The Unexamined Society

[groovedaddy]

Over the past 50 years, we’ve seen a number of gigantic policies produce disappointing results — policies to reduce poverty, homelessness, dropout rates, single-parenting and drug addiction. Many of these policies failed because they were based on an overly simplistic view of human nature. They assumed that people responded in straightforward ways to incentives. Often, they assumed that money could cure behavior problems.

Fortunately, today we are in the middle of a golden age of behavioral research. Thousands of researchers are studying the way actual behavior differs from the way we assume people behave. They are coming up with more accurate theories of who we are, and scores of real-world applications. Here’s one simple example:

When you renew your driver’s license, you have a chance to enroll in an organ donation program. In countries like Germany and the U.S., you have to check a box if you want to opt in. Roughly 14 percent of people do. But behavioral scientists have discovered that how you set the defaults is really important. So in other countries, like Poland or France, you have to check a box if you want to opt out. In these countries, more than 90 percent of people participate.

This is a gigantic behavior difference cued by one tiny and costless change in procedure.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/opinion/08brooks.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

[PATRICK]

1. That is only manipulating

pyschological responses one way or the other. The honest thing would be to mandate organ donorship or make it a clear separate mandatory choice, not fog it up.

Some people have real concerns and just maybe certain harvesting systems can't be trusted way into the future. No trust in the system(need we get into all of that?) is one apprehension, although the less the participation the greater the Black Market and death toll. The price we pay because we can't trust, not just because we fear to trust, means a lose/lose situation. That's where we are in most everything. Dishonesty keeps a lot of things going one way or the other.

[MisterP]

2. the Great Society worked spectacularly until it was weakened by Congress and hit by the energy and

growth crises of the 70s and then was defunded and dismembered after 1979/81

[Igel]

3. Depends what the goal of the Great Society was.

If it was to have a vanishingly small percent of the population need federal assistance, then it failed miserably.

From the time the Great Society programs were instituted until the limit you place on their effectiveness a number of social and demographic variables that are correlated with poverty or with prosperity went more strongly in the "poverty" direction.

If it was just to transfer money to poor people so that they didn't suffer from poverty, then it was working fairly well.

In other words, from the point of a view of a healthy society, not so good. From the perspective of those who received benefits or who felt sorry for those receiving them, pretty good.

[pscot]

4. We are in the early days of the behavioural sink

is what we're in the middle of.

[bemildred]

5. Nah, we are well along now, been here for decades. nt