Solving Societal Problems #

Here I’m defining a “societal problem” as a large problem facing many people that could be solved if said people changed their behavior in some systematic way. For example:

Climate Change could be solved if we all transitioned to using more renewable sources of energy.
The Obesity Epidemic could be solved if we all ate less food.

Individual Change and Shaming #

One common proposal I’ve heard for solving at least the above problems is using a “grassroots” approach. This method would involve first changing your own behavior such that the problem would be solved if everyone behaved like you, then trying to influence others to adopt your new behavior(s). This seems simple enough, but I don’t think it’s the best way forward, and in some ways is actively harmful.

The tacit assumption with this proposal is that people are able to choose what behaviors to adopt. I would argue that in fact our behaviors are much more influenced by our environment than we would like to admit. One component of our environment is indeed other people peer pressuring us, but (IMO) far more dominant factors include:

Economics (how much the behavior change costs)
“At hand”-ness (what other behaviors are “at hand” and easy to do)

When these factors are overpowering (which I argue they usually are), peer pressure becomes a form of bullying and social rejection that the target of which is powerless to stop. Perpetuating this is downright cruel.

Changing the Environment #

If a grassroots behavior change movement isn’t the best way to solve the problem, then what can we do instead? In my opinion, the answer is environmental change. This can take several forms:

1. Local Environmental Change #

This involves making changes to an individual’s local environment (the spaces they interact with on a habitual basis) to guide them to certain behaviors. Some examples would be intentionally not buying unhealthy food when at the grocery store so that when at home these foods are not “at hand”. Or not buying a car so that you instead need to bike or bus to get around.

Note that the line here can be pretty blurry between what is an actual behavior change and what is simply an action that changes one’s environment. Because of this, I think the stronger, ultimate solution is:

2. Policy-Level Environmental Change #

Government policies can create massive environmental changes. For example, extra taxes on certain products can massively impact people’s buying decisions. Or bans of certain products can completely change the suite of chemicals that individuals are exposed to on a daily basis.

A natural objection is to point out that in a democracy, the majority of people (in theory) choose what policies are enacted. Because of this, wouldn’t people just vote for policies that help them perpetuate their current behavior set - which they presumably “chose” and/or otherwise would like to keep?

I argue that actually people are quite able to vote in a way counter to their everyday actions. For instance, people who enjoy soda may vote for a sugar-sweetened beverage tax. The reason why (I think) this is because the mental state you adopt when voting is generally different that the mental state when deciding - or not consciously deciding at all - to engage in a particular behavior.

This is especially true when voting on higher level, more abstract policies. For instance, banning a certain type of energy production might indirectly increase someone’s cost of living by quite a bit in various ways, but thinking about the policy in a more abstract sense may lead someone to approve it despite this personal impact.

Based on my own emotions, I also think that people by and large care deeply about how their lives compare to those of others around them. A tax that greatly increases everyone’s cost of living is much more bearable than one that targets just an individual person. It’s much rarer for people to worry about their absolute standing than how they compare to others - the fact that the majority of people today live like the elites of a couple centuries ago is not a great source of comfort and satisfaction generally speaking.

This, like many solutions to big problems, does depend on an educated populace that is able to reason about the effects of certain policies. Ensuring this condition is itself a large scale societal problem that hopefully can be solved with this same line of thinking. I do admit there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here :/.

Nudging #

The book Nudge explores one philosophy with which good policies can be crafted without impinging too much on individual liberty.

Externality-based Policies #

Many societal problems are due to hard-to-track externalities of existing behaviors that are not “priced in” to the cost of the behavior. For instance, companies that make unhealthy food do not pay for the healthcare costs their products incur. Or single-use plastic producers do not pay for waste cleanup efforts. Or petroleum refiners do not pay for CO2 emissions. If these externalities were priced in, then the consumer would have a much easier time making buying decisions, as the real cost of their consumption would be obvious to them.

Currently, it’s hard to know the real cost of a given behavior, which is further confused by emotional arguments on either side. For example, if you want to know if you should use plastic straws or not, the low price of them might make you think they are an efficient way to solve your problem. But others would argue that [some large number] of straws are used every second! Unfortunately, that doesn’t really tell you very much. If instead it cost a dollar to clean up every discarded straw, and that was priced into the straws cost since the producing company had to clean up the straws, then you as the consumer could make a more informed decision about whether that dollar is worth it.

Of course, tracking all these externalities is hard. But this seems like a useful framework, or at least more useful that trying to get consumers to all individually understand the externalities of their actions.

Probably someone else somewhere has done a much better job exploring this topic.

3. Technological Environmental Change #

New technologies dramatically change the environment people live in. Interestingly, they usually do this without requiring the bureaucracy required to enact government policies. Therefore, the development of new technologies to solve societal problems, like geoengineering techniques for climate change, has a lot of potential. And some problems can only be solved with new technologies (like preventing aging).

4. Cultural Environmental Change #

Shifting cultural norms also can lead to massive change in individual behavior. I don’t really know the best way this can be leveraged without the “grassroots” problem I mentioned above, but I thought it would be worth mentioning.

Personal Impact #

Given this theory, if someone feels strongly that certain problems need to be solves, what should they do?

Influencing government policy is a lot of work and is, I would argue, a task that requires specialized skills. This means that someone who invests more time in building these skills will hone them, and have more leverage when applying them. Therefore, an effective path to personally solving societal problems is to invest a lot of time and energy in honing and applying these skills. Note that I’m not talking about lobbying here, but rather actually writing laws and doing the research that motivates their creation and design. This kind of environment building can also be done outside of formal government in private organizations that fill some roles that a government might otherwise fill.

Our hypothetical person could also get deep into creating a technology that solves the problem they care about. This arguably takes even more time/energy investment to see significant returns.

For those who do not want to, or cannot, invest time/energy in influencing policy or developing new technologies, one fallback option is to instead hone another set of skills, apply them to make money, and then fund policymakers/inventors with the proceeds. This will probably have a bigger impact than dabbling in invention/policymaking, and certainly will have a bigger impact than just changing your own behavior.

Regardless, being a creative optimist (as opposed to a destructive pessimist) is important.

Hypocrisy #

If you assume that “grassroots” individual change has little to no impact on societal problems, then a lot of seemly hypocritical behavior is explained and even excused. For instance, it is very reasonable to believe strongly that society would be better if everyone was vegan, while eating the readily available non-vegan foods provided by society. It even makes some sense that someone super passionate about some political issue - to the point where they organize protests or voting campaigns - may not vote for the issue themselves! In my opinion, these behaviors are more a demonstration of how these hypothetical people think they can manifest change as opposed to what they truly believe.

Testing this Theory #

Right now this line of thinking is just a plausible (at least to me) idea. I would love to see some evidence for this, but don’t have any at hand right now to cite. So (as always) I might be totally wrong :).

Categories: Society

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