Want Real Progress? Try Waiting a Little.
Taking a cue from Alan, I just finished this article on behavioral economics -- a growing field that explores how, and why, flesh-and-blood humans don't behave like the "rational" profit-maximizers that underpin most economic models.
Some examples: real people fear losses more than we value gains, even though a "rational" economic actor would weigh them equally; humans punish bad behavior, even if it hurts our interests to do so; and we worry more about harms caused by people than harms caused by "nature" or chance (e.g., we fear terrorism more than car crashes, and murders more than heart disease).
And here's something else: real human beings radically discount the importance of future events. Pleasure a year from now is little incentive, compared with pleasure right now; and the prospect of discomfort a year from now doesn't seem particularly daunting. That's why, when we're faced with something that's good in the short term (for example, yummy yummy donuts), but bad in the long term (say, weight gain), the short-term view tends to win, hands down.
Ok, this is not exactly a new insight about human nature: a bird in hand has always been worth two in the bush. And economists have long used "discount rates" to downgrade the value of future events, based on how far they are from the present.
But what seemed genuinely new to me is this: studies of brain function have shed a bit of light into what's actually going on when we discount the future.
Not-So-Charismatic Megafauna
Here's the deal: there's a 3 foot long pink earthworm living in the Palouse region of Idaho and Washington and nowhere else on the planet. It can burrow 15 feet underground and it was re-discovered last year after scientists believed it had gone extinct. Also, it smells like a lily.
At the risk of sounding unserious: awesome!
Anyway, a small group of local conservation groups is petitioning to get the worm listed as a federal endangered species. Listing would probably create some incentive for habitat protection in an area where the native ecosystem, a rich 2 million-acre grassland, is nearly vanished.
So the endangered species petition is about more than just the earthworm; it's also about the wider ecosytem. That sort of tactic--finding what biologists sometimes call "charismatic megafauna" to use as a poster child for broader conservation--has worked with grizzly bears, wolves, and sea otters.
But can it work for an earthworm, even a giant one? And anyway, why should we care more about friendly-looking creatures than the oddities of nature?
