Economic policy analysis and emotions

Robert Frank has an op-ed in today's NY Times that tries to understand why we are being so irrational about global warming. A relatively small certain cost, like a carbon tax can probably avert a gigantic disaster that is moderately likely. This should be an easy one, but apparently it's not.

This strange state of affairs may be rooted in human psychology. As the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert put it in a 2006 op-ed article in The Los Angeles Times, “Global warming is bad, but it doesn’t make us feel nauseated or angry or disgraced, and thus we don’t feel compelled to rail against it as we do against other momentous threats to our species, such as flag burning.”

People tend to have strong emotions about topics like food and sex, and to create their own moral rules around these emotions, he says. “Moral emotions are the brain’s call to action,” he wrote. “If climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets.”

Frank's quoting this and his comment on it ("But the human brain is remarkably flexible. Emotions matter, but so does logic.") are instructive about where interesting economics might be heading these days. We'll be better off if we start policy discussions by assuming that reflective choice is not the automatic baseline, but part of a larger process in which emotions and habits play just as large a role as rational problem solving.

If we become more able to make these important choices well, it will only be because we fought for it on all fronts: from political statesmanship in the moment all the way to K-12 funding and curriculum. If we can shift the way we suppose human action is generated and stop presuming that all action originates from choice, we'll be more willing to undertake that struggle, and wiser about how we do it.