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Subsidies, taxes and regulation. Public awareness campaigns education and so on. All of these can change the way people approach a problem like this. The begin

by glomph 12y ago

Subsidies, taxes and regulation. Public awareness campaigns education and so on. All of these can change the way people approach a problem like this. The beginning of course is articles like this one.

msandford 12y ago
That's just trying to change the underlying economics of profit. Subsidies make things profitable which otherwise wouldn't be. Taxes make things less profitable than they otherwise would be. Regulations are a lottery-fine system where you "buy" a ticket to "win" by not complying with the regs. If you "win" the lottery you pay a fine of some sort. It's like speeding tickets in cars; they don't ensure 100% compliance with the speed limit but a rough approximation by fining some people who don't obey. I agree with you that these are ways to change behavior and I would also agree that they're fairly effective. But I am not sure that they motivate people in non-economic methods. I think they just shift the landscape of the economics. I think one possible way to motivate people to do something without economics is to make it illegal but poorly enforced. This will encourage contrarians to engage in it just out of spite. I'll agree that spite probably isn't the best driver of change but it's all I can come up with. This is supposedly what Frederick II did in Prussia during the 1700s to encourage people to cultivate potatoes for the sake of diversifying the food supply. The other way I've heard of motivating people to do things is basically to ask politely. I saw a study somewhere (can't find the link after 10min) that compliance with the law is inversely proportional to the amount of force. It was related to speed limits and they found that the more aggressive the wording was regarding how it's illegal to speed the less people complied. This seems like it's on the other end of spectrum above: more authoritarian encouraged non-compliance and more polite encourages compliance. They're non-economic at least on the surface.

by glomph 12y ago

msandford 12y ago

That's just trying to change the underlying economics of profit. Subsidies make things profitable which otherwise wouldn't be. Taxes make things less profitable than they otherwise would be. Regulations are a lottery-fine system where you "buy" a ticket to "win" by not complying with the regs. If you "win" the lottery you pay a fine of some sort. It's like speeding tickets in cars; they don't ensure 100% compliance with the speed limit but a rough approximation by fining some people who don't obey. I agree with you that these are ways to change behavior and I would also agree that they're fairly effective. But I am not sure that they motivate people in non-economic methods. I think they just shift the landscape of the economics. I think one possible way to motivate people to do something without economics is to make it illegal but poorly enforced. This will encourage contrarians to engage in it just out of spite. I'll agree that spite probably isn't the best driver of change but it's all I can come up with. This is supposedly what Frederick II did in Prussia during the 1700s to encourage people to cultivate potatoes for the sake of diversifying the food supply. The other way I've heard of motivating people to do things is basically to ask politely. I saw a study somewhere (can't find the link after 10min) that compliance with the law is inversely proportional to the amount of force. It was related to speed limits and they found that the more aggressive the wording was regarding how it's illegal to speed the less people complied. This seems like it's on the other end of spectrum above: more authoritarian encouraged non-compliance and more polite encourages compliance. They're non-economic at least on the surface.