increases in relationship to the time that passed since a neighbor has bought a “vehicle” somehow translates to (b) the new buyer wanting the same type of “vehicle” as the one the neighbor just bought.
Moreover, there is no reference as to how the Finnish study normalized for independent variables such as:
— were there local sales that would have compressed vehicle sales over a relatively short period (say 3 months out of every 12 months?
— was the data skewed by good weather versus bad weather affecting sales volumes across the population studied?
— how were buying patterns affected by local advertising and/or limited-time buyer incentives for purchases?
Carl Sagan must be turning over in his grave in response to this kind of gibberish coming out of Cornell University.
Remember however, the “Dunning–Kruger effect” also came out of Cornell after Carl’s passing.
There is a possibility that the syndrome may also apply to Professors speaking outside their own discipline.
“The fool doth think himself a wise man whilst the wise man knows himself to be a fool”
Old Will Shakespeare had it nailed.
Batteries were invented to start internal combustion engine’s. They are ok for flashlights & sex toys.
And just because some moron down the street buys one doesn’t make me want one. I don’t keep up with the joneses.
I’ll keep my 55 Chevy thank you.
CNG powered cars are the near future if the shale gas-fracking revolution and its cheap nat gas continues here in the lower 48.
Except the East and Left Coasts where the idiot Communists live. They want EV’s and pay for it with high priced electricity to charge them since they won’t have the pipeline infrastructure to bring in the nat gas.
I don’t know about modern ICEs, but a few decades ago when gasoline supplies were restricted, there were a few garages that specialized in replacing carburetors with something that would run your current auto on propane or nat. gas.
That conversion seems a whole lot easier than scrapping your present vehicle and investing in a battery transporter that also accommodates passengers. 😉
The ability to describe the future is impossible. Those who have tried to lay claim to such futuristic wisdom are all shown up to be charlatans. As the speed of change increases with technical advance the ability to define the future becomes ever more difficult. It is akin to thinking you are able to define the weather on a day ten years in the future by studying the clouds passing overhead today. A pointless fruitless activity.
Just one disruptive technology advance will alter the entire future picture.
In the energy sector, this could be as basic as a small practical fuel cell being put on the market. At a stroke it would render all battery vehicles obsolete. Consider the current work of small clean nuclear power plants, if successful it would remove the over hyped concern about nuclear risks, that has developed in the minds of the frail members of society. If that technology progresses, the whole picture of energy availability changes. We don’t have to wait another fifty years for fusion to be brought to market. Things are already developing.
The future is uncertain, but one thing is very certain, it will not be as we see the world today.
Well said. I heartily concur!
Exactly Rod!
I spent my career working for a company whose output was sold in little yellow boxes.
We also had one of the world’s largest research divisions with LOTS of very smart people.
If anyone predicted, just a few years prior to my retirement, that much of our product line would be replaced by a handheld telephone they would have generated quite a laugh in response.
Who can see the future? Those who create it.
I have a nine year old diesel RAV4. My neighbour has an eleven year old Peugeot. Opposite is a 15 year old Ford, and so it goes on down my street. My car : £6000. New diesel replacement: £32,000. New electric replacement £42,000 .
So let us gather up all the fairy dust and ground unicorn horn that we can find and all rush in to buy our new electric vehicles.
Clouds, cuckoos and flying pigs reign supreme.
Nicely put.
Porcine aerobatics are a routine phenomenon in the world of climate alarmists, sadly.
Many years ago, when hunting for our first house, we drove through neighbourhoods looking at the cars. We bought in a ‘used Volvo’ district, and found it very congenial for us and the kids.
That made me smile. Our car is a 2006 diesel Volvo V70…won’t be changing it voluntarily.
This guys is a foolish academic living far from reality in his little wealthy western bubble. He is ill equipped to tell the rest of us how the real world works.
Professor is right: peer pressure can “encourage” a person to pay more for less. Forget the fiscal rationality of buying a car – we are really not rational in that respect.
Only I can not figure out how they can bring about the required peer pressure. They have already equipped green celebrities with e-cars, but even if I was one of those dummies who thinks “Gee, that famous actress or actor has the Tesla S, so I gotta have one too”, I could not act on this irrationality because I cannot afford it; and one would really have to be pretty dumb to think “Gee, that famous actress or actor has the Tesla S, so I gotta have a Renault Zoe!”
miso
“Only I can not figure out how they can bring about the required peer pressure.”
Greens are putting political pressure on governments to buy BEVs for their fleets. Big players on Wall Street are encouraging their colleagues to invest sustainably. (E.g., see BlackRock’s latest annual letter, and its ripple effects, such as on Tesla’s stock price.)
You can “encourage” buying of EV’s by dropping the price about 15 thousand bucks. At that price point a few people ~might~ be persuaded to put up with restricted range, long charge times, etc. and that’s only if they live in a place where they can charge in their garage, and cold weather doesn’t knock out the charge.
Right now they are a fad market for sanctimonious, virtue-signaling twits, subsidized by your taxes.
Robert H. Frank.
Another name to add to my ever growing list of idiots in academia that are not worth reading or listening to.
Professor Frank is probably right about this spreading like an infectious disease. I noticed that the % of new car registrations in the UK for pure electric has gone up year on year. 2019 claimed about 70,000 new registrations, and that was before the government started banging on about banning ICE cars. I am sure that 2020 will see an even bigger increase.
The only thing the professor forgot to include in his analysis, is the outcome known as buyer regret. I expect this to develop when the numbers of new PEVs pass a certain threshold, and there are too many people for too few public charging points, which are more costly than gasoline anyway.
As a footnote, the biggest tactical error the UK government has made is to ban hybrids as well. If people went over to hybrids, there would at least be an option if they can’t charge. As the government keep telling people, most journeys are short journeys, so there’s no reason why you can’t charge at home (assuming you don’t live in apartments or non driveway houses). If that is the case, then most journeys using hybrids would be electric. So, what they are proposing is utterly insane, and I predict, will lead to such a backlash that it will likely bring the government down.
Like all contagious diseases, most people will recover.
My neighbour who used to drive electric has just bought a new gasoline powered car.
Because of the limitations in power and range.
“… Buying hybrids and solar panels persuades other people to buy them. That dynamic can help stop climate change…”
It’s a fallacious and thoroughly unscientific statement, more like wishful thinking, because, in the first place, even if we all switched to EVs and solar cells overnight, this would have no effect whatsoever on the purported “climate change,” as every real scientists & engineer who ever looked into it knows well enough. But another fallacy is that people would follow the shining example of the illuminati amongst us. Most of us simply don’t have money enough to waste on this fanfaronade. When we spend money on a car, a lot nowadays, we expect it to serve multiple purposes including ability to drive us and our families from one side of the country to another, without having to waste hours and hours on recharging, and without its range shrinking by 50% in cold weather! When we reroof our homes, which is an expensive business too, we choose what’s cheapest and what will serve its purpose for another 20 years or about without trouble, leaks, costly maintenance, added loading and fire risk. I don’t know any people personally who want to buy an EV and who want to install photovoltaics on their roofs. Even though some in town have done both, it doesn’t seem to be spreading. Merely, it’s yet another extravagance of rich people. Though, the richest man in town continues to drive a Rolls Royce and there are no solar panels on his estate.
Well, pet rocks were a thing.
no matter how wrong the intent, the truth is humans are prone to herd mentality.
If buying hybrids and solar panels was an infectious disease-like consumer contagion then it appears most of the rational population were immunized long ago. In fact thinking people are generally immunized to a significant extent against making spending decisions which conflict with their own self interest. Sometimes it takes a little while to connect the dots and decide which decisions are beneficial and which are harmful but eventually the decision is an easy one. For pure electric vehicles it is only the artificial financial incentive of subsidies that got a lot of e on the wrong track initially. Reliability, battery durability, maintenance costs and the odd running into a brick wall feature will certainly cause many of those who fell for the up front money to rethink.
Where I live there’s not much keeping up with the Joneses pressure. Most of my middle class mates run their ICE cars into c. 80k miles and part exchange for new. Family up the road has a ‘hard-working’ life with a camper van and four modest saloon ICE’ s for their businesses. To think of them converting to electric has me rolling about on the ground, hooting , gasping, hurting myself with laughter.
So why hasn’t new car market share exceeded 3.2% in the US (at least through 2017…but the totals from 2018 and 2019 were below 2012, 2013, and 2014 levels, so it would seem the peak was 3.2% in 2013)?
The Prius took off like hotcakes. It has faded as other competitors have emerged.
In the UK the morons in charge are rolling out something called ‘smart motorways’ where you do something stupid like remove the hard shoulder and replace it with a few laybys. It has just come to the morons attention that battery cars don’t coast when they fail and can’t be towed either so they will cause problems. Mind you, as lots of people have been killed on ‘smart motorways’ they are on hold at the moment.
Providing charging points for battery cars is causing problems in London due to a lack of money. Recognising that people will want fast chargers but they cost £0.5m each to install and there is not the money.
Next month there will be the first zero emission street introduced in London or in other words a 90% plus road closure. This has been a project for over 2 years and will have cost nearly £2.5m once it is done – well assuming that there don’t have to be lots of emergency changes once it starts.
And for 2020, the Isle of Man TT will not have the TT Zero for battery bikes. The reason is falling entries such that less than 10 bikes whirr off for the one lap that they can manage at racing speed as opposed to the 4 to 6 laps the real bikes do which includes fuel stops. Can’t think why they haven’t included recharge stops – oh, yes maybe I can.
What happens when everyone wants to buy an offset? You can’t plant that many trees without cutting down all the existing ones.
Viruses are good for the planet:
https://www.iceagenow.info/coronavirus-has-reduced-chinas-co2-emissions-by-25-percent/
This electric car doggsdickery is leading to a gigantic global fiasco.
Without Government intervention, there’ll be no “infection” and life will be good.
EV ownership can’t expand faster than the electric grid can. Adding additional generation sources and transmission lines is a long process fraught will legal challenges from the very people that insist we must all drive EVs! As a practical matter, this will limit EV penetration more than all other factors combined.
It can if you install small generators in every garage.
Or just hook up your Telsa to the alternator of your SUV (what is the max rating of the typical one?)