I heard Professor Blalock speak about the inability to get people to drive Priuses despite the fact that they are better for the environment and can save money in the long-run. In a similar manner, it was difficult for him to incentivize people to use cooking stoves in East Africa that burned more efficiently and safely. The cooking stoves that people were using were equivalent to “smoking four packs of cigarettes a day,” which was pretty shocking to hear. A team of researchers tried to resolve this problem by attempting to incentivize the use of more efficient cooking stoves in various ways.

One thing that was not emphasized in lecture enough are the social aspects of the problems these two issues present for society. The underlying one being that human nature is to resist change. The reason why it is so difficult to make someone change their cooking stove to a more efficient one is the same reason why my friend still uses Safari instead of google chrome. It is the same reason why I prefer printing out articles that I can just read on my computer. Sometimes, there is a natural preference for each individual, or a preference that a community shares. It may be the case that those cooking stoves have some significant cultural or historical value. As a result, it is difficult to incentivize them enough to change. It would probably take more than a tax on printing paper (or perhaps a subsidy to purchase an e-reader) to discourage me from printing out my lengthy homework.  This is where economics sometimes fails. Incentives in theory work perfectly. In practice there are too many variables that economic models simply do not account for. People do not exist in a perfect vacuum of assumptions that economic theory needs for its models to make accurate predictions (For example, in a market everyone has perfect information – when is this ever true?). Though I should probably think more about the environmental precautions of printing my paper, that is not in my mind when I am worrying about homework. This is not ideal, but as they say, old habits die hard. A combination of reading everything on paper in high school and professors making me print out readings have been reinforcing this habit for years. Undoing this would take a lot of work and patience.

In terms of community outreach, there needs to be a relationship of trust between the people receiving the help and the people giving it out. It’s been suggested that a community should explicitly ask for help before receiving it otherwise the help that is given can be misguided. There is probably  inherently a low amount of trust between the people who are coming into a country that is not theirs to do community outreach and the community. For these reasons, to drop stuff off and tell people about the benefits (that they might not entirely believe), provide a small economic incentive, and then come back four years later and expect everyone to change their every-day behaviors is bound to fail. As I said earlier, changing reinforced habits takes massive amounts of time and patience. If I imagined myself in that scenario I do not know if I would be trusting of the person who is trying to sell me the product, so I would go back to what I know and what is familiar.

On the issue of Priuses, it is incorrect to suggest that people can just “get a loan” and buy one at the snap of their fingers.  There may have been people in the audience for whom it might not be as simple as “just getting a loan.” Low-income people have a hard time getting financial support, and it is probably not on the top of someone’s priority list to get a Prius when they can not afford shoes or enough food to eat in a day. It is easy to sit in a place of privilege and criticize people for not using fuel-efficient cars or other products that are not environmentally friendly, but doing so ignores crucial socioeconomic and institutional factors at play. In an an abstract sense, it is valid to say that people have a consensus when it comes to caring about pressing environmental issues and that there is a problem when it comes to turning those concerns into action. However, to shame everyone for not driving a Prius is, to go back to the Aaron Sachs lecture, the very self-righteousness that turns people off from the environmentalism movement.