Case Studies, Taxes, Tipping, and Trust

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Case Studies,Taxes, Tipping, and Trust
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Suicide Tipping Points
Rural Mo. Area Grapples With Teen Suicides
CARUTHERSVILLE, Mo. Saturday December 16, 2006
438 pm
In a Land Torn by Violence, Too Many Troubling
Deaths New York Times
Marvilia Marmolejo lost two of her children to
suicide, Ketty Salazar, 15, and Yuber Salazar,
18. "This had never happened around here before,"
she said.
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Other Teen Tipping Points

• contagious behavior/imitation Gladwell (p. 223)
  getting permission to act from someone else

Red Lake High School, MN
Jeff Weiss Too Close for Comfort New York Times
Jonesboro, Arkansas
Heath, Kentucky
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Teen Smoking

• (CNN) -- Smoking rates among American teen-agers
  rose dramatically between
• 1988 and 1996, according to the CDC.
• The teen smoking epidemic illustrates both the
  Law of the Few (contagiousness) and Stickiness
• Of all the teenagers who experiment with
  cigarettes, only about a third ever go on to
  smoke regularly. Hence, nicotine may be highly
  addictive, BUT it is only addictive in some
  people, some of the time.
• Even among the population of smokers, a fifth
  of them dont smoke every day.
• There are millions of Americans who manage to
  smoke regularly and not be hookedpeople for whom
  smoking is contagious but not sticky.
• They are known as chippers (avg. no more than 5
  cigarettes a day but who smoke at least 4
  days/per week equivalent of social drinkers)

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Teen Smoking

• What distinguishes chippers from hard-core
  smokers? Partially genetic factors
• e.g., rat experiments at Univ. of Colorado (pp.
  236-237)
• Three Categories
• 1.) People who tried smoking once, didnt get a
  buzz, and found the whole experience so awful
  that they never smoked again are probably similar
  to those rates whose bodies treated nicotine like
  a poison.
• 2.) Chippers may be people who, like other rats,
  have the genes to derive pleasure from nicotine,
  but not the genes to handle it in large doses.
• 3.) Heavy smokers, meanwhile, may be people with
  the genes to do both.
• Yet genes dont provide a total explanation for
  how many people smoke and how much they smoke.
  Environmental factors still play a role.
• What this and other research shows is that what
  makes smoking sticky is very different from the
  kinds of things that make it contagious.

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Teen Smoking

• Contagiousness e.g., the Colorado Adoption
  Project and the nurture myth
• - If nurture matters so much, then why did the
  adopted kids not resemble their adoptive parents
  at all? (Gladwell, p. 240)
• - The Colorado study isnt saying that genes
  explain everything and that environment doesnt
  matter. On the contrary, all of the results
  strongly suggest that our environment plays as
  bigif not a biggerrole as heredity/genes in
  shaping personality and intelligence.
• - What it is saying is that whatever the
  environmental influence is, it doesnt have a lot
  to do with parents. Its something else, Judith
  Harris argues peers (p. 241).
• SO, public health campaigns threatening and
  scaring teenagers with grisly photos about the
  risks of smoking are useless. Theyre adult
  propaganda. Its because adults dont approve of
  smoking that many teenagers want to do it.
• In short, its hard to make smoking less
  contagious.
• Hence, trying to reduce smoking by thwarting the
  efforts of Salesmen and making it less
  contagious doesnt seem like a particularly
  effective strategy.
• So how about trying to make it less sticky?

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Teen Smoking

• Stickiness Two Possibilities
• 1.) recently discovered link between smoking and
  depression
• - research has shown that smokers suffer
  disproportionately from chemical imbalances in
  their brains (serotonin, dopamine, and
  norepinephrine)
• Hence, if you can treat smokers for depression,
  you may be able to make their habit an awful lot
  easier to break (pp. 246-247)
• e.g., Glaxo Wellcome and bupropion/Zyban
• 2.) Nicotine addiction isnt a linear phenomenon
  no instant addiction (takes on average 3 years
  most smokers start in the mid-teens, so you
  have time to prevent addiction)
• - smoking research (p. 249) shows that there is
  something of an addiction tipping point
  chippers simply never smoke enough to hit that
  addiction threshold/tipping point
• chippers smoke up to, but no more than, 5
  cigarettes a day (4-6 milligrams of nicotine)
• - so require tobacco companies to lower the
  level of nicotine so that even the heaviest
  smokersthose smoking, say, 30 cigarettes a
  daycould not get anything more than 5 milligrams
  of nicotine within a 24-hour period (New England
  Journal of Medicine)

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Teen Smoking

• Anti-smoking efforts
• - have focused on trying to make smoking less
  acceptable, more stigmatized
• - have involved raising cigarette prices,
  curtailing advertising, running public health
  messages, limiting access to minors and
  schoolchildren, encouraging absolutely no
  experimentation (in short, trying to change
  attitudes/making smoking less contagious) . . .
  Not very successful.
• Instead . . .
• - treat some smokers for depression,
• - and reduce nicotine levels below the addiction
  threshold
• The habit would be significantly less sticky.
  Cigarette smoking would be more like the common
  cold easily caught but easily defeated.

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Coordination in a Complex World

• coordination problems
• - how best to maneuver around campus?, feed UR
  students?, etc. How can people voluntarily make
  their actions fit together in an efficient and
  orderly way?
• - one way to solve them is by authority or
  coercion, which is unappealing.
• In a liberal society, authority (which includes
  laws or formal rules) has only limited reach over
  the dealings of private citizens, and that seems
  to be how most Americans like it.
• bottom-up, voluntary solutions are preferred
  (e.g., the El Farol problem)

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Coordination in a Complex World

• Schelling Points salient landmarks or focal
  points upon which peoples expectations
  converge. Why important?
• They show that people can find their way to
  collectively beneficial results not only without
  centralized direction but also without even
  talking to each other.
• The existence of Schelling points suggests that
  peoples experiences of the world are often
  surprisingly similar, which makes successful
  coordination easier.
• - Conventions not only maintain order and
  stability, they reduce the amount of cognitive
  work you have to put in to get through the day.
• - Conventions allow us to deal with certain
  situations without thinking too much about them,
  and when it comes to coordination problems in
  particular, they allow groups of disparate,
  unconnected people to organize themselves with
  relative ease and an absence of conflict. (p. 93)
  
• - (In short, they reduce dramatically the number
  of choices individuals have to make on a daily
  basis they help to reduce the Paradox or
  Paralysis of Choice).

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Invisible Norms/Conventions/Social Dictates that
Regulate Human Behavior without Centralized
Control and that Go Largely UnnoticedExcuse Me.
May I Have Your Seat?

• Yoni Brook/The New York Times
• In 1975, students asking for another rider's seat
  on the subway felt queasy breaking the
  first-come-first-served code.
• Three decades later, the experience is just as
  daunting.

Dr. Stanley Milgram, who planned the experiment,
in 1975. Milgrams idea exposed the extremely
strong emotions that lie beneath the surface of
otherwise normal, everyday life. The study showed
how much the unwritten rules of society save us
from chaos through coordination and cooperation.
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Society Does ExistTaxes, Tipping, TV, and Trust

• There's no such thing as society, British Prime
  Minister Margaret Thatcher once famously
  declared. There are individual men and women and
  there are families.
• Society, therefore is nothing more than
  individuals (and families) always and only
  seeking their own self-interest or to maximize
  their own utility in each and every human
  interactionits more rational to free ride.
• If that is true, then how do we explain, among
  other examples (1) the Richard Grasso affair,
  (2) tipping while away on vacation, (3) the
  ultimatum game, (4) the success of eBay and
  Amazon.com, and (5) anyone paying their income
  taxes.

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Society Does ExistTaxes, Tipping, TV, and Trust

• Answer Cooperation through trust and a sense of
  fairness
• prosocial behavior and strong reciprocity by
  which the group benefits
• The key to cooperation is the shadow of the
  future or the opportunity to punish free-riders
  and trust-abusers (eBay, Amazon, tax audits,
  Honor System at UR)
• capitalisms success and superiority over any
  other economic system
• - the realization that the accumulation of
  capital over the long-term, versus the
  short-term, is actually in everyones
  self-interest!
• Capitalism is healthiest when people believe and
  behave on the realization that the long-term
  benefits of fair dealing outweigh the short-term
  benefits of sharp or shady dealing.