WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.520 The following content is provided under a Creative 00:00:02.520 --> 00:00:03.970 Commons license. 00:00:03.970 --> 00:00:06.360 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare 00:00:06.360 --> 00:00:10.660 continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. 00:00:10.660 --> 00:00:13.320 To make a donation or view additional materials 00:00:13.320 --> 00:00:16.670 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 00:00:16.670 --> 00:00:18.080 at OCW.mit.edu. 00:00:25.750 --> 00:00:28.060 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: OK. 00:00:28.060 --> 00:00:31.960 Social movements remind you of the picture 00:00:31.960 --> 00:00:34.600 we had the first day, and once or twice-- 00:00:34.600 --> 00:00:36.860 I should have done it more often since-- 00:00:36.860 --> 00:00:42.820 but on the first day we've been talking about policy making. 00:00:42.820 --> 00:00:43.690 We did on Monday. 00:00:43.690 --> 00:00:45.310 We talked mainly about interest groups 00:00:45.310 --> 00:00:48.460 here, a little bit about regulatory processes. 00:00:48.460 --> 00:00:51.430 We'll come back to that on Wednesday. 00:00:51.430 --> 00:00:57.100 But up here at the top is this vague outside the box-- 00:00:57.100 --> 00:01:01.600 outside these boxes, at least, category of norms and customs 00:01:01.600 --> 00:01:03.700 and values and traditions and institutions 00:01:03.700 --> 00:01:06.910 that we had movements in their, social movements. 00:01:06.910 --> 00:01:09.140 And that's what we're going to talk about today. 00:01:09.140 --> 00:01:12.520 We're going to talk about what they are, how they differ 00:01:12.520 --> 00:01:16.840 from other policy actors, how they work, 00:01:16.840 --> 00:01:20.800 and briefly, what impacts can we see on energy and environmental 00:01:20.800 --> 00:01:22.700 policy. 00:01:22.700 --> 00:01:27.910 So if you think about who effects policy, 00:01:27.910 --> 00:01:31.420 there are obviously individual firms or households. 00:01:31.420 --> 00:01:35.560 And in the US setting you have to think about 00:01:35.560 --> 00:01:36.562 for federal policy. 00:01:36.562 --> 00:01:38.770 You have to think about some federal governments that 00:01:38.770 --> 00:01:41.530 occasionally tribes. 00:01:41.530 --> 00:01:43.090 What we talked about last time were 00:01:43.090 --> 00:01:46.210 all of these, this alphabet soup of interest groups 00:01:46.210 --> 00:01:48.640 that you will find on K Street in Washington, 00:01:48.640 --> 00:01:51.400 and you'll find various analogs in state capitals. 00:01:51.400 --> 00:01:53.500 Sometimes they fly in. 00:01:53.500 --> 00:01:56.380 For those who don't live in this world, that's 00:01:56.380 --> 00:01:59.410 the National Rifle Association, the American Forrest Products 00:01:59.410 --> 00:02:03.730 Association, the Environmental Defense Fund, the AFL/CIO, 00:02:03.730 --> 00:02:06.670 the Union Organization, the American Association 00:02:06.670 --> 00:02:10.419 of Retired People, which sends you mailings when you turn 50 00:02:10.419 --> 00:02:12.370 to show you're really old. 00:02:12.370 --> 00:02:14.920 The American Petroleum Institute, the National Coal 00:02:14.920 --> 00:02:16.600 Institute, and there are many more. 00:02:19.390 --> 00:02:23.140 Then there are political parties. 00:02:23.140 --> 00:02:25.540 Republican, Democrat, or Democratic, 00:02:25.540 --> 00:02:28.480 depending on which parity you affiliate with. 00:02:28.480 --> 00:02:32.140 Green parties in lots of places, Whig parties in US history, 00:02:32.140 --> 00:02:35.020 plenty of other parties in various places. 00:02:35.020 --> 00:02:37.840 And then social movements. 00:02:37.840 --> 00:02:41.410 So the best way I find to think about a social movement 00:02:41.410 --> 00:02:45.010 is to think about examples. 00:02:45.010 --> 00:02:48.322 So as I go back to my period of consciousness, 00:02:48.322 --> 00:02:50.530 there are a number of them that come to mind, and let 00:02:50.530 --> 00:02:52.930 me just walk through a few. 00:02:52.930 --> 00:02:55.120 There is the Civil Rights Movement. 00:02:55.120 --> 00:02:59.050 That's the group gathering to hear Dr. Martin Luther King. 00:03:02.560 --> 00:03:05.530 Not all those people were paying dues to anything 00:03:05.530 --> 00:03:08.260 or had membership cards to anything, 00:03:08.260 --> 00:03:11.410 but they had all come to Washington. 00:03:11.410 --> 00:03:13.810 Most people would probably call the Civil Rights 00:03:13.810 --> 00:03:18.510 Movement successful, maybe not. 00:03:18.510 --> 00:03:21.990 This is the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. 00:03:21.990 --> 00:03:24.330 That, of course, is at MIT. 00:03:24.330 --> 00:03:25.890 This was in 1970. 00:03:25.890 --> 00:03:27.930 The picture-- and that's some other campus, 00:03:27.930 --> 00:03:29.730 and this is Washington. 00:03:29.730 --> 00:03:33.300 The picture I looked for very hard but couldn't find, 00:03:33.300 --> 00:03:35.430 and I know it exists, is a picture 00:03:35.430 --> 00:03:38.100 of the then President of MIT, Howard Johnson, 00:03:38.100 --> 00:03:41.040 marching with a group of students 00:03:41.040 --> 00:03:45.270 down Mass Avenue with an anti-war banner. 00:03:45.270 --> 00:03:49.260 That movement, you might call successful ultimately. 00:03:49.260 --> 00:03:52.120 But I'm going to come back to this. 00:03:52.120 --> 00:03:54.870 You might ask, why? 00:03:54.870 --> 00:04:00.030 Most of those people were too young to vote, so why was 00:04:00.030 --> 00:04:02.755 that movement successful? 00:04:02.755 --> 00:04:04.380 Or did the movement have anything to do 00:04:04.380 --> 00:04:05.630 with ending the war, actually? 00:04:08.082 --> 00:04:09.540 This is the environmental movement. 00:04:09.540 --> 00:04:10.890 That's an early rally. 00:04:10.890 --> 00:04:13.170 Senator Muskie in Washington-- 00:04:13.170 --> 00:04:15.540 I think that's in Washington, addressing a group. 00:04:15.540 --> 00:04:18.390 And the tree hugger on the right, I couldn't resist. 00:04:18.390 --> 00:04:23.100 So there you've got the environmental movement. 00:04:23.100 --> 00:04:24.150 Successful? 00:04:24.150 --> 00:04:25.710 Maybe, maybe not. 00:04:25.710 --> 00:04:27.960 Also, you'll notice one of the interest groups 00:04:27.960 --> 00:04:31.080 I had up there was the Environmental Defense Fund. 00:04:31.080 --> 00:04:33.930 So one might want to think about where that boundary is, 00:04:33.930 --> 00:04:36.960 and we'll come back to that. 00:04:36.960 --> 00:04:39.450 The Women's Movement. 00:04:39.450 --> 00:04:41.520 You see there, the-- 00:04:41.520 --> 00:04:44.790 I think that's the entirety of the Equal Rights 00:04:44.790 --> 00:04:51.120 Amendment, for which there was also opposition. 00:04:51.120 --> 00:04:54.750 As regards the Equal Rights Amendment, 00:04:54.750 --> 00:04:56.880 you could argue that was pretty successful. 00:04:56.880 --> 00:05:00.510 Those-- you don't see votes like that anymore. 00:05:00.510 --> 00:05:02.760 The Equal Rights Amendment phrased on the left 00:05:02.760 --> 00:05:10.050 passed the House in 1972 354 to 24, in the Senate, 84 to 8. 00:05:10.050 --> 00:05:14.400 That means there were a lot of Republican votes for it. 00:05:17.800 --> 00:05:22.800 30 states ratified it by the end of 1973, but it failed. 00:05:22.800 --> 00:05:25.020 They needed 38 to pass. 00:05:25.020 --> 00:05:27.630 It got 35 by 1979. 00:05:27.630 --> 00:05:29.130 Never got to 30-- 00:05:29.130 --> 00:05:31.075 all of these pieces of-- 00:05:31.075 --> 00:05:33.450 all of these amendments have a deadline for ratification. 00:05:33.450 --> 00:05:37.350 The deadline here was '79, and it didn't make it 00:05:37.350 --> 00:05:40.380 and some states rescinded ratification. 00:05:40.380 --> 00:05:42.510 And I don't think you could get that-- 00:05:42.510 --> 00:05:46.740 I don't think you could get that Amendment voted on in Congress 00:05:46.740 --> 00:05:49.020 now, let alone passed. 00:05:49.020 --> 00:05:54.130 So you've got to ask, was that movement successful? 00:05:54.130 --> 00:05:55.060 That was a movement. 00:05:55.060 --> 00:05:56.920 I mean, you got troops turning out. 00:05:56.920 --> 00:05:58.210 You got rallies. 00:05:58.210 --> 00:05:59.530 You got an anti movement. 00:05:59.530 --> 00:06:01.450 Was that movement successful? 00:06:01.450 --> 00:06:03.580 What did it do? 00:06:03.580 --> 00:06:06.010 This is a more recent one. 00:06:06.010 --> 00:06:10.510 You may recall the meetings of the World Trade Organization, 00:06:10.510 --> 00:06:13.600 the International Organization that basically sets trading 00:06:13.600 --> 00:06:16.630 rules for international trade. 00:06:16.630 --> 00:06:20.300 For a period, those meetings were dangerous. 00:06:20.300 --> 00:06:22.300 I don't know whether this is the one in Seattle, 00:06:22.300 --> 00:06:25.000 but Downtown Seattle got sort of trashed 00:06:25.000 --> 00:06:27.460 by people who were protesting globalization, 00:06:27.460 --> 00:06:32.020 protesting the WTO, which is a bunch of bureaucrats who 00:06:32.020 --> 00:06:35.830 deal with trade disputes and associated it 00:06:35.830 --> 00:06:38.110 with global injustice. 00:06:38.110 --> 00:06:41.530 1999. 00:06:41.530 --> 00:06:43.030 That movement failed. 00:06:43.030 --> 00:06:46.030 I think that's fair to say, right? 00:06:46.030 --> 00:06:47.980 We have globalized. 00:06:47.980 --> 00:06:50.350 Trade has not turned back, and that movement 00:06:50.350 --> 00:06:52.060 has pretty much vanished. 00:06:52.060 --> 00:06:53.230 How come? 00:06:53.230 --> 00:06:56.410 How come some succeed and some fail? 00:06:56.410 --> 00:06:58.240 This is the anti-nuclear movement. 00:06:58.240 --> 00:06:59.230 This is international. 00:06:59.230 --> 00:07:04.720 This is-- that's Germany, [SPEAKING GERMAN].. 00:07:04.720 --> 00:07:06.860 That's Japan, and that, of course, 00:07:06.860 --> 00:07:11.680 is Vermont, where the future of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear 00:07:11.680 --> 00:07:14.930 Plant is much debated. 00:07:14.930 --> 00:07:16.768 Is that movement successful? 00:07:16.768 --> 00:07:18.310 That movement start-- well, I'm going 00:07:18.310 --> 00:07:20.852 to come back to that movement, because we'll talk about that, 00:07:20.852 --> 00:07:22.870 actually, at some length. 00:07:22.870 --> 00:07:26.608 But that movement is global. 00:07:26.608 --> 00:07:28.150 A lot of power plants have been built 00:07:28.150 --> 00:07:33.300 since that movement started, a lot of nuclear plants still 00:07:33.300 --> 00:07:34.170 active. 00:07:34.170 --> 00:07:37.530 This is the anti-fracking movement, more recently. 00:07:37.530 --> 00:07:39.870 That's New York, as you see. 00:07:39.870 --> 00:07:46.330 That's somewhere in Paris, and that, I believe, is Bulgaria. 00:07:46.330 --> 00:07:48.480 So it, like the anti-nuclear movement, 00:07:48.480 --> 00:07:52.020 is fairly broad geographically. 00:07:52.020 --> 00:07:55.320 Has succeeded in some places, succeeded at least tentatively 00:07:55.320 --> 00:07:57.498 in New York and in France. 00:07:57.498 --> 00:07:59.415 I have no idea what the status is in Bulgaria. 00:08:03.030 --> 00:08:06.570 The Tea Party movement, look at those numbers. 00:08:06.570 --> 00:08:08.970 Has the Tea Party movement succeeded? will the Tea Party 00:08:08.970 --> 00:08:09.690 movement last? 00:08:09.690 --> 00:08:13.730 How does the Tea Party movement work? 00:08:13.730 --> 00:08:17.130 And, of course, on the other side-- 00:08:17.130 --> 00:08:18.920 by the way, that's impressive. 00:08:18.920 --> 00:08:20.630 That's Washington. 00:08:20.630 --> 00:08:24.590 That's Pennsylvania Avenue full of people. 00:08:24.590 --> 00:08:30.080 This is the opposite side of the coin, the Occupy Movement. 00:08:30.080 --> 00:08:39.350 Again, jobs not cuts whereas the-- we want less over here. 00:08:39.350 --> 00:08:42.799 And jobs not cuts over here. 00:08:42.799 --> 00:08:47.630 So you have two opposed social movements as we speak. 00:08:50.710 --> 00:08:52.770 And then most dramatically, this is 00:08:52.770 --> 00:08:58.200 a good time for this topic, most dramatically, the Arab Spring. 00:08:58.200 --> 00:09:03.900 So as you go around, there's Tahrir Square in Egypt. 00:09:03.900 --> 00:09:05.430 There's Tunisia. 00:09:05.430 --> 00:09:07.860 There's Yemen. 00:09:07.860 --> 00:09:12.540 Government toppled, government toppled, government toppled. 00:09:12.540 --> 00:09:16.080 Bahrain, protests continuing. 00:09:16.080 --> 00:09:18.930 Syria, Civil War. 00:09:18.930 --> 00:09:22.430 Libya, government toppled. 00:09:22.430 --> 00:09:26.130 Social movements. 00:09:26.130 --> 00:09:28.030 OK, there are a lot of them. 00:09:28.030 --> 00:09:29.850 This is just one slice of history, 00:09:29.850 --> 00:09:32.340 a recent slice of history. 00:09:32.340 --> 00:09:36.850 I'm going to come back and talk about some of them. 00:09:36.850 --> 00:09:38.910 But the first thing we ought to worry about 00:09:38.910 --> 00:09:44.400 is, what are these things? 00:09:44.400 --> 00:09:48.120 How are they distinct from other actors? 00:09:48.120 --> 00:09:51.760 Certainly, they're trying to influence policy. 00:09:51.760 --> 00:09:54.030 That's what they're there for. 00:09:54.030 --> 00:09:56.310 Not always in a coherent way, not always 00:09:56.310 --> 00:09:58.230 in a well-defined way. 00:09:58.230 --> 00:10:05.470 The anti-globalization movement, what exactly did they want? 00:10:05.470 --> 00:10:07.203 What's the Occupy Movement want? 00:10:07.203 --> 00:10:09.370 But in any case, they're trying to-- not necessarily 00:10:09.370 --> 00:10:10.840 with a specific agenda, but they're 00:10:10.840 --> 00:10:13.120 trying to have some influence. 00:10:15.780 --> 00:10:17.340 This is easy. 00:10:17.340 --> 00:10:19.210 I listed these actors at the start. 00:10:19.210 --> 00:10:21.420 They're not a formal part of the process. 00:10:21.420 --> 00:10:22.530 They're not on the ballot. 00:10:22.530 --> 00:10:23.910 They're not registered. 00:10:23.910 --> 00:10:27.240 They don't have national committees and slates 00:10:27.240 --> 00:10:32.070 of candidates formally. 00:10:32.070 --> 00:10:35.280 The boundary between a social movement and an interest group, 00:10:35.280 --> 00:10:37.500 though, and Burstein talks about, this 00:10:37.500 --> 00:10:39.030 is a little blurrier, right? 00:10:41.880 --> 00:10:43.440 [? Lowey, ?] whom we read earlier, 00:10:43.440 --> 00:10:48.960 has this italicized phrase, which is interesting. 00:10:48.960 --> 00:10:53.980 All established interest groups are conservative. 00:10:53.980 --> 00:10:56.080 And he means conservative not in the sense 00:10:56.080 --> 00:11:00.910 of left, right, in the sense of less government, more 00:11:00.910 --> 00:11:03.370 government, but in the old-fashioned sense 00:11:03.370 --> 00:11:06.710 of less change, more change. 00:11:06.710 --> 00:11:08.740 So he means they are conservative in the sense 00:11:08.740 --> 00:11:11.420 that interest groups tend to resist radical change. 00:11:11.420 --> 00:11:13.450 They're part of the system. 00:11:13.450 --> 00:11:16.780 The American Forrest Products Association 00:11:16.780 --> 00:11:19.600 has some laws it likes, has some laws it doesn't like, 00:11:19.600 --> 00:11:21.610 lobbies here, lobbies there. 00:11:21.610 --> 00:11:25.180 If you said, let's fundamentally rethink the way we do timber, 00:11:25.180 --> 00:11:28.575 they'd be appalled because that's not 00:11:28.575 --> 00:11:31.940 what they're there for. 00:11:31.940 --> 00:11:32.440 OK. 00:11:32.440 --> 00:11:38.560 So that's-- and they also tend to be more structured, right? 00:11:38.560 --> 00:11:41.620 The Environmental Defense Fund has members, has a budget, 00:11:41.620 --> 00:11:45.160 has offices, has lobbyists, writes papers. 00:11:45.160 --> 00:11:48.070 They do routine influence. 00:11:48.070 --> 00:11:49.210 They lobby. 00:11:49.210 --> 00:11:51.520 They enter briefs in court. 00:11:51.520 --> 00:11:55.180 They send in petitions. 00:11:55.180 --> 00:11:58.690 Social movements tend to be on the margins, 00:11:58.690 --> 00:12:00.700 tend to be on the margins of the system. 00:12:00.700 --> 00:12:02.680 Membership is not well defined. 00:12:02.680 --> 00:12:05.800 Who was a member of the Civil Rights Movement? 00:12:05.800 --> 00:12:07.870 Who was a member of the anti-war movement, 00:12:07.870 --> 00:12:09.790 anti-Vietnam movement? 00:12:09.790 --> 00:12:11.620 Almost everybody I knew did something. 00:12:11.620 --> 00:12:14.410 None of us had cards. 00:12:14.410 --> 00:12:17.650 And they tend to engage in what you'd call non-routine actions, 00:12:17.650 --> 00:12:20.350 like marches and demonstrations and chaining themselves 00:12:20.350 --> 00:12:24.040 to fences and all of that stuff. 00:12:24.040 --> 00:12:26.860 They vary, resources, organization, tactics. 00:12:26.860 --> 00:12:28.930 Greenpeace is an interesting example, right? 00:12:28.930 --> 00:12:33.880 Greenpeace is noted for its anti-whaling activities, 00:12:33.880 --> 00:12:37.900 has ships, intercepts, interferes with whaling. 00:12:37.900 --> 00:12:40.240 That's a non-routine action. 00:12:40.240 --> 00:12:44.810 It also has lobbyists in various capitals 00:12:44.810 --> 00:12:46.700 to push for various things. 00:12:46.700 --> 00:12:51.020 So Greenpeace is an interest group 00:12:51.020 --> 00:12:53.000 in the sense of being organized and having 00:12:53.000 --> 00:12:59.000 members and dues and stuff, but it also 00:12:59.000 --> 00:13:02.930 engages in non-standard tactics. 00:13:02.930 --> 00:13:08.780 But all of the examples social movements I had 00:13:08.780 --> 00:13:14.590 tend to be without a defined membership. 00:13:14.590 --> 00:13:16.540 Who was part of the Arab Spring? 00:13:16.540 --> 00:13:17.800 Varied from day to day. 00:13:17.800 --> 00:13:21.010 Who showed up for the demonstrations? 00:13:21.010 --> 00:13:23.800 Who's part of the anti-Putin movement, to the extent 00:13:23.800 --> 00:13:25.750 it is a movement, in Russia? 00:13:25.750 --> 00:13:28.180 Who comes? 00:13:28.180 --> 00:13:29.830 Who was part of the anti-war movement? 00:13:29.830 --> 00:13:31.580 Who was part of the Civil Rights Movement? 00:13:31.580 --> 00:13:33.250 So the membership tends to be unclear. 00:13:33.250 --> 00:13:37.090 The actions tend to be non-standard. 00:13:37.090 --> 00:13:39.160 The anti-Vietnam movement did engage 00:13:39.160 --> 00:13:41.530 in massive letter writing campaigns, 00:13:41.530 --> 00:13:44.180 which is pretty standard. 00:13:44.180 --> 00:13:47.110 But it also occupied the MIT president's office 00:13:47.110 --> 00:13:49.450 and various other University presidents offices, 00:13:49.450 --> 00:13:51.970 which is pretty non-standard. 00:13:51.970 --> 00:13:54.850 So it's a mixture. 00:13:54.850 --> 00:13:58.650 Thoughts about this so far? 00:13:58.650 --> 00:14:01.230 OK. 00:14:01.230 --> 00:14:04.330 So how do they work when they work? 00:14:04.330 --> 00:14:08.290 How might any of these affect public policy? 00:14:08.290 --> 00:14:09.670 What are the mechanisms? 00:14:09.670 --> 00:14:11.620 Why do they matter? 00:14:11.620 --> 00:14:15.160 What do they ever matter? 00:14:15.160 --> 00:14:17.660 What are they doing? 00:14:17.660 --> 00:14:19.033 Yeah? 00:14:19.033 --> 00:14:20.700 AUDIENCE: Sometimes, it's trying to show 00:14:20.700 --> 00:14:22.530 that if a politician does something 00:14:22.530 --> 00:14:24.720 that these social movements-- or back 00:14:24.720 --> 00:14:27.320 something these social movements find distasteful, 00:14:27.320 --> 00:14:33.256 unpopular, [INAUDIBLE] less likely to get elected. 00:14:33.256 --> 00:14:37.298 [INAUDIBLE] an example might be that [INAUDIBLE] People 00:14:37.298 --> 00:14:39.960 made it very clear that this was not something 00:14:39.960 --> 00:14:41.900 they supported, and so politicians backed away 00:14:41.900 --> 00:14:42.890 from it. 00:14:42.890 --> 00:14:46.490 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: So one mechanism is in a sense, 00:14:46.490 --> 00:14:54.740 they provide information or they demonstrate salience. 00:14:59.600 --> 00:15:01.520 Salience is awareness. 00:15:10.520 --> 00:15:13.073 So an issue's salient to me if I'm aware of it 00:15:13.073 --> 00:15:14.240 and I consider it important. 00:15:14.240 --> 00:15:17.750 So you could argue that the anti-Vietnam protests made 00:15:17.750 --> 00:15:21.950 it clear that, to at least a segment of the population, 00:15:21.950 --> 00:15:25.040 all of us who could get drafted, we were very 00:15:25.040 --> 00:15:26.880 aware of what was going on. 00:15:26.880 --> 00:15:29.160 It was very important to us. 00:15:29.160 --> 00:15:30.950 We felt strongly. 00:15:30.950 --> 00:15:34.820 OK, so they can provide information about salience, 00:15:34.820 --> 00:15:37.070 about the population's feelings. 00:15:37.070 --> 00:15:40.980 How else might it work? 00:15:40.980 --> 00:15:41.690 Yeah, Brendan? 00:15:41.690 --> 00:15:42.960 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] You could just-- 00:15:42.960 --> 00:15:44.627 not necessarily motivate the politician. 00:15:44.627 --> 00:15:48.222 You also motivate other people to come on board. 00:15:48.222 --> 00:15:49.680 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: So you might-- 00:15:54.490 --> 00:15:59.590 well, there are two ways you might do that, right? 00:15:59.590 --> 00:16:02.020 One way is to change preferences. 00:16:10.260 --> 00:16:13.790 You could persuade people that-- 00:16:13.790 --> 00:16:17.540 by getting them to think about it, that this group is right. 00:16:17.540 --> 00:16:20.300 You could argue that was a large part of what Martin Luther 00:16:20.300 --> 00:16:25.050 King did, and the effective leadership of the Civil Rights 00:16:25.050 --> 00:16:25.550 Movement. 00:16:25.550 --> 00:16:28.700 It persuaded a lot of people that the current state 00:16:28.700 --> 00:16:33.530 of affairs was just wrong, full stop, wrong. 00:16:33.530 --> 00:16:36.800 It blurs with raise salience. 00:16:43.990 --> 00:16:46.000 I think these two are hard to separate, 00:16:46.000 --> 00:16:48.670 because it could be that an awful lot of people 00:16:48.670 --> 00:16:51.310 in the North were unaware of just how 00:16:51.310 --> 00:16:53.830 segregated the South was. 00:16:53.830 --> 00:16:58.600 So you made people aware of it by increasing awareness. 00:16:58.600 --> 00:17:00.890 That works, of course, if they agree with you. 00:17:00.890 --> 00:17:01.712 Charlotte? 00:17:01.712 --> 00:17:03.580 AUDIENCE: I also think that, going along 00:17:03.580 --> 00:17:05.560 with the trend of getting more people involved, 00:17:05.560 --> 00:17:09.010 just having a group makes people who already have that belief, 00:17:09.010 --> 00:17:11.260 maybe are already aware of the issue, but just unaware 00:17:11.260 --> 00:17:13.329 of how they could affect it, join together. 00:17:13.329 --> 00:17:17.235 And then it [INAUDIBLE] just because there are more bodies. 00:17:17.235 --> 00:17:18.610 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: So this is-- 00:17:18.610 --> 00:17:21.730 AUDIENCE: Like attract people, I guess [INAUDIBLE] 00:17:21.730 --> 00:17:23.780 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: The-- yeah. 00:17:23.780 --> 00:17:24.280 Yeah. 00:17:24.280 --> 00:17:26.510 The model Burstein has is that works 00:17:26.510 --> 00:17:31.810 if it makes a politician rethink, rethink 00:17:31.810 --> 00:17:34.100 their prospects. 00:17:34.100 --> 00:17:38.020 And so I guess I'd sort of put that one in a way here. 00:17:38.020 --> 00:17:41.530 But you'd say it not only demonstrates to politicians 00:17:41.530 --> 00:17:43.720 that a lot of people care about, it 00:17:43.720 --> 00:17:45.460 demonstrates to a lot of other people 00:17:45.460 --> 00:17:46.700 that people care about it. 00:17:46.700 --> 00:17:50.170 And that's a lot of the story of the Arab Spring, I think, 00:17:50.170 --> 00:17:52.840 is you've got a few people who are just 00:17:52.840 --> 00:17:57.550 sufficiently outraged that they would risk getting shot at. 00:17:57.550 --> 00:17:59.900 And other people said, well, I feel that way, too, 00:17:59.900 --> 00:18:03.500 and if they're going to do that, maybe I should do that. 00:18:03.500 --> 00:18:06.760 And at some point you demonstrate to the regime 00:18:06.760 --> 00:18:09.880 that it lacks popular support. 00:18:09.880 --> 00:18:13.360 And regimes that aren't Democratic 00:18:13.360 --> 00:18:16.270 tend to not have much idea how much support they have, 00:18:16.270 --> 00:18:19.115 and it's easy to exaggerate how much support you have. 00:18:19.115 --> 00:18:20.740 Because every time you go out in public 00:18:20.740 --> 00:18:22.930 and have a parade, people cheer. 00:18:22.930 --> 00:18:25.630 Because they-- why wouldn't you cheer? 00:18:25.630 --> 00:18:27.143 The dictator's going by. 00:18:27.143 --> 00:18:28.060 So that's interesting. 00:18:28.060 --> 00:18:31.750 You can say it sort of rallies people, 00:18:31.750 --> 00:18:37.660 and I think those are the most plausible ways we've got them. 00:18:37.660 --> 00:18:42.970 The others-- Burstein looks at people 00:18:42.970 --> 00:18:49.540 who argue that these somehow persuade, as 00:18:49.540 --> 00:18:51.430 in a logical sense. 00:18:51.430 --> 00:18:53.650 But that's not plausible, he says, 00:18:53.650 --> 00:18:58.752 and I agree with him, that they're not 00:18:58.752 --> 00:19:00.460 going to-- you don't march in the streets 00:19:00.460 --> 00:19:03.400 to make an intellectual argument. 00:19:03.400 --> 00:19:06.640 You march in the streets to do something else. 00:19:06.640 --> 00:19:12.890 And if it isn't going to affect re-election, why bother? 00:19:12.890 --> 00:19:16.030 And if it is, why is the group necessary 00:19:16.030 --> 00:19:17.620 if the person knows it? 00:19:17.620 --> 00:19:24.420 You could argue that the anti-Vietnam demonstrations 00:19:24.420 --> 00:19:29.970 simply made it inescapable that there was widespread opposition 00:19:29.970 --> 00:19:31.590 to the war. 00:19:31.590 --> 00:19:34.650 Public opinion polls said the same thing, 00:19:34.650 --> 00:19:38.430 but marching in the streets made us all feel better, of course. 00:19:38.430 --> 00:19:43.800 But also, brought it home. 00:19:43.800 --> 00:19:49.830 The other point I'm making here in that second bullet 00:19:49.830 --> 00:19:50.790 is donors. 00:19:50.790 --> 00:19:53.550 I mean, gun control is an interesting example 00:19:53.550 --> 00:19:57.000 of the impact of salience and the impact of an interest 00:19:57.000 --> 00:19:58.620 group. 00:19:58.620 --> 00:20:01.560 Polls say that 70% of Americans-- typically, 00:20:01.560 --> 00:20:04.680 the number varies a little bit, but 70% of Americans 00:20:04.680 --> 00:20:07.320 would favor some gun control, say limits 00:20:07.320 --> 00:20:08.565 on assault weapons on campus. 00:20:11.340 --> 00:20:16.965 You-- or some restrictions on carrying weapons. 00:20:19.860 --> 00:20:22.080 But most people don't care much. 00:20:22.080 --> 00:20:24.750 Every police chief favors gun control. 00:20:24.750 --> 00:20:27.000 Most people don't care much. 00:20:27.000 --> 00:20:29.400 People who support the National Rifle 00:20:29.400 --> 00:20:33.630 Association, who oppose gun control, care a lot, 00:20:33.630 --> 00:20:35.980 and they win. 00:20:35.980 --> 00:20:38.800 Because the fact that I favor gun control 00:20:38.800 --> 00:20:43.480 is not going to cause me, in most cases, 00:20:43.480 --> 00:20:48.010 to change my vote on anything, because that's rarely 00:20:48.010 --> 00:20:50.240 a big campaign issue. 00:20:50.240 --> 00:20:53.710 If I'm elected, I will enact-- 00:20:53.710 --> 00:20:54.940 no. 00:20:54.940 --> 00:20:58.010 That's rarely a campaign issue. 00:20:58.010 --> 00:21:02.300 So those of us who care a little bit don't do anything, 00:21:02.300 --> 00:21:07.910 and those who care a lot and have some money have control. 00:21:07.910 --> 00:21:10.150 So that's a concentrated interest diffuse interest 00:21:10.150 --> 00:21:14.570 example of some importance. 00:21:14.570 --> 00:21:17.500 So the other ways we talked about providing information. 00:21:17.500 --> 00:21:21.970 You could argue that's what happened in Vietnam. 00:21:21.970 --> 00:21:25.060 That's what happened in East Germany. 00:21:25.060 --> 00:21:30.310 When-- I didn't put up the demonstrations that 00:21:30.310 --> 00:21:33.970 brought down the Berlin Wall, but as distinct from the Arab 00:21:33.970 --> 00:21:37.730 Spring, nobody got shot, right? 00:21:37.730 --> 00:21:38.750 That happened quickly. 00:21:38.750 --> 00:21:40.520 They talked about the Velvet Revolution 00:21:40.520 --> 00:21:47.380 in Czechoslovakia, talked about in East Germany, 00:21:47.380 --> 00:21:49.390 nothing much happened. 00:21:49.390 --> 00:21:52.960 Crowds turned out, crowds turned out. 00:21:52.960 --> 00:21:55.660 They didn't seize the government buildings. 00:21:55.660 --> 00:22:00.460 They didn't overrun the president's or prime minister's 00:22:00.460 --> 00:22:02.060 house. 00:22:02.060 --> 00:22:04.730 The government just gave up and left. 00:22:04.730 --> 00:22:09.420 So I think the argument here is that they provided 00:22:09.420 --> 00:22:11.540 enormous amount of information to voters 00:22:11.540 --> 00:22:15.170 that you have no support. 00:22:15.170 --> 00:22:18.020 You're loathed. 00:22:18.020 --> 00:22:21.440 Changing preferences. 00:22:21.440 --> 00:22:24.570 This often has to do with reframing an issue. 00:22:24.570 --> 00:22:28.510 Think about the pro-life movement, 00:22:28.510 --> 00:22:31.610 which is a brilliant piece of reframing. 00:22:31.610 --> 00:22:34.072 How can you be against life? 00:22:34.072 --> 00:22:36.280 I mean, you're for choice, but what's more important, 00:22:36.280 --> 00:22:37.730 choice or life? 00:22:37.730 --> 00:22:40.570 So you could argue that reframing the issue as, 00:22:40.570 --> 00:22:47.340 are you for or against life, has an impact on preferences. 00:22:47.340 --> 00:22:49.930 The attacks on the health care legislation 00:22:49.930 --> 00:22:54.730 by making it Obama's legislation as opposed to, by the way, 00:22:54.730 --> 00:22:57.340 no pre-existing condition, universal insurance, blah, 00:22:57.340 --> 00:23:00.310 blah, blah, changes how it's thought of. 00:23:00.310 --> 00:23:02.860 It's something Obama is shoving down our throats. 00:23:06.340 --> 00:23:09.564 And you can argue that Civil Rights did that, 00:23:09.564 --> 00:23:13.300 that that was the essence of the Civil Rights Movement. 00:23:13.300 --> 00:23:19.390 That if you saw in real time the marchers being taken down 00:23:19.390 --> 00:23:24.340 with fire hoses, it was hard not to think, that's just wrong. 00:23:24.340 --> 00:23:25.600 These people are marching. 00:23:25.600 --> 00:23:27.610 How can they-- why is that right? 00:23:27.610 --> 00:23:30.880 So and you don't do-- 00:23:30.880 --> 00:23:38.300 King's speeches were important, but watching people peacefully 00:23:38.300 --> 00:23:43.130 protest being beaten changes your views of the people 00:23:43.130 --> 00:23:45.560 beating them and of the issue. 00:23:45.560 --> 00:23:48.260 So part of what they do social movements 00:23:48.260 --> 00:23:51.290 is theater that changes preferences as well 00:23:51.290 --> 00:23:57.290 as signals information. 00:23:57.290 --> 00:24:02.330 You can raise salience by making people aware of an issue, 00:24:02.330 --> 00:24:06.740 but it only works if they agree with you, right? 00:24:06.740 --> 00:24:09.070 I mean, think about globalization, 00:24:09.070 --> 00:24:12.040 the anti-globalization movement. 00:24:12.040 --> 00:24:14.320 So they protested globalization. 00:24:14.320 --> 00:24:17.980 They protested poor working conditions in poor countries, 00:24:17.980 --> 00:24:21.310 and they trashed Starbucks. 00:24:21.310 --> 00:24:23.890 And most people said what? 00:24:23.890 --> 00:24:26.845 I'm sorry. 00:24:26.845 --> 00:24:29.440 If you're very sympathetic to poor people, you say, yeah. 00:24:29.440 --> 00:24:32.107 They should pay people more in poor countries. 00:24:32.107 --> 00:24:33.690 And if you're not, you say, well, they 00:24:33.690 --> 00:24:35.273 don't have to take the jobs, you know? 00:24:35.273 --> 00:24:39.220 I mean, they're not being forced to work in these factories. 00:24:39.220 --> 00:24:41.600 It's more fun than being in a village. 00:24:41.600 --> 00:24:49.540 So the example-- one of the optional readings, C and G-- 00:24:49.540 --> 00:24:51.370 I forget now what their initials are-- 00:24:51.370 --> 00:24:54.250 make the point that among people who 00:24:54.250 --> 00:24:56.950 are for environmental change and who 00:24:56.950 --> 00:25:01.240 were opposed to environmental change in a survey, 00:25:01.240 --> 00:25:05.900 awareness of environmental issues was equal. 00:25:05.900 --> 00:25:08.480 Values differed. 00:25:08.480 --> 00:25:11.630 So the policy implications differed. 00:25:11.630 --> 00:25:13.400 So you make people aware that there's 00:25:13.400 --> 00:25:16.400 a lot of international trade, and a lot of what you buy 00:25:16.400 --> 00:25:19.790 is produced by people in poor countries, 00:25:19.790 --> 00:25:21.890 one response is, that's really terrible. 00:25:21.890 --> 00:25:25.400 Another response is, well, that's a market. 00:25:25.400 --> 00:25:28.010 And if people mainly think, that's 00:25:28.010 --> 00:25:33.110 a market because that's what they value, 00:25:33.110 --> 00:25:36.760 making them more aware of an issue won't help. 00:25:36.760 --> 00:25:40.430 You could argue the same thing happens with climate change. 00:25:40.430 --> 00:25:42.370 There's been a lot of work-- 00:25:42.370 --> 00:25:45.040 I wouldn't call it a movement, but an awful lot of people 00:25:45.040 --> 00:25:48.520 have spent a lot of time trying to educate people 00:25:48.520 --> 00:25:50.470 about climate change. 00:25:50.470 --> 00:25:52.780 It has not produced a groundswell. 00:25:52.780 --> 00:25:55.340 Quite the contrary. 00:25:55.340 --> 00:25:59.770 And the argument is that it comes up against it's 00:25:59.770 --> 00:26:01.420 a conflict of values. 00:26:01.420 --> 00:26:04.060 Do you want to have economic growth, 00:26:04.060 --> 00:26:06.440 or do you want to have environmental protection? 00:26:06.440 --> 00:26:10.990 We can both be aware of climate change and its issues, 00:26:10.990 --> 00:26:14.360 but reach very different policy conclusions. 00:26:14.360 --> 00:26:19.270 So raising salience only works, raising awareness 00:26:19.270 --> 00:26:25.710 only works if there's agreement or potential agreement, 00:26:25.710 --> 00:26:29.700 or something like agreement. 00:26:29.700 --> 00:26:33.838 And the final way, and this is the borderline-- 00:26:33.838 --> 00:26:35.255 this isn't really social movement. 00:26:35.255 --> 00:26:39.060 I think the Burstein article is, nonetheless, a good article. 00:26:39.060 --> 00:26:42.090 For interest groups, how do interest groups affect policy? 00:26:42.090 --> 00:26:45.540 Well, they do all this other stuff, right? 00:26:45.540 --> 00:26:49.740 The National Rifle Association does advertise, does-- 00:26:49.740 --> 00:26:52.410 the Environmental Defense Fund does send out mailings 00:26:52.410 --> 00:26:54.330 to people, so these people do engage 00:26:54.330 --> 00:26:59.400 in the organized petition drives that do all this. 00:26:59.400 --> 00:27:04.880 But interest groups work on implementation. 00:27:04.880 --> 00:27:07.460 That's inside baseball, right? 00:27:07.460 --> 00:27:11.810 So we'll talk about it in the environmental case 00:27:11.810 --> 00:27:14.780 next time when we talk about what 00:27:14.780 --> 00:27:20.210 EPA did to set standards a couple of times. 00:27:20.210 --> 00:27:25.160 But the Dodd-Frank law is the big current example, right? 00:27:25.160 --> 00:27:27.410 You can read about it in the paper all the time. 00:27:27.410 --> 00:27:31.835 The law required lots of regulations, set up 00:27:31.835 --> 00:27:34.430 some new entities, and it required this regulation, 00:27:34.430 --> 00:27:35.180 that regulation. 00:27:35.180 --> 00:27:38.000 Spell this out, make this clear, hundreds, 00:27:38.000 --> 00:27:40.880 thousands of regulations required. 00:27:40.880 --> 00:27:43.860 No votes in Congress. 00:27:43.860 --> 00:27:48.040 Really, really boring stuff. 00:27:48.040 --> 00:27:50.050 Who wins? 00:27:50.050 --> 00:27:54.070 The people who have offices in Washington, 00:27:54.070 --> 00:27:57.670 who have lawyers, who have staff, who have resources. 00:27:57.670 --> 00:28:01.090 It's not a matter of buying votes in regulatory agencies. 00:28:01.090 --> 00:28:02.920 It's a matter of providing information, 00:28:02.920 --> 00:28:06.850 lobbying, per the piece we had assigned for last time. 00:28:09.460 --> 00:28:14.710 When the issue has low salience to the public-- 00:28:14.710 --> 00:28:17.920 interchange fees on debit cards I 00:28:17.920 --> 00:28:21.310 will tell you exercise the entire banking industry, 00:28:21.310 --> 00:28:23.770 and it may have been in the Globe 00:28:23.770 --> 00:28:28.480 twice on the third business page. 00:28:28.480 --> 00:28:32.840 Every banker in the country was up in arms. 00:28:32.840 --> 00:28:37.180 The Federal Reserve was required to regulate that. 00:28:37.180 --> 00:28:40.750 It had enormous discretion. 00:28:40.750 --> 00:28:44.320 It was required to regulate that fee paying due attention 00:28:44.320 --> 00:28:46.240 to incremental costs. 00:28:46.240 --> 00:28:49.090 Incremental costs varied all over the lot. 00:28:49.090 --> 00:28:52.840 Hundreds of submissions went into the Federal Reserve. 00:28:52.840 --> 00:28:53.840 They made a decision. 00:28:53.840 --> 00:28:54.930 Yeah? 00:28:54.930 --> 00:28:57.272 AUDIENCE: So that's the Durbin Amendment, right? 00:28:57.272 --> 00:28:59.230 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: The Durbin Amendment, yep. 00:28:59.230 --> 00:29:00.950 AUDIENCE: So when that-- 00:29:00.950 --> 00:29:04.810 so when that was approved, the fact that, for instance, 00:29:04.810 --> 00:29:07.210 Bank of America started charging monthly fee 00:29:07.210 --> 00:29:08.710 for people when they use their debit 00:29:08.710 --> 00:29:11.530 card to try to offset the fact that they couldn't make 00:29:11.530 --> 00:29:15.302 as much money from marginal cost-- 00:29:15.302 --> 00:29:17.260 like the marginal revenue that they had before. 00:29:17.260 --> 00:29:18.343 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Yeah. 00:29:18.343 --> 00:29:20.920 AUDIENCE: But wouldn't that cause people to care a lot? 00:29:20.920 --> 00:29:23.045 Because at the end of the day, the regular customer 00:29:23.045 --> 00:29:25.750 was the one who kind of got screwed over a little bit, 00:29:25.750 --> 00:29:29.230 and the merchants were the ones who won. 00:29:29.230 --> 00:29:32.140 But wouldn't eventually like people 00:29:32.140 --> 00:29:33.787 be against the Dodd-Frank? 00:29:33.787 --> 00:29:36.245 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Well, you mean against that Amendment. 00:29:36.245 --> 00:29:37.000 AUDIENCE: Yeah, yeah. 00:29:37.000 --> 00:29:38.750 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Well, I mean here's-- 00:29:41.420 --> 00:29:46.930 here are the-- this was a fight in which I participated. 00:29:46.930 --> 00:29:50.080 Here's what happens in the short run. 00:29:50.080 --> 00:29:53.920 What happens in the short run is merchants save a little bit 00:29:53.920 --> 00:29:55.960 on debit card transactions. 00:29:55.960 --> 00:29:58.810 Not enough to cause them to cut prices, 00:29:58.810 --> 00:30:00.700 because it's only a little bit. 00:30:00.700 --> 00:30:05.905 So one person, one large chain said on a conference call-- 00:30:05.905 --> 00:30:07.030 I think it was Home Depot-- 00:30:07.030 --> 00:30:09.010 said on a conference call that that 00:30:09.010 --> 00:30:12.820 was worth about $100 million to them, short run profits. 00:30:12.820 --> 00:30:14.740 So prices don't go down. 00:30:14.740 --> 00:30:17.050 What happens to banks is checking 00:30:17.050 --> 00:30:19.700 accounts are now less profitable, 00:30:19.700 --> 00:30:23.200 so they look to recoup in other ways. 00:30:23.200 --> 00:30:25.600 They tried the monthly fee. 00:30:25.600 --> 00:30:26.470 That didn't work. 00:30:26.470 --> 00:30:30.490 The easiest thing to do, and what they've done quietly, 00:30:30.490 --> 00:30:32.620 is they've raised the minimum balances required 00:30:32.620 --> 00:30:35.740 for free checking. 00:30:35.740 --> 00:30:38.050 And we'll see the numbers, but checking, 00:30:38.050 --> 00:30:42.520 because of these fees, if you use the debit card a lot, 00:30:42.520 --> 00:30:44.380 the bank is-- 00:30:44.380 --> 00:30:46.690 you're profitable to the bank even if you don't leave 00:30:46.690 --> 00:30:49.120 a lot of money on deposit. 00:30:49.120 --> 00:30:52.070 Take away those fees, you're no longer profitable. 00:30:52.070 --> 00:30:54.070 So they start raising the minimum requirement 00:30:54.070 --> 00:30:55.900 for free checking, and the number 00:30:55.900 --> 00:30:58.950 of people without checking accounts goes up. 00:30:58.950 --> 00:31:01.260 So, I mean, that's the predictable consequence 00:31:01.260 --> 00:31:03.450 of the amendment. 00:31:03.450 --> 00:31:11.127 It was pushed by merchants, and Senator Durbin 00:31:11.127 --> 00:31:13.710 talked about his friend, I think it was a hardware store owner 00:31:13.710 --> 00:31:17.280 or drug store owner, who was being taken to the cleaners 00:31:17.280 --> 00:31:17.980 by these fees. 00:31:17.980 --> 00:31:20.010 So he's presumably happy. 00:31:20.010 --> 00:31:22.920 In the long run, costs get passed through. 00:31:22.920 --> 00:31:24.990 It's just they're frictions to changing prices, 00:31:24.990 --> 00:31:28.110 so in the short run they don't. 00:31:28.110 --> 00:31:31.140 In the long run, prices adjust up. 00:31:31.140 --> 00:31:37.150 People pay slightly more if they use cash. 00:31:37.150 --> 00:31:40.950 So-- but this is a typical-- 00:31:40.950 --> 00:31:45.550 this is a-- this is an extreme piece of legislation. 00:31:45.550 --> 00:31:48.810 It was not debated, really. 00:31:48.810 --> 00:31:49.940 It got a floor vote-- 00:31:49.940 --> 00:31:56.850 a quick floor vote, not much material on it anywhere. 00:31:56.850 --> 00:31:58.710 It said to the Federal Reserve, neglect 00:31:58.710 --> 00:32:02.005 the fixed costs of running these programs when you set a price. 00:32:02.005 --> 00:32:04.350 Wait, what? 00:32:04.350 --> 00:32:05.850 They have to cover the fixed cost. 00:32:05.850 --> 00:32:09.570 OK, neglect the fixed costs, and it instructed the Fed 00:32:09.570 --> 00:32:11.010 to consider marginal cost. 00:32:11.010 --> 00:32:13.200 The Fed ran a survey. 00:32:13.200 --> 00:32:15.840 Marginal costs varied by roughly an order of magnitude 00:32:15.840 --> 00:32:17.640 across banks. 00:32:17.640 --> 00:32:20.610 OK, now what do you do? 00:32:20.610 --> 00:32:24.180 And they came out with a proposed rule. 00:32:24.180 --> 00:32:26.010 There was the expected howling. 00:32:26.010 --> 00:32:28.810 They doubled the ceiling. 00:32:28.810 --> 00:32:29.970 There was less howling. 00:32:29.970 --> 00:32:31.170 Life goes on. 00:32:31.170 --> 00:32:33.570 But yeah, it'll have the effect of increasing 00:32:33.570 --> 00:32:35.650 the number of unbanked people. 00:32:35.650 --> 00:32:37.230 It's not as serious as it used to be 00:32:37.230 --> 00:32:40.560 not to have a bank account, but it's still pretty serious. 00:32:40.560 --> 00:32:41.967 So yeah. 00:32:41.967 --> 00:32:43.800 The Durbin Amendment, you follow this stuff. 00:32:43.800 --> 00:32:45.090 That's amazing. 00:32:45.090 --> 00:32:47.130 It's not even energy. 00:32:47.130 --> 00:32:49.410 Anything else while I pause for breath and anecdote? 00:32:49.410 --> 00:32:49.910 Yeah? 00:32:49.910 --> 00:32:52.118 AUDIENCE: Can you tell us a little bit about the role 00:32:52.118 --> 00:32:54.090 that social media has paid like how to mobilize 00:32:54.090 --> 00:32:55.450 all these different publics? 00:32:55.450 --> 00:33:01.210 Like, I can see with Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Everything 00:33:01.210 --> 00:33:02.460 how [INAUDIBLE] come together. 00:33:02.460 --> 00:33:02.973 I saw that. 00:33:02.973 --> 00:33:04.890 But something like the Civil Rights Movement-- 00:33:04.890 --> 00:33:06.855 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: But it's a little less clear, isn't it, 00:33:06.855 --> 00:33:07.650 how-- 00:33:07.650 --> 00:33:10.320 the Occupy Movement, I find mysterious. 00:33:10.320 --> 00:33:11.910 Because the Civil Rights Movement 00:33:11.910 --> 00:33:14.310 had a set of charismatic leaders. 00:33:14.310 --> 00:33:18.000 It had some clear objectives, and it had great media 00:33:18.000 --> 00:33:19.770 coverage, right? 00:33:19.770 --> 00:33:23.790 I mean, when those kids went to-- where 00:33:23.790 --> 00:33:27.210 was it that the Civil rights workers got shot? 00:33:27.210 --> 00:33:28.830 Selma, maybe? 00:33:28.830 --> 00:33:30.810 Boy, that coverage of three college students 00:33:30.810 --> 00:33:33.060 go down to help the black community organize 00:33:33.060 --> 00:33:37.620 in Selma, Alabama and get shot for their troubles, that woke 00:33:37.620 --> 00:33:40.020 people up in an amazing way. 00:33:40.020 --> 00:33:43.920 And when you watch them fire hose the marchers, 00:33:43.920 --> 00:33:45.210 that was galvanizing. 00:33:45.210 --> 00:33:49.380 And when Dr. Martin Luther King spoke, that was, oh, gee. 00:33:49.380 --> 00:33:51.180 There is something here. 00:33:51.180 --> 00:33:53.610 Occupy was mysterious. 00:33:53.610 --> 00:33:55.995 Occupy just happened. 00:33:55.995 --> 00:33:57.418 I don't know. 00:33:57.418 --> 00:33:57.960 I don't know. 00:33:57.960 --> 00:34:03.330 These things-- and the anti-globalization, similarly. 00:34:03.330 --> 00:34:07.680 What was-- I can point to triggering events. 00:34:07.680 --> 00:34:11.130 You go back to the Rosa Parks refusing 00:34:11.130 --> 00:34:15.780 to sit in the back of the bus, people moving into integrated 00:34:15.780 --> 00:34:19.610 lunch counters, all of this getting media attention. 00:34:19.610 --> 00:34:21.780 I can see-- the triggering events in Civil Rights 00:34:21.780 --> 00:34:22.280 were clear. 00:34:22.280 --> 00:34:24.969 The triggering event in Vietnam was pretty clear. 00:34:24.969 --> 00:34:30.670 It just went on and on, and thinking about thousands 00:34:30.670 --> 00:34:32.560 of people chanting, hey, hey, LBJ. 00:34:32.560 --> 00:34:35.804 How many kids did you kill today? 00:34:35.804 --> 00:34:37.179 Those are pretty dramatic things. 00:34:37.179 --> 00:34:41.637 But Occupy, I don't know what triggered Occupy. 00:34:41.637 --> 00:34:43.929 I also don't know what triggered the anti-globalization 00:34:43.929 --> 00:34:45.760 movement. 00:34:45.760 --> 00:34:47.110 We know the Arab Spring. 00:34:47.110 --> 00:34:49.090 We know it was the-- 00:34:49.090 --> 00:34:51.190 normally, there's something. 00:34:51.190 --> 00:34:54.070 The guy in Tunisia who burned himself to death in protest. 00:34:54.070 --> 00:34:56.860 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] but like how people 00:34:56.860 --> 00:34:58.330 are mobilizing come together. 00:34:58.330 --> 00:35:00.020 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Well, now you-- 00:35:00.020 --> 00:35:02.620 now people point to, particularly 00:35:02.620 --> 00:35:06.970 in the case of Egypt, it was much discussed social media. 00:35:06.970 --> 00:35:09.700 You can organize through Twitter and Facebook 00:35:09.700 --> 00:35:12.460 and various other connections, and just things 00:35:12.460 --> 00:35:15.310 going viral in a variety of ways through people's 00:35:15.310 --> 00:35:16.600 personal networks. 00:35:16.600 --> 00:35:18.610 You can organize. 00:35:18.610 --> 00:35:20.590 Vietnam was posters. 00:35:20.590 --> 00:35:22.490 There will be a rally today, 00:35:22.490 --> 00:35:25.050 AUDIENCE: There was a leader that called it all. 00:35:25.050 --> 00:35:26.800 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: There were people who 00:35:26.800 --> 00:35:28.415 appointed themselves leaders. 00:35:28.415 --> 00:35:30.040 You put up a poster and you say there's 00:35:30.040 --> 00:35:33.010 going to be a demonstration today in [INAUDIBLE] well, 00:35:33.010 --> 00:35:38.410 it was then the great court, nobody had to show up. 00:35:38.410 --> 00:35:40.960 If people weren't ready to do something, 00:35:40.960 --> 00:35:43.720 you can imagine calling a rally and nobody comes. 00:35:43.720 --> 00:35:44.860 That happens often enough. 00:35:50.290 --> 00:35:54.713 This, as far as I know, and undoubtedly there's-- 00:35:54.713 --> 00:35:56.380 people have written boring papers on it, 00:35:56.380 --> 00:35:59.290 but it strikes me just as an observer of history 00:35:59.290 --> 00:36:01.840 that it's a bit mysterious what does it. 00:36:01.840 --> 00:36:03.010 It's a bit mysterious. 00:36:03.010 --> 00:36:09.790 So guy burns himself to death in Tunisia. 00:36:09.790 --> 00:36:11.910 Why does that spread? 00:36:11.910 --> 00:36:13.530 What triggers that? 00:36:13.530 --> 00:36:16.860 Did somebody in Egypt set himself up or herself up 00:36:16.860 --> 00:36:18.540 as a leader and began saying, hey, we're 00:36:18.540 --> 00:36:20.340 going to meet in the square tomorrow, 00:36:20.340 --> 00:36:24.240 and then gradually it built. It did build 00:36:24.240 --> 00:36:28.090 from a relatively small group. 00:36:28.090 --> 00:36:33.220 But in Moscow, there are protests that have lost, 00:36:33.220 --> 00:36:34.360 have plainly lost. 00:36:34.360 --> 00:36:38.110 Their anti-Putin protests in Russia, they were small. 00:36:38.110 --> 00:36:39.640 I don't know how they happened. 00:36:39.640 --> 00:36:40.690 They weren't sufficient. 00:36:40.690 --> 00:36:42.670 They dissipated. 00:36:42.670 --> 00:36:44.843 So it doesn't always happen. 00:36:44.843 --> 00:36:45.760 Doesn't always happen. 00:36:45.760 --> 00:36:48.010 Andrew? 00:36:48.010 --> 00:36:51.340 AUDIENCE: Just as-- it might be an extreme, 00:36:51.340 --> 00:36:54.080 could someone argue that, especially 00:36:54.080 --> 00:36:58.270 in, say, for the Arab Spring movements, that violence 00:36:58.270 --> 00:37:00.960 or the threat of violence, or blackmail 00:37:00.960 --> 00:37:05.410 or the threat of just physically destroying something 00:37:05.410 --> 00:37:08.640 is a means of affecting public policy? 00:37:08.640 --> 00:37:11.800 So not votes, just the fact that there's 00:37:11.800 --> 00:37:14.975 a big body out there that will affect the way the country 00:37:14.975 --> 00:37:15.475 is run. 00:37:15.475 --> 00:37:18.520 So let's read their demands. 00:37:18.520 --> 00:37:20.320 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Well, a standard thing 00:37:20.320 --> 00:37:23.710 that happens, although in France it tends to be well organized, 00:37:23.710 --> 00:37:25.810 mass strikes. 00:37:25.810 --> 00:37:28.870 You can call it-- you call a general strike. 00:37:28.870 --> 00:37:31.420 And if the general strike is effective, 00:37:31.420 --> 00:37:34.305 you've demonstrated that you have the-- 00:37:34.305 --> 00:37:35.680 that enough-- you've demonstrated 00:37:35.680 --> 00:37:38.980 there are enough people care enough about the issue 00:37:38.980 --> 00:37:39.880 to do something. 00:37:39.880 --> 00:37:42.230 I don't know if it has to be physical violence, 00:37:42.230 --> 00:37:44.050 but I think it has to be an action. 00:37:44.050 --> 00:37:47.210 Because that's how you demonstrate that you care, 00:37:47.210 --> 00:37:47.710 right? 00:37:47.710 --> 00:37:50.380 I mean, now, of course, you just send an email to Congress. 00:37:50.380 --> 00:37:52.005 No, that doesn't really say that you're 00:37:52.005 --> 00:37:54.280 very excited about the issue. 00:37:54.280 --> 00:37:55.720 If you go out and march, you stand 00:37:55.720 --> 00:37:58.210 in the hot sun for a few hours, it demonstrates it. 00:38:02.140 --> 00:38:03.850 The story of the Civil Rights Movement 00:38:03.850 --> 00:38:05.620 is kind of the reverse, right? 00:38:05.620 --> 00:38:10.540 There was no threat of violence from the activists. 00:38:10.540 --> 00:38:14.560 It was the violence from those acting against them 00:38:14.560 --> 00:38:15.940 that really built support. 00:38:15.940 --> 00:38:19.330 It was Dr. King's nonviolent strategy 00:38:19.330 --> 00:38:23.980 which worked beyond anything I've seen. 00:38:23.980 --> 00:38:27.670 In the anti-Vietnam, people were pretty nonviolent, too. 00:38:27.670 --> 00:38:30.880 I don't think it mattered much. 00:38:30.880 --> 00:38:33.160 Occupy has been nonviolent. 00:38:33.160 --> 00:38:37.570 The Tea Party, been a little shrill but nonviolent. 00:38:37.570 --> 00:38:40.360 Tea Party's had some effect politically in the Republican 00:38:40.360 --> 00:38:40.990 Party. 00:38:40.990 --> 00:38:45.670 The Occupy Movement seems to have vanished in the night. 00:38:45.670 --> 00:38:48.514 So it's a little bit mysterious. 00:38:48.514 --> 00:38:50.940 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] because you mentioned strikes. 00:38:50.940 --> 00:38:55.680 Because one another where would that category [INAUDIBLE] 00:38:55.680 --> 00:38:58.040 So say some people said, I don't know, 00:38:58.040 --> 00:39:00.790 like tomorrow all bus drivers decided 00:39:00.790 --> 00:39:01.980 that they want to strike. 00:39:01.980 --> 00:39:05.910 So for some reason actually that's more pertinent in Europe 00:39:05.910 --> 00:39:08.460 where transportation is, but I guess I've seen it happen. 00:39:08.460 --> 00:39:09.960 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Those are those 00:39:09.960 --> 00:39:11.280 tend to be very heavily union. 00:39:11.280 --> 00:39:13.460 That's why I talked about a general strike. 00:39:13.460 --> 00:39:16.440 AUDIENCE: So I was going to say, even for a union. 00:39:16.440 --> 00:39:18.860 So because it's a relatively small body, 00:39:18.860 --> 00:39:22.170 but because it exhibits a big-- 00:39:22.170 --> 00:39:24.060 a lot of power and the fact that we 00:39:24.060 --> 00:39:27.350 will have buses or the subway tomorrow, 00:39:27.350 --> 00:39:33.840 will bother a bigger majority of people. 00:39:33.840 --> 00:39:36.060 And basically, that's almost like blackmail. 00:39:36.060 --> 00:39:39.292 So you're influencing what the majority of people 00:39:39.292 --> 00:39:40.500 is thinking about this issue. 00:39:40.500 --> 00:39:43.500 It's not that it's directly influencing 00:39:43.500 --> 00:39:46.543 what you're asking for, which could be wages for bus drivers. 00:39:46.543 --> 00:39:48.960 But they're so frustrated that we don't have buses, so OK, 00:39:48.960 --> 00:39:50.730 let's give them the wages because they're 00:39:50.730 --> 00:39:51.480 causing all this-- 00:39:51.480 --> 00:39:52.500 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: But it can fail. 00:39:52.500 --> 00:39:53.220 It could fail. 00:39:53.220 --> 00:39:55.020 There was a-- I was reading recently 00:39:55.020 --> 00:39:59.190 a fictionalized treatment of the famous police strike in Boston 00:39:59.190 --> 00:40:00.990 in 1919. 00:40:00.990 --> 00:40:03.420 That strike, police hadn't been paid. 00:40:03.420 --> 00:40:06.030 They were underpaid, hadn't gotten a raise in 30 years 00:40:06.030 --> 00:40:08.670 kind of thing, badly underpaid. 00:40:08.670 --> 00:40:09.780 They struck. 00:40:09.780 --> 00:40:12.570 There was a crime wave. 00:40:12.570 --> 00:40:15.420 The police completely lost the popular sympathy, 00:40:15.420 --> 00:40:19.420 and lots of them were fired and jailed and all kinds of things. 00:40:19.420 --> 00:40:20.910 So that was the threat. 00:40:20.910 --> 00:40:22.680 They carried out the threat. 00:40:22.680 --> 00:40:27.630 People got very, very angry, made Calvin Coolidge president 00:40:27.630 --> 00:40:32.050 because of how drastically he reacted against the strike. 00:40:32.050 --> 00:40:37.830 So it's not necessarily a winning strategy. 00:40:37.830 --> 00:40:41.338 It's not necessarily a winning strategy. 00:40:41.338 --> 00:40:41.880 Another hand? 00:40:41.880 --> 00:40:42.433 Yeah? 00:40:42.433 --> 00:40:44.850 AUDIENCE: I'm confused by the difference between the first 00:40:44.850 --> 00:40:46.477 and the second strategies. 00:40:46.477 --> 00:40:48.060 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: The first-- yeah. 00:40:48.060 --> 00:40:49.620 I must say reading that reading the paper, 00:40:49.620 --> 00:40:51.620 I was a little confused about his argument, too. 00:40:51.620 --> 00:40:55.650 He said, well, can you just walk in and say, 00:40:55.650 --> 00:40:57.450 I'm opposed to the Vietnam War. 00:40:57.450 --> 00:41:02.310 I've got-- there are bunch of us and here are my arguments. 00:41:02.310 --> 00:41:05.640 And I think what he's saying is, that's not going to work. 00:41:05.640 --> 00:41:09.870 Social movements work by demonstrating 00:41:09.870 --> 00:41:14.070 that it matters to enough people, 00:41:14.070 --> 00:41:16.050 that you have to take it into account. 00:41:16.050 --> 00:41:19.290 And if the policymaker knows that it 00:41:19.290 --> 00:41:21.510 matters enough to a lot of people, 00:41:21.510 --> 00:41:23.870 you don't need a social movement. 00:41:23.870 --> 00:41:25.620 And if it doesn't-- 00:41:25.620 --> 00:41:30.250 Occupy-- if it doesn't, the movement won't have any effect. 00:41:30.250 --> 00:41:32.430 I think that's what he's saying. 00:41:32.430 --> 00:41:34.620 In my money, in social movements, 00:41:34.620 --> 00:41:38.820 what you want to think about is to think about these three. 00:41:38.820 --> 00:41:42.420 Are you persuading people that a lot of people care? 00:41:42.420 --> 00:41:45.210 Are you making-- changing people's preferences 00:41:45.210 --> 00:41:46.110 toward an issue? 00:41:46.110 --> 00:41:48.690 Are you making them more aware of an issue 00:41:48.690 --> 00:41:50.850 and making it more important? 00:41:50.850 --> 00:41:52.770 You could be aware of fracking. 00:41:52.770 --> 00:41:55.800 You could make it more important in people's-- in people's minds 00:41:55.800 --> 00:41:57.120 by providing information. 00:41:57.120 --> 00:41:59.190 You could raise salience either by awareness 00:41:59.190 --> 00:42:02.670 or on the important side. 00:42:02.670 --> 00:42:05.580 And this is an inside baseball story. 00:42:05.580 --> 00:42:07.770 So I share your confusion about the first. 00:42:07.770 --> 00:42:10.400 I confess, I read his argument on the first one 00:42:10.400 --> 00:42:14.450 and I said, well, what would that look like? 00:42:14.450 --> 00:42:21.570 The closest thing I can think of is maybe in Vietnam 00:42:21.570 --> 00:42:23.550 there was some persuasion, but I think 00:42:23.550 --> 00:42:26.850 what Vietnam was all about was this, 00:42:26.850 --> 00:42:30.690 was letting people know that a large part of the population 00:42:30.690 --> 00:42:32.160 was passionate. 00:42:32.160 --> 00:42:34.650 And that's what happened in Czechoslovakia, 00:42:34.650 --> 00:42:39.450 in East Germany, and generally throughout Eastern Europe. 00:42:39.450 --> 00:42:41.040 Once it became clear the Russians 00:42:41.040 --> 00:42:43.350 weren't going to intervene militarily, 00:42:43.350 --> 00:42:45.330 and it became clear to the government 00:42:45.330 --> 00:42:49.650 that they had no popular support, game over. 00:42:49.650 --> 00:42:50.310 Game over. 00:42:50.310 --> 00:42:50.977 Yeah? 00:42:50.977 --> 00:42:52.560 AUDIENCE: I'm not sure if I'm correct, 00:42:52.560 --> 00:42:57.270 but my theory, my [INAUDIBLE] theory for the Occupy Movement, 00:42:57.270 --> 00:42:59.730 is that it wasn't necessarily [INAUDIBLE] 00:42:59.730 --> 00:43:00.930 by any particular event. 00:43:00.930 --> 00:43:04.428 However, there was-- since the financial crisis and then 00:43:04.428 --> 00:43:06.970 all the economic problems that were happening in the country. 00:43:06.970 --> 00:43:09.720 I think there were just a lot of people unsatisfied 00:43:09.720 --> 00:43:11.070 with the current status. 00:43:11.070 --> 00:43:13.740 But I don't think that would have been enough to trigger 00:43:13.740 --> 00:43:15.585 that movement in-- 00:43:15.585 --> 00:43:16.860 for this particular case. 00:43:16.860 --> 00:43:20.460 I think the actual people, the initial leaders 00:43:20.460 --> 00:43:22.335 who tried to convince people, those 00:43:22.335 --> 00:43:23.460 are really the key players. 00:43:23.460 --> 00:43:25.460 I don't think that's something that would have-- 00:43:25.460 --> 00:43:27.840 that was bound to happen, regardless of whether or not 00:43:27.840 --> 00:43:29.100 someone had started. 00:43:29.100 --> 00:43:30.300 I don't think it would have been something 00:43:30.300 --> 00:43:32.010 that if it didn't happen then, it would 00:43:32.010 --> 00:43:33.450 have happened two months after. 00:43:33.450 --> 00:43:35.940 I just think that the people who initially organized it 00:43:35.940 --> 00:43:37.410 did a really good job. 00:43:37.410 --> 00:43:42.580 They [INAUDIBLE] this anarchy concept of-- 00:43:42.580 --> 00:43:47.010 they had all those masks of that movie V for Vendetta. 00:43:47.010 --> 00:43:49.800 And they [INAUDIBLE] that image, and they 00:43:49.800 --> 00:43:53.220 were just very secretive about how they attracted people. 00:43:53.220 --> 00:43:54.930 They became viral and [INAUDIBLE] 00:43:54.930 --> 00:43:55.700 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Became viral, 00:43:55.700 --> 00:43:57.158 but what's interesting is you point 00:43:57.158 --> 00:43:59.340 to the particular leaders. 00:43:59.340 --> 00:44:02.945 I mean, they occupied Portland, Oregon for heaven's sakes. 00:44:02.945 --> 00:44:03.810 What was that about? 00:44:03.810 --> 00:44:05.850 This was a protest against global capitalism? 00:44:05.850 --> 00:44:07.330 Have you been to Portland, Oregon? 00:44:07.330 --> 00:44:10.350 I mean, this is not the financial hub 00:44:10.350 --> 00:44:11.910 of the Western world with millions 00:44:11.910 --> 00:44:14.470 of people getting rich on the backs of the masses, right? 00:44:14.470 --> 00:44:15.600 It's a pretty mellow place. 00:44:15.600 --> 00:44:17.280 But they occupied Portland. 00:44:17.280 --> 00:44:22.590 So they occupied a lot of places. 00:44:22.590 --> 00:44:23.160 I give up. 00:44:23.160 --> 00:44:23.790 Let me move on. 00:44:23.790 --> 00:44:24.600 Yeah, Julian? 00:44:24.600 --> 00:44:27.097 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 00:44:27.097 --> 00:44:29.430 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: I was going to try, but undoubtedly 00:44:29.430 --> 00:44:30.390 as profound. 00:44:30.390 --> 00:44:32.010 Give it a shot. 00:44:32.010 --> 00:44:36.285 AUDIENCE: I think, [INAUDIBLE] it's kind of the precipitation 00:44:36.285 --> 00:44:43.840 of a general sentiment that the government isn't necessarily 00:44:43.840 --> 00:44:47.937 benefiting [INAUDIBLE] I feel like [INAUDIBLE] 00:44:47.937 --> 00:44:50.270 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Which is exactly what the Tea Party 00:44:50.270 --> 00:44:52.670 people thought, too, which is interesting. 00:44:52.670 --> 00:44:53.610 I mean that's it. 00:44:53.610 --> 00:44:55.610 There's something wrong in Washington, something 00:44:55.610 --> 00:44:58.830 wrong with a different diagnosis. 00:44:58.830 --> 00:45:00.080 AUDIENCE: Different diagnosis. 00:45:00.080 --> 00:45:03.770 I mean, very different ideas in the Tea Party movement. 00:45:03.770 --> 00:45:11.150 But it's just a general precipitation of some things 00:45:11.150 --> 00:45:16.220 wrong you don't necessarily like it from a financial statement. 00:45:16.220 --> 00:45:19.550 The grand majority of people that took place in-- 00:45:19.550 --> 00:45:22.730 they don't necessarily know what is wrong 00:45:22.730 --> 00:45:24.720 or exactly how to fix it to begin with. 00:45:24.720 --> 00:45:28.910 So I think that's one of the reasons why it died out 00:45:28.910 --> 00:45:32.357 is that it just became a general shout of, I'm angry. 00:45:32.357 --> 00:45:33.440 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Yeah. 00:45:33.440 --> 00:45:35.542 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] nothing-- 00:45:35.542 --> 00:45:38.000 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: And you saw a lot of movements of the, 00:45:38.000 --> 00:45:41.390 I'm angry variety during the Great Depression, 00:45:41.390 --> 00:45:42.710 from both left and right. 00:45:42.710 --> 00:45:47.360 So it does-- you do get this in hard times. 00:45:47.360 --> 00:45:49.046 There was a-- 00:45:49.046 --> 00:45:53.720 I think sometime in the '30s, there was a World War I 00:45:53.720 --> 00:45:55.850 veterans March on Washington because pensions 00:45:55.850 --> 00:45:56.960 weren't adequate. 00:45:56.960 --> 00:46:00.500 And you got the rise of both extreme left and extreme 00:46:00.500 --> 00:46:02.810 right political groups on the grounds 00:46:02.810 --> 00:46:04.590 that it's just not right. 00:46:04.590 --> 00:46:09.050 The Tea Party movement has more heft because it actually 00:46:09.050 --> 00:46:12.260 has clearer objectives, right? 00:46:12.260 --> 00:46:14.480 There's a caucus in Congress. 00:46:14.480 --> 00:46:17.000 There are relatively organized groups 00:46:17.000 --> 00:46:19.730 in some congressional districts. 00:46:19.730 --> 00:46:21.410 Tea Party backing is a big deal. 00:46:21.410 --> 00:46:24.020 They have a convention, so they've made themselves 00:46:24.020 --> 00:46:30.100 into an interest group from a movement, interestingly enough. 00:46:30.100 --> 00:46:32.395 With a little incoherence. 00:46:32.395 --> 00:46:34.480 There was a split between the Boston Tea 00:46:34.480 --> 00:46:37.570 Party and the Worcester Tea Party recently, 00:46:37.570 --> 00:46:40.432 so they had separate rallies. 00:46:40.432 --> 00:46:41.890 The Worcester Tea Party said, we're 00:46:41.890 --> 00:46:45.130 all about low taxes and limited government and stuff like that. 00:46:45.130 --> 00:46:46.840 And the Boston Tea Party said, yeah, 00:46:46.840 --> 00:46:48.558 and we hate gay marriage, too. 00:46:48.558 --> 00:46:50.350 And the Worcester people said, no, maybe we 00:46:50.350 --> 00:46:51.880 ought to just stay focused. 00:46:51.880 --> 00:46:52.930 So they split. 00:46:52.930 --> 00:46:54.790 Anyway. 00:46:54.790 --> 00:46:56.620 OK. 00:46:56.620 --> 00:47:00.520 To get a little closer to this course 00:47:00.520 --> 00:47:05.350 and a little less abstract, there's an interesting-- 00:47:05.350 --> 00:47:08.080 the other assigned paper is [INAUDIBLE] 00:47:08.080 --> 00:47:09.550 which is about nuclear power. 00:47:14.140 --> 00:47:19.510 And they trace the partial evolution of the politics here. 00:47:19.510 --> 00:47:21.160 What did the politics of nuclear power 00:47:21.160 --> 00:47:23.530 look like in the '50s and '60s? 00:47:23.530 --> 00:47:25.420 Movements, interest groups, what? 00:47:28.800 --> 00:47:30.303 That was a hand? 00:47:30.303 --> 00:47:31.220 No, it was not waving. 00:47:31.220 --> 00:47:32.340 OK. 00:47:32.340 --> 00:47:32.917 Yeah. 00:47:32.917 --> 00:47:33.750 Brandon, you got it. 00:47:33.750 --> 00:47:34.632 OK. 00:47:34.632 --> 00:47:36.840 AUDIENCE: I think it was kind of like, let's do this. 00:47:36.840 --> 00:47:39.378 This is gonna be-- it's gonna cost pennies to-- it's going 00:47:39.378 --> 00:47:40.170 to cost you penny-- 00:47:40.170 --> 00:47:42.462 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Too cheap to meter was the phrase. 00:47:42.462 --> 00:47:43.358 Too cheap to meter. 00:47:43.358 --> 00:47:44.816 AUDIENCE: It was very enthusiastic. 00:47:44.816 --> 00:47:46.110 The navy was going nuclear. 00:47:46.110 --> 00:47:47.902 There was a lot of proliferation technology 00:47:47.902 --> 00:47:51.090 out there so these reactors were ready to build. 00:47:51.090 --> 00:47:53.420 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: And the politics 00:47:53.420 --> 00:47:56.810 was industry interest groups, right? 00:47:56.810 --> 00:48:01.650 There were-- the paper labeled a bunch of them. 00:48:01.650 --> 00:48:03.320 The big thing, their big win was there's 00:48:03.320 --> 00:48:07.730 a limit still in force on the liability of any-- 00:48:07.730 --> 00:48:09.530 related to any nuclear facility. 00:48:09.530 --> 00:48:11.600 The Atomic Energy Commission was regulatory, 00:48:11.600 --> 00:48:16.790 but it also was promoting Atomic Energy as well as regulating. 00:48:16.790 --> 00:48:20.330 So it was like the early years of airline travel 00:48:20.330 --> 00:48:25.700 where what politics there was was positive, 00:48:25.700 --> 00:48:31.040 industry groups dominated, inside the beltway stuff. 00:48:31.040 --> 00:48:34.520 Not much in the media, except for cheap, swell, good, clean, 00:48:34.520 --> 00:48:36.950 et cetera. 00:48:36.950 --> 00:48:38.150 What happened in the '70s? 00:48:41.920 --> 00:48:42.420 Yeah? 00:48:42.420 --> 00:48:44.980 AUDIENCE: It was a combination of a movie called 00:48:44.980 --> 00:48:47.700 The China Syndrome that came out and then Three Mile Island-- 00:48:47.700 --> 00:48:48.310 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: China Syndrome 00:48:48.310 --> 00:48:49.590 might have been a little later, but go ahead. 00:48:49.590 --> 00:48:50.250 Not much later. 00:48:50.250 --> 00:48:50.942 AUDIENCE: They were similar. 00:48:50.942 --> 00:48:51.290 [INAUDIBLE] 00:48:51.290 --> 00:48:52.820 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: It followed Three Mile Island a little bit. 00:48:52.820 --> 00:48:55.450 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] Three Mile Island happened, 00:48:55.450 --> 00:48:58.270 which seemed to mimic the movie with like, oh geez, 00:48:58.270 --> 00:48:59.200 this is reality. 00:48:59.200 --> 00:49:00.510 It's actually dangerous. 00:49:00.510 --> 00:49:01.927 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: And you began 00:49:01.927 --> 00:49:03.960 to get a different kind of politics, right? 00:49:03.960 --> 00:49:05.280 Politically, what did you get? 00:49:10.516 --> 00:49:12.420 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 00:49:12.420 --> 00:49:14.520 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: I showed you. 00:49:14.520 --> 00:49:16.260 What was on that slide? 00:49:16.260 --> 00:49:17.800 You've got an anti-nuclear movement. 00:49:17.800 --> 00:49:19.140 You've got people marching. 00:49:19.140 --> 00:49:20.850 You've got protests. 00:49:20.850 --> 00:49:23.910 All of a sudden, you had these industry groups in Washington 00:49:23.910 --> 00:49:28.200 with guys in suits and other capitals for that matter. 00:49:28.200 --> 00:49:30.030 It wasn't just an American phenomenon. 00:49:30.030 --> 00:49:33.780 And then you begin to have those German marchers 00:49:33.780 --> 00:49:38.220 and the Japanese marchers and Vermont is recent, 00:49:38.220 --> 00:49:39.660 but you had American marchers. 00:49:39.660 --> 00:49:43.500 You began to get an anti-nuclear movement with protests. 00:49:43.500 --> 00:49:48.570 And after Three Mile Island, the industry stopped. 00:49:48.570 --> 00:49:50.640 Now this is the neat part, which I actually 00:49:50.640 --> 00:49:53.850 wasn't aware of until I saw the article. 00:49:53.850 --> 00:49:57.760 What did the industry try to do to react to this? 00:49:57.760 --> 00:49:59.658 Do you have the guys in suits in Washington? 00:49:59.658 --> 00:50:00.700 Are they a good reaction? 00:50:00.700 --> 00:50:01.200 Yeah? 00:50:01.200 --> 00:50:03.850 AUDIENCE: They tried to form their own pro-nuclear movement. 00:50:03.850 --> 00:50:06.880 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: They try to do a pro-nuclear movement. 00:50:06.880 --> 00:50:07.945 Did it work? 00:50:07.945 --> 00:50:09.340 AUDIENCE: Not really. 00:50:09.340 --> 00:50:11.230 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: How come? 00:50:11.230 --> 00:50:14.440 AUDIENCE: Well, the article mentions like the anti-nuclear 00:50:14.440 --> 00:50:19.204 movement came from the people, and they all felt like he-- 00:50:19.204 --> 00:50:22.550 or that an industry-backed movement [INAUDIBLE] 00:50:22.550 --> 00:50:26.300 so they were set apart from the masses. 00:50:26.300 --> 00:50:28.850 And then [INAUDIBLE] 00:50:28.850 --> 00:50:30.920 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: So they tried to do it, 00:50:30.920 --> 00:50:34.870 but they really had trouble making it authentic. 00:50:34.870 --> 00:50:39.200 The anti-nuclear movement was mom and pop and your uncle 00:50:39.200 --> 00:50:41.600 and people really upset, and the pro-nuclear movement 00:50:41.600 --> 00:50:46.790 was industry people with their ties off. 00:50:46.790 --> 00:50:49.580 The phrase they use in the businesses 00:50:49.580 --> 00:50:54.470 to distinguish between grassroots and AstroTurf. 00:50:54.470 --> 00:50:56.900 Grassroots movements are really genuine 00:50:56.900 --> 00:50:58.910 and reflect popular sentiment. 00:50:58.910 --> 00:51:02.390 AstroTurf is created, right? 00:51:02.390 --> 00:51:05.240 You can see it when you get emails-- 00:51:05.240 --> 00:51:08.630 when a congressional office gets emails on an issue and they're 00:51:08.630 --> 00:51:11.030 all identical. 00:51:11.030 --> 00:51:12.620 You say, oh. 00:51:12.620 --> 00:51:14.570 That's AstroTurf. 00:51:14.570 --> 00:51:18.410 Somebody is really pushing people to send-- 00:51:18.410 --> 00:51:23.120 somebody's saying to all their employees, send this email. 00:51:23.120 --> 00:51:25.640 That's not people being passionate. 00:51:25.640 --> 00:51:29.510 And it just didn't work, didn't work. 00:51:29.510 --> 00:51:31.640 It was an attempt to create a movement 00:51:31.640 --> 00:51:33.740 to affect energy policy. 00:51:33.740 --> 00:51:34.400 Didn't work. 00:51:36.980 --> 00:51:40.700 There's not a lot of social movements in energy directly. 00:51:40.700 --> 00:51:44.300 You see them more on the environmental side. 00:51:44.300 --> 00:51:47.510 And the piece by [? Rooked-- ?] but environmental movements 00:51:47.510 --> 00:51:49.370 affect energy, so it's worth talking about. 00:51:52.210 --> 00:51:56.950 That's a depressing article, if you read the first part 00:51:56.950 --> 00:51:58.570 in a bad mood. 00:51:58.570 --> 00:52:00.490 Because he says the environment's gotten worse 00:52:00.490 --> 00:52:02.770 and species are getting extinct, and we're 00:52:02.770 --> 00:52:04.570 depleting natural resources. 00:52:04.570 --> 00:52:07.420 I would just argue that he's measuring against the past, 00:52:07.420 --> 00:52:08.920 not against what would have happened 00:52:08.920 --> 00:52:12.520 but for the environmental movement since the air 00:52:12.520 --> 00:52:15.370 and the water in US and Europe and many other places 00:52:15.370 --> 00:52:17.950 has improved notably. 00:52:17.950 --> 00:52:22.240 Nobody believes that, but those are the numbers. 00:52:22.240 --> 00:52:26.650 He argues-- so he's trying to be quantitative. 00:52:26.650 --> 00:52:31.510 He says that an environmental movement can 00:52:31.510 --> 00:52:34.600 work through lobbying, can work through public opinion, 00:52:34.600 --> 00:52:38.290 can work through individual attitudes, 00:52:38.290 --> 00:52:42.830 or through a Green Party, as exist in some countries. 00:52:42.830 --> 00:52:46.980 And the reason he does this rather than thinking 00:52:46.980 --> 00:52:49.950 about the ways we just finished talking about, the more general 00:52:49.950 --> 00:52:53.145 ways, is he's got measures of all these things. 00:52:53.145 --> 00:52:57.510 He's got measures of how big the green movement is. 00:52:57.510 --> 00:52:59.520 He's got measures of public opinion. 00:52:59.520 --> 00:53:03.243 He's got measures of attitudes of various kinds, 00:53:03.243 --> 00:53:05.160 and he certainly knows whether there's a Green 00:53:05.160 --> 00:53:06.870 Party that gets any votes. 00:53:06.870 --> 00:53:09.630 So he can measure these channels, 00:53:09.630 --> 00:53:14.470 and he gives you this nice picture. 00:53:14.470 --> 00:53:19.620 So environmental movements react to environmental problems. 00:53:19.620 --> 00:53:21.780 I think interpreted largely via sciences 00:53:21.780 --> 00:53:24.340 is a little too optimistic, but perceive 00:53:24.340 --> 00:53:26.310 problems they can lobby. 00:53:26.310 --> 00:53:28.620 They can be an interest group. 00:53:28.620 --> 00:53:32.700 The Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense 00:53:32.700 --> 00:53:35.910 Council, the Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club. 00:53:39.560 --> 00:53:40.260 There are more. 00:53:40.260 --> 00:53:43.800 I'm trying to think of a few, but they lobby as well as do 00:53:43.800 --> 00:53:45.970 other things. 00:53:45.970 --> 00:53:48.240 And so here are his channels. 00:53:48.240 --> 00:53:56.430 So he has this very interesting table. 00:53:56.430 --> 00:53:59.340 Based on a set of measures, he looks 00:53:59.340 --> 00:54:03.870 at the strength of environmental pressure groups. 00:54:03.870 --> 00:54:06.870 He looks, based on opinion polls, attitudes 00:54:06.870 --> 00:54:08.560 toward the environment. 00:54:08.560 --> 00:54:14.100 Is there a Green Party, and how strong is the policy 00:54:14.100 --> 00:54:17.340 and what's happened to the environment? 00:54:17.340 --> 00:54:22.890 It's interesting, the US scores high in terms 00:54:22.890 --> 00:54:26.510 of the environmental pressure group. 00:54:26.510 --> 00:54:29.660 We're kind of in the middle in terms of attitudes. 00:54:29.660 --> 00:54:31.640 We don't have a Green Party. 00:54:31.640 --> 00:54:33.470 A lot of places don't have green parties, 00:54:33.470 --> 00:54:36.680 and we're kind of in the middle on policy efforts, which 00:54:36.680 --> 00:54:40.110 I think is, compared to these countries, 00:54:40.110 --> 00:54:46.790 I think is not far off the mark roughly. 00:54:46.790 --> 00:54:49.240 And we're in the middle in terms of Environmental Quality. 00:54:49.240 --> 00:54:50.830 I forget how he measures that. 00:54:50.830 --> 00:54:54.650 That's a tough one because he's got so many different things. 00:54:54.650 --> 00:55:00.220 But this is the summary, his summary of how these work. 00:55:00.220 --> 00:55:02.590 And I must say-- 00:55:02.590 --> 00:55:03.760 so what he did was-- 00:55:03.760 --> 00:55:10.010 to be clear, the US gets a three here. 00:55:10.010 --> 00:55:11.750 It gets a two here. 00:55:11.750 --> 00:55:13.550 It gets a one here. 00:55:13.550 --> 00:55:15.350 It gets a one there. 00:55:15.350 --> 00:55:18.330 And a one-- sorry, a two there and a two there. 00:55:18.330 --> 00:55:19.220 This is three. 00:55:19.220 --> 00:55:20.240 This is two. 00:55:20.240 --> 00:55:21.380 This is one. 00:55:21.380 --> 00:55:24.140 And then he looks at correlations, 00:55:24.140 --> 00:55:27.460 which is not obviously the right way to do it. 00:55:27.460 --> 00:55:30.930 It's not, I would say, the wrong way to do it. 00:55:30.930 --> 00:55:32.300 But here they are. 00:55:36.040 --> 00:55:36.540 OK. 00:55:36.540 --> 00:55:41.160 So reading across, an environmental pressure group 00:55:41.160 --> 00:55:44.790 is most strongly associated with the strength of policy 00:55:44.790 --> 00:55:46.890 across countries. 00:55:46.890 --> 00:55:50.610 Has very little to do with whether there's a Green Party 00:55:50.610 --> 00:55:53.910 or not, the stars or statistical significance. 00:55:53.910 --> 00:55:57.930 Very little to do with whether there's a Green Party or not. 00:55:57.930 --> 00:56:00.210 Why don't we have a Green Party in the United States? 00:56:05.470 --> 00:56:06.469 Brendan? 00:56:06.469 --> 00:56:07.594 AUDIENCE: I thought we did. 00:56:07.594 --> 00:56:09.490 Wasn't that Ralph Nader [INAUDIBLE]?? 00:56:09.490 --> 00:56:10.670 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Oh. 00:56:10.670 --> 00:56:12.500 Is that what he called it? 00:56:12.500 --> 00:56:13.660 OK. 00:56:13.660 --> 00:56:14.903 We might have once. 00:56:14.903 --> 00:56:15.820 We don't have one now. 00:56:15.820 --> 00:56:17.110 They do in Germany. 00:56:17.110 --> 00:56:20.330 Various other countries do. 00:56:20.330 --> 00:56:23.093 Well, Julian? 00:56:23.093 --> 00:56:25.518 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] it's just insignificant. 00:56:25.518 --> 00:56:26.810 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: It's what? 00:56:26.810 --> 00:56:27.710 AUDIENCE: It's just insignificant. 00:56:27.710 --> 00:56:28.580 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Insignificant. 00:56:28.580 --> 00:56:28.850 Yeah. 00:56:28.850 --> 00:56:29.900 Well, maybe that's it. 00:56:29.900 --> 00:56:31.845 Why don't we have one that's significant? 00:56:31.845 --> 00:56:33.553 AUDIENCE: Well, we've always been heavily 00:56:33.553 --> 00:56:36.496 polarized [INAUDIBLE] Democrats or Republicans. 00:56:36.496 --> 00:56:38.912 It's really hard for any party to break into that 00:56:38.912 --> 00:56:40.620 and make a three party system, especially 00:56:40.620 --> 00:56:45.022 a Green, which is like a subset of the Democratic party. 00:56:45.022 --> 00:56:46.730 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: It's very important. 00:56:46.730 --> 00:56:49.940 Our electoral rules are pretty important as they 00:56:49.940 --> 00:56:51.770 are in some countries. 00:56:51.770 --> 00:56:58.250 In some countries, you vote for the party, not the candidate. 00:56:58.250 --> 00:57:01.700 And the party has representation in parliament, 00:57:01.700 --> 00:57:04.280 depending on the percentage of the votes it gets. 00:57:04.280 --> 00:57:08.630 In that case, a Green Party could get 5%, 6% of the votes 00:57:08.630 --> 00:57:11.510 and have somebody in Washington. 00:57:11.510 --> 00:57:14.540 Here, you've got to win a majority to get into the house, 00:57:14.540 --> 00:57:16.700 to get into the Senate. 00:57:16.700 --> 00:57:18.680 It's very tough for third parties 00:57:18.680 --> 00:57:20.840 of any kind in our system. 00:57:20.840 --> 00:57:22.490 Not in all systems. 00:57:22.490 --> 00:57:25.400 I wouldn't say we're heavily-- we're heavily polarized now. 00:57:25.400 --> 00:57:28.235 The Republican and Democratic parties used to overlap more. 00:57:28.235 --> 00:57:31.040 You used to actually have conservative Democrats who 00:57:31.040 --> 00:57:33.200 were more conservative than liberal Republicans, 00:57:33.200 --> 00:57:35.730 believe it or not. 00:57:35.730 --> 00:57:42.020 So one of the reasons for this is electoral laws. 00:57:42.020 --> 00:57:50.470 But it's-- this is the strongest correlation he's got. 00:57:50.470 --> 00:57:52.090 And that's between the importance 00:57:52.090 --> 00:57:55.660 of environmental pressure groups and the strength of policy 00:57:55.660 --> 00:57:58.510 efforts to preserve the environment, which 00:57:58.510 --> 00:58:00.790 is sort of interesting. 00:58:00.790 --> 00:58:04.660 He says the environmental movement does matter. 00:58:04.660 --> 00:58:08.140 He called-- the environmental movement pressure. 00:58:08.140 --> 00:58:12.640 If you think about it in the US, we don't actually 00:58:12.640 --> 00:58:18.960 have a lot of marches and rallies for the environment. 00:58:18.960 --> 00:58:22.140 We have interest groups in Washington. 00:58:22.140 --> 00:58:24.560 The Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, the this, 00:58:24.560 --> 00:58:25.290 the that. 00:58:25.290 --> 00:58:28.080 So there are not a lot of non-conventional actions being 00:58:28.080 --> 00:58:29.670 done to save the environment. 00:58:29.670 --> 00:58:32.280 There was a time in the Pacific Northwest 00:58:32.280 --> 00:58:34.740 when people would drive iron spikes into trees 00:58:34.740 --> 00:58:36.300 to prevent logging. 00:58:36.300 --> 00:58:38.910 You don't hear much of that anymore. 00:58:38.910 --> 00:58:42.720 You don't hear people chaining themselves to a nuclear power 00:58:42.720 --> 00:58:44.650 plant much anymore. 00:58:44.650 --> 00:58:47.220 So at this point, we're lobbying. 00:58:47.220 --> 00:58:48.845 Other places, stronger. 00:58:48.845 --> 00:58:50.220 The other interesting correlation 00:58:50.220 --> 00:58:52.590 is how much stronger the correlation 00:58:52.590 --> 00:58:55.320 between environmental movement pressure and policy 00:58:55.320 --> 00:58:57.510 is than between movement pressure 00:58:57.510 --> 00:59:03.480 and his measure, at least, of changes in the environment. 00:59:03.480 --> 00:59:07.370 And part of that has to do with where you are 00:59:07.370 --> 00:59:09.530 and what the natural conditions are, right? 00:59:09.530 --> 00:59:13.040 Policy efforts in Los Angeles are extraordinary. 00:59:13.040 --> 00:59:16.630 Los Angeles has dirty air. 00:59:16.630 --> 00:59:20.830 I don't think there's a European country that takes as much pain 00:59:20.830 --> 00:59:24.310 to preserve air quality as there is done in the Los Angeles 00:59:24.310 --> 00:59:25.040 basin. 00:59:25.040 --> 00:59:26.470 It's just really hard. 00:59:26.470 --> 00:59:28.450 It just doesn't ventilate. 00:59:28.450 --> 00:59:32.380 So the notion that-- and if you're highly-- 00:59:32.380 --> 00:59:34.420 if it's a very dense country, it's 00:59:34.420 --> 00:59:38.770 kind of hard to preserve species against development and so 00:59:38.770 --> 00:59:40.190 on and so forth. 00:59:40.190 --> 00:59:41.725 So, I don't know. 00:59:41.725 --> 00:59:44.830 You believe the-- are you persuaded by the article? 00:59:44.830 --> 00:59:46.590 Comments on it? 00:59:46.590 --> 00:59:50.410 Does that actually seem like a plausible description 00:59:50.410 --> 00:59:53.215 of interest group, of environmental politics? 00:59:56.390 --> 01:00:01.400 And I would notice also that the difference-- 01:00:01.400 --> 01:00:05.870 the link between-- and, again, causation is an inference. 01:00:05.870 --> 01:00:08.480 Its correlation is all we measure. 01:00:08.480 --> 01:00:12.080 The link between individual-- 01:00:12.080 --> 01:00:14.030 between environmental pressure and attitudes 01:00:14.030 --> 01:00:17.780 isn't that great, which makes sense in the US, right? 01:00:17.780 --> 01:00:22.170 Because the Sierra Club isn't trying to persuade you and me. 01:00:22.170 --> 01:00:25.400 It's trying to persuade Congress and the EPA. 01:00:25.400 --> 01:00:30.920 So if it's successful there, it wins. 01:00:30.920 --> 01:00:34.190 Individual attitudes and policy, not that strong either. 01:00:34.190 --> 01:00:36.690 Not that strong a correlation. 01:00:36.690 --> 01:00:42.650 So this is sort of a picture of lobbying 01:00:42.650 --> 01:00:45.500 where the environmental movement acts directly on policy. 01:00:45.500 --> 01:00:49.190 Doesn't act indirectly, seems to me, 01:00:49.190 --> 01:00:53.240 through parades, mass marches, demonstrations, and any 01:00:53.240 --> 01:00:56.420 of those other mechanisms. 01:00:56.420 --> 01:00:57.890 I think that's a fair description 01:00:57.890 --> 01:00:59.270 of the movement now in the US. 01:00:59.270 --> 01:01:00.320 Yeah? 01:01:00.320 --> 01:01:02.480 AUDIENCE: Seems to me, seems pretty reasonable 01:01:02.480 --> 01:01:04.720 even though it's correlation not causation, right? 01:01:04.720 --> 01:01:07.610 Because although one can make the argument 01:01:07.610 --> 01:01:11.150 that interest groups [INAUDIBLE] people would come out 01:01:11.150 --> 01:01:13.490 after certain policy is made. 01:01:13.490 --> 01:01:16.850 It seems to me that the more logical flow 01:01:16.850 --> 01:01:19.520 would be for information-- 01:01:19.520 --> 01:01:22.130 for those groups to be formed initially and then 01:01:22.130 --> 01:01:24.470 the policy is made. 01:01:24.470 --> 01:01:26.900 So even though he proved only correlation, 01:01:26.900 --> 01:01:29.070 I think that that flow makes more sense. 01:01:29.070 --> 01:01:30.320 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Oh, yeah. 01:01:30.320 --> 01:01:30.530 No. 01:01:30.530 --> 01:01:31.530 It's not-- is not from-- 01:01:34.700 --> 01:01:37.430 in fact, it can go the other way. 01:01:37.430 --> 01:01:41.210 Because when Reagan basically declared war 01:01:41.210 --> 01:01:44.900 on environmental policy, the memberships of those groups 01:01:44.900 --> 01:01:48.590 soared because they saw a threat. 01:01:48.590 --> 01:01:52.668 And the groups sent out mass mailings, saying, look 01:01:52.668 --> 01:01:54.710 what this guy is trying to do to the environment, 01:01:54.710 --> 01:01:56.060 and the money flowed in. 01:01:58.890 --> 01:02:02.780 So the question of, are they exerting pressure? 01:02:02.780 --> 01:02:05.510 Yes, but in that case, they were exerting more pressure 01:02:05.510 --> 01:02:08.720 in a much more hostile environment politically. 01:02:08.720 --> 01:02:11.300 So yeah. 01:02:11.300 --> 01:02:17.360 I think that the direction is generally right. 01:02:17.360 --> 01:02:20.470 Any other comments? 01:02:20.470 --> 01:02:21.688 Yeah, Charlotte? 01:02:21.688 --> 01:02:22.480 AUDIENCE: I guess-- 01:02:22.480 --> 01:02:24.250 I know he had a system for doing all this, 01:02:24.250 --> 01:02:26.290 but it seems like you could come up with a different system 01:02:26.290 --> 01:02:27.430 and get different results. 01:02:27.430 --> 01:02:28.602 And-- 01:02:28.602 --> 01:02:31.060 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: You're just not a natural sociologist. 01:02:31.060 --> 01:02:31.602 You're just-- 01:02:31.602 --> 01:02:33.350 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] apply to this. 01:02:33.350 --> 01:02:35.890 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Yeah, well-- 01:02:35.890 --> 01:02:42.250 but this raises a general problem in social science. 01:02:42.250 --> 01:02:46.090 In economics, we get lucky because you 01:02:46.090 --> 01:02:49.720 have dollars and quantities and tons and stuff. 01:02:49.720 --> 01:02:51.550 This is sociology. 01:02:51.550 --> 01:02:52.390 What have you got? 01:02:52.390 --> 01:02:54.010 You've got attitudes. 01:02:54.010 --> 01:02:56.012 You've got some ill-defined measures 01:02:56.012 --> 01:02:57.220 of this, that, and the other. 01:02:57.220 --> 01:03:02.440 You want to say, are environmental groups effective? 01:03:02.440 --> 01:03:06.700 It seems to me you're stuck doing something like this. 01:03:06.700 --> 01:03:08.710 You could do it well or poorly. 01:03:08.710 --> 01:03:11.292 I think this is pretty good. 01:03:11.292 --> 01:03:13.250 I'm still not-- I hadn't thought about it much, 01:03:13.250 --> 01:03:14.833 but it just didn't strike me that just 01:03:14.833 --> 01:03:18.070 running ordinary correlations is quite the right way to do it. 01:03:18.070 --> 01:03:20.818 But there's no obviously better way that comes to mind. 01:03:20.818 --> 01:03:21.360 I don't know. 01:03:21.360 --> 01:03:22.110 What would you do? 01:03:22.110 --> 01:03:25.030 AUDIENCE: I think I'd be more persuaded by case studies where 01:03:25.030 --> 01:03:27.850 it did work in the case where there was a Green Party 01:03:27.850 --> 01:03:29.267 or wasn't a Green Party, or didn't 01:03:29.267 --> 01:03:32.350 work in that sort of case. 01:03:32.350 --> 01:03:35.832 I think I'd be able to relate to that more. 01:03:35.832 --> 01:03:38.317 And I know that's not as general as what 01:03:38.317 --> 01:03:39.317 he's trying to do here-- 01:03:39.317 --> 01:03:39.760 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Yep. 01:03:39.760 --> 01:03:42.400 AUDIENCE: --but I think that maybe he makes it too general. 01:03:42.400 --> 01:03:44.108 Like, what's the difference between a 0.6 01:03:44.108 --> 01:03:45.910 and a 0.7 on his little scale? 01:03:45.910 --> 01:03:47.436 That doesn't mean anything to me. 01:03:47.436 --> 01:03:49.930 RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: No, I'm sort of with you. 01:03:52.690 --> 01:03:57.250 I'd prefer to understand one or two cases well than 18 cases 01:03:57.250 --> 01:03:59.530 badly. 01:03:59.530 --> 01:04:06.190 The issue he's-- well, it's a general problem, right? 01:04:06.190 --> 01:04:08.410 You do a case study. 01:04:08.410 --> 01:04:12.010 You have a study where n equals 1, right? 01:04:12.010 --> 01:04:14.770 You can't test the hypothesis with n equals 1. 01:04:14.770 --> 01:04:18.280 So if you're interested in testing a hypothesis, say, 01:04:18.280 --> 01:04:20.470 environmental movements operate mainly 01:04:20.470 --> 01:04:25.690 through individual attitudes, you can't do n equals 1. 01:04:25.690 --> 01:04:29.290 You could probably do before and after in a case study. 01:04:29.290 --> 01:04:31.000 You could try it. 01:04:31.000 --> 01:04:34.090 But, of course, you can't hold everything else constant. 01:04:34.090 --> 01:04:36.910 No, I'm sympathetic. 01:04:36.910 --> 01:04:42.220 I'm not excited about uni-dimensional measures 01:04:42.220 --> 01:04:44.380 of policy efforts, right? 01:04:44.380 --> 01:04:46.308 I mean, US policy is stronger than some 01:04:46.308 --> 01:04:48.100 of those other countries on some dimensions 01:04:48.100 --> 01:04:49.090 and weaker on others. 01:04:52.030 --> 01:04:54.910 European tax systems favor use of diesels. 01:04:54.910 --> 01:04:56.470 Diesels produce small particulates. 01:04:56.470 --> 01:04:59.970 Small particulates have terrible health effects. 01:04:59.970 --> 01:05:01.720 So are they more environmentally conscious 01:05:01.720 --> 01:05:04.180 than we are because they recycle or more, 01:05:04.180 --> 01:05:05.860 or are we more environmentally conscious 01:05:05.860 --> 01:05:08.200 because we avoid diesels? 01:05:08.200 --> 01:05:09.380 Very hard to do. 01:05:09.380 --> 01:05:09.880 Yeah. 01:05:09.880 --> 01:05:12.440 No, I take the point. 01:05:12.440 --> 01:05:13.090 Anybody else? 01:05:16.490 --> 01:05:19.200 OK. 01:05:19.200 --> 01:05:23.940 We will, Wednesday, talk about US environmental policy, 01:05:23.940 --> 01:05:26.290 walking through the case study and looking beyond it. 01:05:26.290 --> 01:05:28.810 So please read that. 01:05:28.810 --> 01:05:31.260 And for those of you who came late, 01:05:31.260 --> 01:05:33.210 Monday we will see if we can find 01:05:33.210 --> 01:05:34.830 a guest speaker for an hour, and we'll 01:05:34.830 --> 01:05:38.100 do an hour's soft shoe on-- a half an hour soft shoe 01:05:38.100 --> 01:05:43.400 on green growth, reflecting the will of a narrow majority.