econlife - Who Will Sacrifice Civil Liberties During a Pandemic? by Elaine Schwartz

 

In a new NBER paper, a group of Harvard and Stanford scholars investigated how much of our civil liberties we would trade for better health conditions. Their data came from 370,000 individuals in 15 countries. Given to participants between March and October 2020, the surveys were ongoing.

As a teacher, I could not resist beginning with a quiz. Before seeing the results of the survey, do give it a guess. Starting with the country least willing to sacrifice civil liberties for better health conditions (#1) and ending with the place most willing (#14), please create a 1-14 ranking. (In this part of the survey, one of the 15 countries, Sweden, was excluded because of different data.)

The countries:

Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, South Korea, The United Kingdom, the United States

The answers are in the five graphics that precede “Our Bottom Line.”

Civil Liberties Tradeoffs

Asked about the tradeoff through survey questions, 80 percent of the participants were willing to trade off some civil liberties for better health conditions. However, as you might expect there was a big difference between the United States and China. During a major crisis, four times as many U.S. respondents as those from China were unwilling to give up civil liberties. Among the Chinese participants, only five percent were unwilling to sacrifice rights.

The researchers, though, cited individual differences.  For certain people, as worry about the health risk went up–especially those most susceptible to COVID-19–so too did their willingness to give up liberties. Others valued civil liberties above all, They also found that individuals with less education, less attachment to the labor force, and (in the U.S.) racial and ethnic minorities were less willing to trade liberties. As for the time factor, initially, there was less willingness to give up liberties. Then, after June, attitudes plateaued.

Quiz Results

For the quiz results, it all depends on which civil liberty you select. The length of the bars reflects individuals’ unwillingness to give up that civil liberty. You can see that China is definitely last and respondents from Singapore (SGP) and India wound up with shorter bars. I found it interesting that “Endure Economic Losses” had the least resistance.

Sacrifice Own Rights and Relax Privacy Protections:

Suspend Democratic Procedures:

Sacrifice Free Press and Endure Economic Losses:

Our Bottom Line: Trade-offs

As always, looking at trade-offs through an economic lens, we can say that, “Choosing is refusing.” Furthermore, we should always keep in mind that every decision has a cost. Defined economically, cost is a sacrificed alternative that need not be money.

My sources and more: Today’s post was based on this new NBER paper. Ninety pages long, it has much more than I presented. I suggest taking a look. It is un-gated.

Our featured image is a National Park Service photograph of the Liberty Bell that is located in Independence National Historical Park.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - The Easiest Way to Keep a New Year’s Resolution by Elaine Schwartz

Whenever I do the dinner dishes, I listen to a “page-turner” mystery. In fact, listening to the 13 novels in the Maisie Dobbs series, I actually looked for extra dishes. Now, it turns out that my dishes/mystery “complementarity” was a research topic. Wharton professor Katy Milkman called the phenomenon temptation bundling.

Where are we going? To our New Year’s resolutions.

Temptation Bundling

With temptation bundling, we combine our “wants” and “shoulds.”

The Experiment

To see if temptation bundling had academic resilience, researchers from Penn and Harvard set up three scenarios at a campus workout facility. All three groups got iPods. But the first group’s iPod was loaded with tempting page-turner novels that could be accessed only at the gym. The second group also got the good books on their iPods. However, they were not required to listen at the gym. Then, acting as a control, the third group got iPods, a $25 Barnes & Noble gift certificate, and a sample workout with a reminder that exercising is good for your health..

The results confirmed most of what we would expect. Group 1’s workouts exceeded the control group by 51 percent and for Group 2, 29 percent. So yes, temptation bundling did increase the frequency of the undesirable activity—the “should”– but after a temporary Thanksgiving break, its impact on all groups diminished precipitously:

 

Utility Streams

Temptation bundling creates added value. It limits the time used for your indulgent wants while encouraging a distasteful activity that will be good for you. You wind up with less of the “wants” and more of the “shoulds.” Done alone, each activity has less utility. Done together their synergy is more valuable.

The Penn/Harvard research team summed up the value boost with two utility streams. Our wants have less cost at first because they are so pleasant. But then the guilt and wasted time kick in. Meanwhile, the “should” starts out really painful. But then as time goes on, its benefits surface.

Graphed (below) the “wants” curve sinks over time but the “should’ curve ascends:

Temptation bundling is really just about cost and benefit. By combining a want and a should, the wants become less of a minus and the shoulds, more of a plus.

We also just waded into the waters of behavioral economics.

Our Bottom Line: Commitment Devices

Temptation bundling is one of many commitment devices. Defined by behavioral economists, commitment devices are just what you would expect. They are incentives that encourage us to stick with an activity.

Here are some commitment devices:

Most of us need commitment devices to keep our New Year’s resolutions. Maybe temptation bundling is the one.

My sources and more: I first learned about Dr. Milkman’s work on temptation bundling in a Freakonomics podcast. (My speedy 4 mile walks and good podcasts are another temptation bundle!) The podcast took me to Dr. Milkman’s co-authored paper and then to a broader look at commitment devices.

Please note that this post is an updated version of a 2015 econlife.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.