From the article:
But there’s another great downside [to
recycling that Professor Munger] didn’t mention. Namely: When you cast policy
issues in moral terms, you degrade the character of public discourse. You lead
people to see conflicting priorities as an occasion for battle, rather than an
occasion for compromise. You send the message that policy is best decided by
appeals to one’s inner conscience (or, more likely, to the polemics of demagogues),
rather than by appeals to impersonal cost-benefit analysis. And this is a very
bad thing. If overusing landfills is a bad habit, then branding everything you
don’t like as evil is a far worse one.
If we’re determined to instill blind
moral instincts that make people behave better most of the time, I’d like to
nominate a blind moral instinct to respect price signals and the individual
choices that underlie them—an instinct, for example, to recoil from judging and
undercutting other people’s voluntary arrangements. I like it when my neighbors
dispose of their beer cans properly. I’d like it even more if they’d stop
trying to dictate other people’s wages, working conditions, housing contracts,
and drug habits.
By concentrating our moral resources
on recycling, we not only crowd out that nobler mission; we actually undercut
it, by sending the message that price signals are unreliable. Of course,
some price signals are unreliable, but the whole point of the moral
suasion agenda is to get things right most of the time, not all of
the time. Every time a misguided locavore makes the world a poorer place by
choosing expensive local food, it’s because she’s absorbed the false lesson
that prices are generally a poor measure of social cost - a lesson first
absorbed, I suspect, at the feet of the recycling propagandists she first met
in elementary school.
That’s a good reason to be squeamish
about using moral suasion as a policy tool. On the other hand, there are times
when we might want to overcome that squeamishness. I’m on board, for example,
with making people feel guilty about committing murder for hire. I might be on
board with making people feel guilty about working as OSHA inspectors, or
accepting jobs that wouldn’t exist without tariff protection, or installing
solar panels solely because they’re subsidized.
Source: Stephen Landsburg, “Don’t Cast Recycling as a Moral Issue” from the discussion of "The Political Economy of Recycling," Cato Unbound, June 2013
Source: Stephen Landsburg, “Don’t Cast Recycling as a Moral Issue” from the discussion of "The Political Economy of Recycling," Cato Unbound, June 2013
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