Case Studies,Taxes, Tipping, and Trust

Suicide Tipping Points

Rural Mo. Area Grapples With Teen Suicides CARUTHERSVILLE, Mo.

Saturday December 16, 2006 4:38 pm

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.

“In a Land Torn by Violence, Too Many Troubling Deaths”

New York Times

Other Teen “Tipping Points”contagious behavior/imitation: Gladwell (p. 223) “getting permission to act from someone else”

Jonesboro, Arkansas Heath, Kentucky Red Lake High School, MN Jeff Weiss“Too Close for Comfort”

New York Times

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 don’t smoke every day.

There are millions of Americans who manage to smoke regularly and not be hooked—people 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”)

Teen SmokingWhat 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, didn’t 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 don’t 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.

Teen SmokingContagiousness: 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 isn’t saying that genes explain everything and that environment doesn’t matter. On the contrary, all of the results strongly suggest that our environment plays as big—if not a bigger—role as heredity/genes in shaping personality and intelligence.

- What it is saying is that whatever the environmental influence is, it doesn’t have a lot to do with parents. It’s 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. They’re adult propaganda. It’s because adults don’t approve of smoking that many teenagers want to do it.

** In short, it’s hard to make smoking less contagious. **

Hence, trying to reduce smoking by “thwarting the efforts of Salesmen” and making it less contagious doesn’t seem like a particularly effective strategy.

So how about trying to make it less “sticky”?

Teen SmokingStickiness: 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 isn’t 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 smokers—those smoking, say, 30 cigarettes a day—could not get anything more than 5 milligrams of nicotine within a 24-hour period (New England Journal of Medicine)

Teen SmokingAnti-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.

Coordination in a Complex Worldcoordination 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)

Coordination in a Complex World“Schelling Points”: salient landmarks or “focal points” upon which people’s

expectations converge. Why important?

(1) 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.

(2) The existence of “Schelling points” suggests that people’s 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”).

Invisible Norms/Conventions/Social Dictates that Regulate Human Behavior without Centralized Control and that Go Largely Unnoticed

“Excuse 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. Milgram’s 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.

Society Does Exist:Taxes, 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 interaction…it’s 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.

Society Does Exist:Taxes, 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)

* capitalism’s 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 everyone’s 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.”