Yes, the planet will notice

The central premise of co2mmit is that each of us can have a real impact on the climate by changing the things in our own lives that we have the power to change. Doing so will amplify our voice as advocates, affecting both the actions taken by others and the policies of governments. 

But, isn’t that the opposite of what economists tell us? Don’t they (or “we,” I should say, since I’m an economist, too) tell us that we are rational egoists who will change our destructive behaviors only when forced to do so by top-down government policies?

In a 2011 book, economist Gernot Wagner was dismissive of individual actions like taking a cloth bag to the grocery store or swapping out old light bulbs – even though those were things he did himself. His title, But Will the Planet Notice, suggested that such choices, however praiseworthy, would change little.   “What you and I do individually does not make the least bit of difference,” he argued, unless backed up by strong government policies grounded in smart economics.

Who is right here? In a new book that spans philosophy, politics, and economics, Gerald Gaus takes a deep dive into human cultural evolution and finds reasons to believe that the planet will, after all, pay attention to individual actions. We have emerged from tens of thousands of years of cultural evolution, he says, not as the rational individualists of neoclassical economics, but as “norm-following cooperators.” The norms we follow include a deep-seated concern with fairness, reciprocity, and a constellation of cooperative rules that treat others as free and equal. 

And where do those social rules themselves come from? “Humans,” says Gaus, “are, first and foremost, learners: to successfully acquire the tremendous store of information within our culture, we must decide whom we are to copy. We tend, for example, to copy high-prestige persons, those who are more successful, or the majority.”

You might think that kind of learning would just mean imitating the most ruthlessly successful exploiters. If so, then the learned norm would be that might makes right. But that is not how cultural evolution has worked. Ruthless exploitation might temporarily enrich individuals, but it would impoverish societies. Societies grow rich only if the individuals who compose it are able to cooperate. Over time, then, cultural evolution favors societies in which people learn to express their self-interest within social rules that encourage fairness and discipline noncooperators.

Once we view humans not as asocial maximizers but as cultural creatures, and understand that the essence of culture consists in learning social rules through imitation, it becomes clear why the planet will notice our individual efforts to behave in environmentally responsible ways. To import a little economic jargon, we could say that our environmentally responsible actions have “cultural externalities” that operate through our human propensity to imitate what others do and to lean the norms that are implicit in their actions.

But none of this means that the policies that economists advocate are inappropriate or ineffective. As Gaus notes, “Social life is riddled with opportunities to exploit others, which most people don’t even notice.” Smart economic policies reduce the temptations to exploit.

For example, if I drive a gasoline-hungry SUV to work, I am (whether I notice or not) exploiting others by polluting the atmosphere. Eventually, as I see more and more EVs on the road, including Teslas and electric BMWs driven by high-prestige influencers, I may learn a new cultural norm that changes my transportation choices. But the change will come even faster if the cultural signaling is reinforced by policies that weaken the temptation to offend against the environment in the first place. A carbon tax that raised the price of gasoline would be one such measure. So would a subsidy for the purchase of electric vehicles, or a building standard that required apartment owners to offer EV charging to their tenants.

In the end, we do not face an either-or choice between cultural signaling and policy-driven incentives. If we want the planet really to sit up and notice, we need a whole suite of cultural, behavioral, political, and economic tools that work together.