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RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: OK.
Social movements remind you of the picture
we had the first day, and once or twice--
I should have done it more often since--
but on the first day we've been talking about policy making.
We did on Monday.
We talked mainly about interest groups
here, a little bit about regulatory processes.
We'll come back to that on Wednesday.
But up here at the top is this vague outside the box--
outside these boxes, at least, category of norms and customs
and values and traditions and institutions
that we had movements in their, social movements.
And that's what we're going to talk about today.
We're going to talk about what they are, how they differ
from other policy actors, how they work,
and briefly, what impacts can we see on energy and environmental
policy.
So if you think about who effects policy,
there are obviously individual firms or households.
And in the US setting you have to think about
for federal policy.
You have to think about some federal governments that
occasionally tribes.
What we talked about last time were
all of these, this alphabet soup of interest groups
that you will find on K Street in Washington,
and you'll find various analogs in state capitals.
Sometimes they fly in.
For those who don't live in this world, that's
the National Rifle Association, the American Forrest Products
Association, the Environmental Defense Fund, the AFL/CIO,
the Union Organization, the American Association
of Retired People, which sends you mailings when you turn 50
to show you're really old.
The American Petroleum Institute, the National Coal
Institute, and there are many more.
Then there are political parties.
Republican, Democrat, or Democratic,
depending on which parity you affiliate with.
Green parties in lots of places, Whig parties in US history,
plenty of other parties in various places.
And then social movements.
So the best way I find to think about a social movement
is to think about examples.
So as I go back to my period of consciousness,
there are a number of them that come to mind, and let
me just walk through a few.
There is the Civil Rights Movement.
That's the group gathering to hear Dr. Martin Luther King.
Not all those people were paying dues to anything
or had membership cards to anything,
but they had all come to Washington.
Most people would probably call the Civil Rights
Movement successful, maybe not.
This is the Anti-Vietnam War Movement.
That, of course, is at MIT.
This was in 1970.
The picture-- and that's some other campus,
and this is Washington.
The picture I looked for very hard but couldn't find,
and I know it exists, is a picture
of the then President of MIT, Howard Johnson,
marching with a group of students
down Mass Avenue with an anti-war banner.
That movement, you might call successful ultimately.
But I'm going to come back to this.
You might ask, why?
Most of those people were too young to vote, so why was
that movement successful?
Or did the movement have anything to do
with ending the war, actually?
This is the environmental movement.
That's an early rally.
Senator Muskie in Washington--
I think that's in Washington, addressing a group.
And the tree hugger on the right, I couldn't resist.
So there you've got the environmental movement.
Successful?
Maybe, maybe not.
Also, you'll notice one of the interest groups
I had up there was the Environmental Defense Fund.
So one might want to think about where that boundary is,
and we'll come back to that.
The Women's Movement.
You see there, the--
I think that's the entirety of the Equal Rights
Amendment, for which there was also opposition.
As regards the Equal Rights Amendment,
you could argue that was pretty successful.
Those-- you don't see votes like that anymore.
The Equal Rights Amendment phrased on the left
passed the House in 1972 354 to 24, in the Senate, 84 to 8.
That means there were a lot of Republican votes for it.
30 states ratified it by the end of 1973, but it failed.
They needed 38 to pass.
It got 35 by 1979.
Never got to 30--
all of these pieces of--
all of these amendments have a deadline for ratification.
The deadline here was '79, and it didn't make it
and some states rescinded ratification.
And I don't think you could get that--
I don't think you could get that Amendment voted on in Congress
now, let alone passed.
So you've got to ask, was that movement successful?
That was a movement.
I mean, you got troops turning out.
You got rallies.
You got an anti movement.
Was that movement successful?
What did it do?
This is a more recent one.
You may recall the meetings of the World Trade Organization,
the International Organization that basically sets trading
rules for international trade.
For a period, those meetings were dangerous.
I don't know whether this is the one in Seattle,
but Downtown Seattle got sort of trashed
by people who were protesting globalization,
protesting the WTO, which is a bunch of bureaucrats who
deal with trade disputes and associated it
with global injustice.
1999.
That movement failed.
I think that's fair to say, right?
We have globalized.
Trade has not turned back, and that movement
has pretty much vanished.
How come?
How come some succeed and some fail?
This is the anti-nuclear movement.
This is international.
This is-- that's Germany, [SPEAKING GERMAN]..
That's Japan, and that, of course,
is Vermont, where the future of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear
Plant is much debated.
Is that movement successful?
That movement start-- well, I'm going
to come back to that movement, because we'll talk about that,
actually, at some length.
But that movement is global.
A lot of power plants have been built
since that movement started, a lot of nuclear plants still
active.
This is the anti-fracking movement, more recently.
That's New York, as you see.
That's somewhere in Paris, and that, I believe, is Bulgaria.
So it, like the anti-nuclear movement,
is fairly broad geographically.
Has succeeded in some places, succeeded at least tentatively
in New York and in France.
I have no idea what the status is in Bulgaria.
The Tea Party movement, look at those numbers.
Has the Tea Party movement succeeded? will the Tea Party
movement last?
How does the Tea Party movement work?
And, of course, on the other side--
by the way, that's impressive.
That's Washington.
That's Pennsylvania Avenue full of people.
This is the opposite side of the coin, the Occupy Movement.
Again, jobs not cuts whereas the-- we want less over here.
And jobs not cuts over here.
So you have two opposed social movements as we speak.
And then most dramatically, this is
a good time for this topic, most dramatically, the Arab Spring.
So as you go around, there's Tahrir Square in Egypt.
There's Tunisia.
There's Yemen.
Government toppled, government toppled, government toppled.
Bahrain, protests continuing.
Syria, Civil War.
Libya, government toppled.
Social movements.
OK, there are a lot of them.
This is just one slice of history,
a recent slice of history.
I'm going to come back and talk about some of them.
But the first thing we ought to worry about
is, what are these things?
How are they distinct from other actors?
Certainly, they're trying to influence policy.
That's what they're there for.
Not always in a coherent way, not always
in a well-defined way.
The anti-globalization movement, what exactly did they want?
What's the Occupy Movement want?
But in any case, they're trying to-- not necessarily
with a specific agenda, but they're
trying to have some influence.
This is easy.
I listed these actors at the start.
They're not a formal part of the process.
They're not on the ballot.
They're not registered.
They don't have national committees and slates
of candidates formally.
The boundary between a social movement and an interest group,
though, and Burstein talks about, this
is a little blurrier, right?
[? Lowey, ?] whom we read earlier,
has this italicized phrase, which is interesting.
All established interest groups are conservative.
And he means conservative not in the sense
of left, right, in the sense of less government, more
government, but in the old-fashioned sense
of less change, more change.
So he means they are conservative in the sense
that interest groups tend to resist radical change.
They're part of the system.
The American Forrest Products Association
has some laws it likes, has some laws it doesn't like,
lobbies here, lobbies there.
If you said, let's fundamentally rethink the way we do timber,
they'd be appalled because that's not
what they're there for.
OK.
So that's-- and they also tend to be more structured, right?
The Environmental Defense Fund has members, has a budget,
has offices, has lobbyists, writes papers.
They do routine influence.
They lobby.
They enter briefs in court.
They send in petitions.
Social movements tend to be on the margins,
tend to be on the margins of the system.
Membership is not well defined.
Who was a member of the Civil Rights Movement?
Who was a member of the anti-war movement,
anti-Vietnam movement?
Almost everybody I knew did something.
None of us had cards.
And they tend to engage in what you'd call non-routine actions,
like marches and demonstrations and chaining themselves
to fences and all of that stuff.
They vary, resources, organization, tactics.
Greenpeace is an interesting example, right?
Greenpeace is noted for its anti-whaling activities,
has ships, intercepts, interferes with whaling.
That's a non-routine action.
It also has lobbyists in various capitals
to push for various things.
So Greenpeace is an interest group
in the sense of being organized and having
members and dues and stuff, but it also
engages in non-standard tactics.
But all of the examples social movements I had
tend to be without a defined membership.
Who was part of the Arab Spring?
Varied from day to day.
Who showed up for the demonstrations?
Who's part of the anti-Putin movement, to the extent
it is a movement, in Russia?
Who comes?
Who was part of the anti-war movement?
Who was part of the Civil Rights Movement?
So the membership tends to be unclear.
The actions tend to be non-standard.
The anti-Vietnam movement did engage
in massive letter writing campaigns,
which is pretty standard.
But it also occupied the MIT president's office
and various other University presidents offices,
which is pretty non-standard.
So it's a mixture.
Thoughts about this so far?
OK.
So how do they work when they work?
How might any of these affect public policy?
What are the mechanisms?
Why do they matter?
What do they ever matter?
What are they doing?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Sometimes, it's trying to show
that if a politician does something
that these social movements-- or back
something these social movements find distasteful,
unpopular, [INAUDIBLE] less likely to get elected.
[INAUDIBLE] an example might be that [INAUDIBLE] People
made it very clear that this was not something
they supported, and so politicians backed away
from it.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: So one mechanism is in a sense,
they provide information or they demonstrate salience.
Salience is awareness.
So an issue's salient to me if I'm aware of it
and I consider it important.
So you could argue that the anti-Vietnam protests made
it clear that, to at least a segment of the population,
all of us who could get drafted, we were very
aware of what was going on.
It was very important to us.
We felt strongly.
OK, so they can provide information about salience,
about the population's feelings.
How else might it work?
Yeah, Brendan?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] You could just--
not necessarily motivate the politician.
You also motivate other people to come on board.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: So you might--
well, there are two ways you might do that, right?
One way is to change preferences.
You could persuade people that--
by getting them to think about it, that this group is right.
You could argue that was a large part of what Martin Luther
King did, and the effective leadership of the Civil Rights
Movement.
It persuaded a lot of people that the current state
of affairs was just wrong, full stop, wrong.
It blurs with raise salience.
I think these two are hard to separate,
because it could be that an awful lot of people
in the North were unaware of just how
segregated the South was.
So you made people aware of it by increasing awareness.
That works, of course, if they agree with you.
Charlotte?
AUDIENCE: I also think that, going along
with the trend of getting more people involved,
just having a group makes people who already have that belief,
maybe are already aware of the issue, but just unaware
of how they could affect it, join together.
And then it [INAUDIBLE] just because there are more bodies.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: So this is--
AUDIENCE: Like attract people, I guess [INAUDIBLE]
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: The-- yeah.
Yeah.
The model Burstein has is that works
if it makes a politician rethink, rethink
their prospects.
And so I guess I'd sort of put that one in a way here.
But you'd say it not only demonstrates to politicians
that a lot of people care about, it
demonstrates to a lot of other people
that people care about it.
And that's a lot of the story of the Arab Spring, I think,
is you've got a few people who are just
sufficiently outraged that they would risk getting shot at.
And other people said, well, I feel that way, too,
and if they're going to do that, maybe I should do that.
And at some point you demonstrate to the regime
that it lacks popular support.
And regimes that aren't Democratic
tend to not have much idea how much support they have,
and it's easy to exaggerate how much support you have.
Because every time you go out in public
and have a parade, people cheer.
Because they-- why wouldn't you cheer?
The dictator's going by.
So that's interesting.
You can say it sort of rallies people,
and I think those are the most plausible ways we've got them.
The others-- Burstein looks at people
who argue that these somehow persuade, as
in a logical sense.
But that's not plausible, he says,
and I agree with him, that they're not
going to-- you don't march in the streets
to make an intellectual argument.
You march in the streets to do something else.
And if it isn't going to affect re-election, why bother?
And if it is, why is the group necessary
if the person knows it?
You could argue that the anti-Vietnam demonstrations
simply made it inescapable that there was widespread opposition
to the war.
Public opinion polls said the same thing,
but marching in the streets made us all feel better, of course.
But also, brought it home.
The other point I'm making here in that second bullet
is donors.
I mean, gun control is an interesting example
of the impact of salience and the impact of an interest
group.
Polls say that 70% of Americans-- typically,
the number varies a little bit, but 70% of Americans
would favor some gun control, say limits
on assault weapons on campus.
You-- or some restrictions on carrying weapons.
But most people don't care much.
Every police chief favors gun control.
Most people don't care much.
People who support the National Rifle
Association, who oppose gun control, care a lot,
and they win.
Because the fact that I favor gun control
is not going to cause me, in most cases,
to change my vote on anything, because that's rarely
a big campaign issue.
If I'm elected, I will enact--
no.
That's rarely a campaign issue.
So those of us who care a little bit don't do anything,
and those who care a lot and have some money have control.
So that's a concentrated interest diffuse interest
example of some importance.
So the other ways we talked about providing information.
You could argue that's what happened in Vietnam.
That's what happened in East Germany.
When-- I didn't put up the demonstrations that
brought down the Berlin Wall, but as distinct from the Arab
Spring, nobody got shot, right?
That happened quickly.
They talked about the Velvet Revolution
in Czechoslovakia, talked about in East Germany,
nothing much happened.
Crowds turned out, crowds turned out.
They didn't seize the government buildings.
They didn't overrun the president's or prime minister's
house.
The government just gave up and left.
So I think the argument here is that they provided
enormous amount of information to voters
that you have no support.
You're loathed.
Changing preferences.
This often has to do with reframing an issue.
Think about the pro-life movement,
which is a brilliant piece of reframing.
How can you be against life?
I mean, you're for choice, but what's more important,
choice or life?
So you could argue that reframing the issue as,
are you for or against life, has an impact on preferences.
The attacks on the health care legislation
by making it Obama's legislation as opposed to, by the way,
no pre-existing condition, universal insurance, blah,
blah, blah, changes how it's thought of.
It's something Obama is shoving down our throats.
And you can argue that Civil Rights did that,
that that was the essence of the Civil Rights Movement.
That if you saw in real time the marchers being taken down
with fire hoses, it was hard not to think, that's just wrong.
These people are marching.
How can they-- why is that right?
So and you don't do--
King's speeches were important, but watching people peacefully
protest being beaten changes your views of the people
beating them and of the issue.
So part of what they do social movements
is theater that changes preferences as well
as signals information.
You can raise salience by making people aware of an issue,
but it only works if they agree with you, right?
I mean, think about globalization,
the anti-globalization movement.
So they protested globalization.
They protested poor working conditions in poor countries,
and they trashed Starbucks.
And most people said what?
I'm sorry.
If you're very sympathetic to poor people, you say, yeah.
They should pay people more in poor countries.
And if you're not, you say, well, they
don't have to take the jobs, you know?
I mean, they're not being forced to work in these factories.
It's more fun than being in a village.
So the example-- one of the optional readings, C and G--
I forget now what their initials are--
make the point that among people who
are for environmental change and who
were opposed to environmental change in a survey,
awareness of environmental issues was equal.
Values differed.
So the policy implications differed.
So you make people aware that there's
a lot of international trade, and a lot of what you buy
is produced by people in poor countries,
one response is, that's really terrible.
Another response is, well, that's a market.
And if people mainly think, that's
a market because that's what they value,
making them more aware of an issue won't help.
You could argue the same thing happens with climate change.
There's been a lot of work--
I wouldn't call it a movement, but an awful lot of people
have spent a lot of time trying to educate people
about climate change.
It has not produced a groundswell.
Quite the contrary.
And the argument is that it comes up against it's
a conflict of values.
Do you want to have economic growth,
or do you want to have environmental protection?
We can both be aware of climate change and its issues,
but reach very different policy conclusions.
So raising salience only works, raising awareness
only works if there's agreement or potential agreement,
or something like agreement.
And the final way, and this is the borderline--
this isn't really social movement.
I think the Burstein article is, nonetheless, a good article.
For interest groups, how do interest groups affect policy?
Well, they do all this other stuff, right?
The National Rifle Association does advertise, does--
the Environmental Defense Fund does send out mailings
to people, so these people do engage
in the organized petition drives that do all this.
But interest groups work on implementation.
That's inside baseball, right?
So we'll talk about it in the environmental case
next time when we talk about what
EPA did to set standards a couple of times.
But the Dodd-Frank law is the big current example, right?
You can read about it in the paper all the time.
The law required lots of regulations, set up
some new entities, and it required this regulation,
that regulation.
Spell this out, make this clear, hundreds,
thousands of regulations required.
No votes in Congress.
Really, really boring stuff.
Who wins?
The people who have offices in Washington,
who have lawyers, who have staff, who have resources.
It's not a matter of buying votes in regulatory agencies.
It's a matter of providing information,
lobbying, per the piece we had assigned for last time.
When the issue has low salience to the public--
interchange fees on debit cards I
will tell you exercise the entire banking industry,
and it may have been in the Globe
twice on the third business page.
Every banker in the country was up in arms.
The Federal Reserve was required to regulate that.
It had enormous discretion.
It was required to regulate that fee paying due attention
to incremental costs.
Incremental costs varied all over the lot.
Hundreds of submissions went into the Federal Reserve.
They made a decision.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: So that's the Durbin Amendment, right?
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: The Durbin Amendment, yep.
AUDIENCE: So when that--
so when that was approved, the fact that, for instance,
Bank of America started charging monthly fee
for people when they use their debit
card to try to offset the fact that they couldn't make
as much money from marginal cost--
like the marginal revenue that they had before.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: But wouldn't that cause people to care a lot?
Because at the end of the day, the regular customer
was the one who kind of got screwed over a little bit,
and the merchants were the ones who won.
But wouldn't eventually like people
be against the Dodd-Frank?
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Well, you mean against that Amendment.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, yeah.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Well, I mean here's--
here are the-- this was a fight in which I participated.
Here's what happens in the short run.
What happens in the short run is merchants save a little bit
on debit card transactions.
Not enough to cause them to cut prices,
because it's only a little bit.
So one person, one large chain said on a conference call--
I think it was Home Depot--
said on a conference call that that
was worth about $100 million to them, short run profits.
So prices don't go down.
What happens to banks is checking
accounts are now less profitable,
so they look to recoup in other ways.
They tried the monthly fee.
That didn't work.
The easiest thing to do, and what they've done quietly,
is they've raised the minimum balances required
for free checking.
And we'll see the numbers, but checking,
because of these fees, if you use the debit card a lot,
the bank is--
you're profitable to the bank even if you don't leave
a lot of money on deposit.
Take away those fees, you're no longer profitable.
So they start raising the minimum requirement
for free checking, and the number
of people without checking accounts goes up.
So, I mean, that's the predictable consequence
of the amendment.
It was pushed by merchants, and Senator Durbin
talked about his friend, I think it was a hardware store owner
or drug store owner, who was being taken to the cleaners
by these fees.
So he's presumably happy.
In the long run, costs get passed through.
It's just they're frictions to changing prices,
so in the short run they don't.
In the long run, prices adjust up.
People pay slightly more if they use cash.
So-- but this is a typical--
this is a-- this is an extreme piece of legislation.
It was not debated, really.
It got a floor vote--
a quick floor vote, not much material on it anywhere.
It said to the Federal Reserve, neglect
the fixed costs of running these programs when you set a price.
Wait, what?
They have to cover the fixed cost.
OK, neglect the fixed costs, and it instructed the Fed
to consider marginal cost.
The Fed ran a survey.
Marginal costs varied by roughly an order of magnitude
across banks.
OK, now what do you do?
And they came out with a proposed rule.
There was the expected howling.
They doubled the ceiling.
There was less howling.
Life goes on.
But yeah, it'll have the effect of increasing
the number of unbanked people.
It's not as serious as it used to be
not to have a bank account, but it's still pretty serious.
So yeah.
The Durbin Amendment, you follow this stuff.
That's amazing.
It's not even energy.
Anything else while I pause for breath and anecdote?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Can you tell us a little bit about the role
that social media has paid like how to mobilize
all these different publics?
Like, I can see with Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Everything
how [INAUDIBLE] come together.
I saw that.
But something like the Civil Rights Movement--
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: But it's a little less clear, isn't it,
how--
the Occupy Movement, I find mysterious.
Because the Civil Rights Movement
had a set of charismatic leaders.
It had some clear objectives, and it had great media
coverage, right?
I mean, when those kids went to-- where
was it that the Civil rights workers got shot?
Selma, maybe?
Boy, that coverage of three college students
go down to help the black community organize
in Selma, Alabama and get shot for their troubles, that woke
people up in an amazing way.
And when you watch them fire hose the marchers,
that was galvanizing.
And when Dr. Martin Luther King spoke, that was, oh, gee.
There is something here.
Occupy was mysterious.
Occupy just happened.
I don't know.
These things-- and the anti-globalization, similarly.
What was-- I can point to triggering events.
You go back to the Rosa Parks refusing
to sit in the back of the bus, people moving into integrated
lunch counters, all of this getting media attention.
I can see-- the triggering events in Civil Rights
were clear.
The triggering event in Vietnam was pretty clear.
It just went on and on, and thinking about thousands
of people chanting, hey, hey, LBJ.
How many kids did you kill today?
Those are pretty dramatic things.
But Occupy, I don't know what triggered Occupy.
I also don't know what triggered the anti-globalization
movement.
We know the Arab Spring.
We know it was the--
normally, there's something.
The guy in Tunisia who burned himself to death in protest.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] but like how people
are mobilizing come together.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Well, now you--
now people point to, particularly
in the case of Egypt, it was much discussed social media.
You can organize through Twitter and Facebook
and various other connections, and just things
going viral in a variety of ways through people's
personal networks.
You can organize.
Vietnam was posters.
There will be a rally today,
AUDIENCE: There was a leader that called it all.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: There were people who
appointed themselves leaders.
You put up a poster and you say there's
going to be a demonstration today in [INAUDIBLE] well,
it was then the great court, nobody had to show up.
If people weren't ready to do something,
you can imagine calling a rally and nobody comes.
That happens often enough.
This, as far as I know, and undoubtedly there's--
people have written boring papers on it,
but it strikes me just as an observer of history
that it's a bit mysterious what does it.
It's a bit mysterious.
So guy burns himself to death in Tunisia.
Why does that spread?
What triggers that?
Did somebody in Egypt set himself up or herself up
as a leader and began saying, hey, we're
going to meet in the square tomorrow,
and then gradually it built. It did build
from a relatively small group.
But in Moscow, there are protests that have lost,
have plainly lost.
Their anti-Putin protests in Russia, they were small.
I don't know how they happened.
They weren't sufficient.
They dissipated.
So it doesn't always happen.
Doesn't always happen.
Andrew?
AUDIENCE: Just as-- it might be an extreme,
could someone argue that, especially
in, say, for the Arab Spring movements, that violence
or the threat of violence, or blackmail
or the threat of just physically destroying something
is a means of affecting public policy?
So not votes, just the fact that there's
a big body out there that will affect the way the country
is run.
So let's read their demands.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Well, a standard thing
that happens, although in France it tends to be well organized,
mass strikes.
You can call it-- you call a general strike.
And if the general strike is effective,
you've demonstrated that you have the--
that enough-- you've demonstrated
there are enough people care enough about the issue
to do something.
I don't know if it has to be physical violence,
but I think it has to be an action.
Because that's how you demonstrate that you care,
right?
I mean, now, of course, you just send an email to Congress.
No, that doesn't really say that you're
very excited about the issue.
If you go out and march, you stand
in the hot sun for a few hours, it demonstrates it.
The story of the Civil Rights Movement
is kind of the reverse, right?
There was no threat of violence from the activists.
It was the violence from those acting against them
that really built support.
It was Dr. King's nonviolent strategy
which worked beyond anything I've seen.
In the anti-Vietnam, people were pretty nonviolent, too.
I don't think it mattered much.
Occupy has been nonviolent.
The Tea Party, been a little shrill but nonviolent.
Tea Party's had some effect politically in the Republican
Party.
The Occupy Movement seems to have vanished in the night.
So it's a little bit mysterious.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] because you mentioned strikes.
Because one another where would that category [INAUDIBLE]
So say some people said, I don't know,
like tomorrow all bus drivers decided
that they want to strike.
So for some reason actually that's more pertinent in Europe
where transportation is, but I guess I've seen it happen.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Those are those
tend to be very heavily union.
That's why I talked about a general strike.
AUDIENCE: So I was going to say, even for a union.
So because it's a relatively small body,
but because it exhibits a big--
a lot of power and the fact that we
will have buses or the subway tomorrow,
will bother a bigger majority of people.
And basically, that's almost like blackmail.
So you're influencing what the majority of people
is thinking about this issue.
It's not that it's directly influencing
what you're asking for, which could be wages for bus drivers.
But they're so frustrated that we don't have buses, so OK,
let's give them the wages because they're
causing all this--
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: But it can fail.
It could fail.
There was a-- I was reading recently
a fictionalized treatment of the famous police strike in Boston
in 1919.
That strike, police hadn't been paid.
They were underpaid, hadn't gotten a raise in 30 years
kind of thing, badly underpaid.
They struck.
There was a crime wave.
The police completely lost the popular sympathy,
and lots of them were fired and jailed and all kinds of things.
So that was the threat.
They carried out the threat.
People got very, very angry, made Calvin Coolidge president
because of how drastically he reacted against the strike.
So it's not necessarily a winning strategy.
It's not necessarily a winning strategy.
Another hand?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: I'm confused by the difference between the first
and the second strategies.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: The first-- yeah.
I must say reading that reading the paper,
I was a little confused about his argument, too.
He said, well, can you just walk in and say,
I'm opposed to the Vietnam War.
I've got-- there are bunch of us and here are my arguments.
And I think what he's saying is, that's not going to work.
Social movements work by demonstrating
that it matters to enough people,
that you have to take it into account.
And if the policymaker knows that it
matters enough to a lot of people,
you don't need a social movement.
And if it doesn't--
Occupy-- if it doesn't, the movement won't have any effect.
I think that's what he's saying.
In my money, in social movements,
what you want to think about is to think about these three.
Are you persuading people that a lot of people care?
Are you making-- changing people's preferences
toward an issue?
Are you making them more aware of an issue
and making it more important?
You could be aware of fracking.
You could make it more important in people's-- in people's minds
by providing information.
You could raise salience either by awareness
or on the important side.
And this is an inside baseball story.
So I share your confusion about the first.
I confess, I read his argument on the first one
and I said, well, what would that look like?
The closest thing I can think of is maybe in Vietnam
there was some persuasion, but I think
what Vietnam was all about was this,
was letting people know that a large part of the population
was passionate.
And that's what happened in Czechoslovakia,
in East Germany, and generally throughout Eastern Europe.
Once it became clear the Russians
weren't going to intervene militarily,
and it became clear to the government
that they had no popular support, game over.
Game over.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: I'm not sure if I'm correct,
but my theory, my [INAUDIBLE] theory for the Occupy Movement,
is that it wasn't necessarily [INAUDIBLE]
by any particular event.
However, there was-- since the financial crisis and then
all the economic problems that were happening in the country.
I think there were just a lot of people unsatisfied
with the current status.
But I don't think that would have been enough to trigger
that movement in--
for this particular case.
I think the actual people, the initial leaders
who tried to convince people, those
are really the key players.
I don't think that's something that would have--
that was bound to happen, regardless of whether or not
someone had started.
I don't think it would have been something
that if it didn't happen then, it would
have happened two months after.
I just think that the people who initially organized it
did a really good job.
They [INAUDIBLE] this anarchy concept of--
they had all those masks of that movie V for Vendetta.
And they [INAUDIBLE] that image, and they
were just very secretive about how they attracted people.
They became viral and [INAUDIBLE]
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Became viral,
but what's interesting is you point
to the particular leaders.
I mean, they occupied Portland, Oregon for heaven's sakes.
What was that about?
This was a protest against global capitalism?
Have you been to Portland, Oregon?
I mean, this is not the financial hub
of the Western world with millions
of people getting rich on the backs of the masses, right?
It's a pretty mellow place.
But they occupied Portland.
So they occupied a lot of places.
I give up.
Let me move on.
Yeah, Julian?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: I was going to try, but undoubtedly
as profound.
Give it a shot.
AUDIENCE: I think, [INAUDIBLE] it's kind of the precipitation
of a general sentiment that the government isn't necessarily
benefiting [INAUDIBLE] I feel like [INAUDIBLE]
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Which is exactly what the Tea Party
people thought, too, which is interesting.
I mean that's it.
There's something wrong in Washington, something
wrong with a different diagnosis.
AUDIENCE: Different diagnosis.
I mean, very different ideas in the Tea Party movement.
But it's just a general precipitation of some things
wrong you don't necessarily like it from a financial statement.
The grand majority of people that took place in--
they don't necessarily know what is wrong
or exactly how to fix it to begin with.
So I think that's one of the reasons why it died out
is that it just became a general shout of, I'm angry.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] nothing--
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: And you saw a lot of movements of the,
I'm angry variety during the Great Depression,
from both left and right.
So it does-- you do get this in hard times.
There was a--
I think sometime in the '30s, there was a World War I
veterans March on Washington because pensions
weren't adequate.
And you got the rise of both extreme left and extreme
right political groups on the grounds
that it's just not right.
The Tea Party movement has more heft because it actually
has clearer objectives, right?
There's a caucus in Congress.
There are relatively organized groups
in some congressional districts.
Tea Party backing is a big deal.
They have a convention, so they've made themselves
into an interest group from a movement, interestingly enough.
With a little incoherence.
There was a split between the Boston Tea
Party and the Worcester Tea Party recently,
so they had separate rallies.
The Worcester Tea Party said, we're
all about low taxes and limited government and stuff like that.
And the Boston Tea Party said, yeah,
and we hate gay marriage, too.
And the Worcester people said, no, maybe we
ought to just stay focused.
So they split.
Anyway.
OK.
To get a little closer to this course
and a little less abstract, there's an interesting--
the other assigned paper is [INAUDIBLE]
which is about nuclear power.
And they trace the partial evolution of the politics here.
What did the politics of nuclear power
look like in the '50s and '60s?
Movements, interest groups, what?
That was a hand?
No, it was not waving.
OK.
Yeah.
Brandon, you got it.
OK.
AUDIENCE: I think it was kind of like, let's do this.
This is gonna be-- it's gonna cost pennies to-- it's going
to cost you penny--
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Too cheap to meter was the phrase.
Too cheap to meter.
AUDIENCE: It was very enthusiastic.
The navy was going nuclear.
There was a lot of proliferation technology
out there so these reactors were ready to build.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: And the politics
was industry interest groups, right?
There were-- the paper labeled a bunch of them.
The big thing, their big win was there's
a limit still in force on the liability of any--
related to any nuclear facility.
The Atomic Energy Commission was regulatory,
but it also was promoting Atomic Energy as well as regulating.
So it was like the early years of airline travel
where what politics there was was positive,
industry groups dominated, inside the beltway stuff.
Not much in the media, except for cheap, swell, good, clean,
et cetera.
What happened in the '70s?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: It was a combination of a movie called
The China Syndrome that came out and then Three Mile Island--
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: China Syndrome
might have been a little later, but go ahead.
Not much later.
AUDIENCE: They were similar.
[INAUDIBLE]
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: It followed Three Mile Island a little bit.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] Three Mile Island happened,
which seemed to mimic the movie with like, oh geez,
this is reality.
It's actually dangerous.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: And you began
to get a different kind of politics, right?
Politically, what did you get?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: I showed you.
What was on that slide?
You've got an anti-nuclear movement.
You've got people marching.
You've got protests.
All of a sudden, you had these industry groups in Washington
with guys in suits and other capitals for that matter.
It wasn't just an American phenomenon.
And then you begin to have those German marchers
and the Japanese marchers and Vermont is recent,
but you had American marchers.
You began to get an anti-nuclear movement with protests.
And after Three Mile Island, the industry stopped.
Now this is the neat part, which I actually
wasn't aware of until I saw the article.
What did the industry try to do to react to this?
Do you have the guys in suits in Washington?
Are they a good reaction?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: They tried to form their own pro-nuclear movement.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: They try to do a pro-nuclear movement.
Did it work?
AUDIENCE: Not really.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: How come?
AUDIENCE: Well, the article mentions like the anti-nuclear
movement came from the people, and they all felt like he--
or that an industry-backed movement [INAUDIBLE]
so they were set apart from the masses.
And then [INAUDIBLE]
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: So they tried to do it,
but they really had trouble making it authentic.
The anti-nuclear movement was mom and pop and your uncle
and people really upset, and the pro-nuclear movement
was industry people with their ties off.
The phrase they use in the businesses
to distinguish between grassroots and AstroTurf.
Grassroots movements are really genuine
and reflect popular sentiment.
AstroTurf is created, right?
You can see it when you get emails--
when a congressional office gets emails on an issue and they're
all identical.
You say, oh.
That's AstroTurf.
Somebody is really pushing people to send--
somebody's saying to all their employees, send this email.
That's not people being passionate.
And it just didn't work, didn't work.
It was an attempt to create a movement
to affect energy policy.
Didn't work.
There's not a lot of social movements in energy directly.
You see them more on the environmental side.
And the piece by [? Rooked-- ?] but environmental movements
affect energy, so it's worth talking about.
That's a depressing article, if you read the first part
in a bad mood.
Because he says the environment's gotten worse
and species are getting extinct, and we're
depleting natural resources.
I would just argue that he's measuring against the past,
not against what would have happened
but for the environmental movement since the air
and the water in US and Europe and many other places
has improved notably.
Nobody believes that, but those are the numbers.
He argues-- so he's trying to be quantitative.
He says that an environmental movement can
work through lobbying, can work through public opinion,
can work through individual attitudes,
or through a Green Party, as exist in some countries.
And the reason he does this rather than thinking
about the ways we just finished talking about, the more general
ways, is he's got measures of all these things.
He's got measures of how big the green movement is.
He's got measures of public opinion.
He's got measures of attitudes of various kinds,
and he certainly knows whether there's a Green
Party that gets any votes.
So he can measure these channels,
and he gives you this nice picture.
So environmental movements react to environmental problems.
I think interpreted largely via sciences
is a little too optimistic, but perceive
problems they can lobby.
They can be an interest group.
The Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense
Council, the Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club.
There are more.
I'm trying to think of a few, but they lobby as well as do
other things.
And so here are his channels.
So he has this very interesting table.
Based on a set of measures, he looks
at the strength of environmental pressure groups.
He looks, based on opinion polls, attitudes
toward the environment.
Is there a Green Party, and how strong is the policy
and what's happened to the environment?
It's interesting, the US scores high in terms
of the environmental pressure group.
We're kind of in the middle in terms of attitudes.
We don't have a Green Party.
A lot of places don't have green parties,
and we're kind of in the middle on policy efforts, which
I think is, compared to these countries,
I think is not far off the mark roughly.
And we're in the middle in terms of Environmental Quality.
I forget how he measures that.
That's a tough one because he's got so many different things.
But this is the summary, his summary of how these work.
And I must say--
so what he did was--
to be clear, the US gets a three here.
It gets a two here.
It gets a one here.
It gets a one there.
And a one-- sorry, a two there and a two there.
This is three.
This is two.
This is one.
And then he looks at correlations,
which is not obviously the right way to do it.
It's not, I would say, the wrong way to do it.
But here they are.
OK.
So reading across, an environmental pressure group
is most strongly associated with the strength of policy
across countries.
Has very little to do with whether there's a Green Party
or not, the stars or statistical significance.
Very little to do with whether there's a Green Party or not.
Why don't we have a Green Party in the United States?
Brendan?
AUDIENCE: I thought we did.
Wasn't that Ralph Nader [INAUDIBLE]??
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Oh.
Is that what he called it?
OK.
We might have once.
We don't have one now.
They do in Germany.
Various other countries do.
Well, Julian?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] it's just insignificant.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: It's what?
AUDIENCE: It's just insignificant.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Insignificant.
Yeah.
Well, maybe that's it.
Why don't we have one that's significant?
AUDIENCE: Well, we've always been heavily
polarized [INAUDIBLE] Democrats or Republicans.
It's really hard for any party to break into that
and make a three party system, especially
a Green, which is like a subset of the Democratic party.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: It's very important.
Our electoral rules are pretty important as they
are in some countries.
In some countries, you vote for the party, not the candidate.
And the party has representation in parliament,
depending on the percentage of the votes it gets.
In that case, a Green Party could get 5%, 6% of the votes
and have somebody in Washington.
Here, you've got to win a majority to get into the house,
to get into the Senate.
It's very tough for third parties
of any kind in our system.
Not in all systems.
I wouldn't say we're heavily-- we're heavily polarized now.
The Republican and Democratic parties used to overlap more.
You used to actually have conservative Democrats who
were more conservative than liberal Republicans,
believe it or not.
So one of the reasons for this is electoral laws.
But it's-- this is the strongest correlation he's got.
And that's between the importance
of environmental pressure groups and the strength of policy
efforts to preserve the environment, which
is sort of interesting.
He says the environmental movement does matter.
He called-- the environmental movement pressure.
If you think about it in the US, we don't actually
have a lot of marches and rallies for the environment.
We have interest groups in Washington.
The Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, the this,
the that.
So there are not a lot of non-conventional actions being
done to save the environment.
There was a time in the Pacific Northwest
when people would drive iron spikes into trees
to prevent logging.
You don't hear much of that anymore.
You don't hear people chaining themselves to a nuclear power
plant much anymore.
So at this point, we're lobbying.
Other places, stronger.
The other interesting correlation
is how much stronger the correlation
between environmental movement pressure and policy
is than between movement pressure
and his measure, at least, of changes in the environment.
And part of that has to do with where you are
and what the natural conditions are, right?
Policy efforts in Los Angeles are extraordinary.
Los Angeles has dirty air.
I don't think there's a European country that takes as much pain
to preserve air quality as there is done in the Los Angeles
basin.
It's just really hard.
It just doesn't ventilate.
So the notion that-- and if you're highly--
if it's a very dense country, it's
kind of hard to preserve species against development and so
on and so forth.
So, I don't know.
You believe the-- are you persuaded by the article?
Comments on it?
Does that actually seem like a plausible description
of interest group, of environmental politics?
And I would notice also that the difference--
the link between-- and, again, causation is an inference.
Its correlation is all we measure.
The link between individual--
between environmental pressure and attitudes
isn't that great, which makes sense in the US, right?
Because the Sierra Club isn't trying to persuade you and me.
It's trying to persuade Congress and the EPA.
So if it's successful there, it wins.
Individual attitudes and policy, not that strong either.
Not that strong a correlation.
So this is sort of a picture of lobbying
where the environmental movement acts directly on policy.
Doesn't act indirectly, seems to me,
through parades, mass marches, demonstrations, and any
of those other mechanisms.
I think that's a fair description
of the movement now in the US.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Seems to me, seems pretty reasonable
even though it's correlation not causation, right?
Because although one can make the argument
that interest groups [INAUDIBLE] people would come out
after certain policy is made.
It seems to me that the more logical flow
would be for information--
for those groups to be formed initially and then
the policy is made.
So even though he proved only correlation,
I think that that flow makes more sense.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Oh, yeah.
No.
It's not-- is not from--
in fact, it can go the other way.
Because when Reagan basically declared war
on environmental policy, the memberships of those groups
soared because they saw a threat.
And the groups sent out mass mailings, saying, look
what this guy is trying to do to the environment,
and the money flowed in.
So the question of, are they exerting pressure?
Yes, but in that case, they were exerting more pressure
in a much more hostile environment politically.
So yeah.
I think that the direction is generally right.
Any other comments?
Yeah, Charlotte?
AUDIENCE: I guess--
I know he had a system for doing all this,
but it seems like you could come up with a different system
and get different results.
And--
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: You're just not a natural sociologist.
You're just--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] apply to this.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Yeah, well--
but this raises a general problem in social science.
In economics, we get lucky because you
have dollars and quantities and tons and stuff.
This is sociology.
What have you got?
You've got attitudes.
You've got some ill-defined measures
of this, that, and the other.
You want to say, are environmental groups effective?
It seems to me you're stuck doing something like this.
You could do it well or poorly.
I think this is pretty good.
I'm still not-- I hadn't thought about it much,
but it just didn't strike me that just
running ordinary correlations is quite the right way to do it.
But there's no obviously better way that comes to mind.
I don't know.
What would you do?
AUDIENCE: I think I'd be more persuaded by case studies where
it did work in the case where there was a Green Party
or wasn't a Green Party, or didn't
work in that sort of case.
I think I'd be able to relate to that more.
And I know that's not as general as what
he's trying to do here--
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: Yep.
AUDIENCE: --but I think that maybe he makes it too general.
Like, what's the difference between a 0.6
and a 0.7 on his little scale?
That doesn't mean anything to me.
RICHARD SCHMALENSEE: No, I'm sort of with you.
I'd prefer to understand one or two cases well than 18 cases
badly.
The issue he's-- well, it's a general problem, right?
You do a case study.
You have a study where n equals 1, right?
You can't test the hypothesis with n equals 1.
So if you're interested in testing a hypothesis, say,
environmental movements operate mainly
through individual attitudes, you can't do n equals 1.
You could probably do before and after in a case study.
You could try it.
But, of course, you can't hold everything else constant.
No, I'm sympathetic.
I'm not excited about uni-dimensional measures
of policy efforts, right?
I mean, US policy is stronger than some
of those other countries on some dimensions
and weaker on others.
European tax systems favor use of diesels.
Diesels produce small particulates.
Small particulates have terrible health effects.
So are they more environmentally conscious
than we are because they recycle or more,
or are we more environmentally conscious
because we avoid diesels?
Very hard to do.
Yeah.
No, I take the point.
Anybody else?
OK.
We will, Wednesday, talk about US environmental policy,
walking through the case study and looking beyond it.
So please read that.
And for those of you who came late,
Monday we will see if we can find
a guest speaker for an hour, and we'll
do an hour's soft shoe on-- a half an hour soft shoe
on green growth, reflecting the will of a narrow majority.