WHY DO SOME SOCIETIES MAKE DISASTROUS DECISIONS?: JARED DIAMOND (p4)

The second step in my road map, after a society has anticipated or failed to anticipate a problem before it arises, involves a society's failing to perceive a problem that has actually arrived. There are at least three reasons for such failures, all of them common in the business world and in academia. First, the origins of some problems are literally imperceptible. For example, the nutrients responsible for soil fertility are invisible to the eye, and only in modem times measurable by means of chemical analysis. In Australia, Mangareva, parts of the U.S. Southwest, and many other locations, most of the nutrients had already been leached out of the soil by rainfall. When people arrived and began growing crops, those crops quickly exhausted the remaining nutrients, so that agriculture rapidly failed. Yet such nutrient-poor soils often bear lush-appearing vegetation; it's just that most of the nutrients in the ecosystem are contained in the vegetation rather than in the soil, so that the nutrients are removed when one cuts down the vegetation. There was no way that the first colonists of Australia and Mangareva could perceive that problem of soil nutrient exhaustion.

An even commoner reason for a society's failing to perceive a problem is that the problem may take the form of a slow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations. The prime example in modern times is global warming. We now realize that temperatures around the world have been slowly rising in recent decades, due in large part to changes in the atmosphere caused by humans. However, it is not the case that the climate each year is inexorably 0.17 degrees warmer than in the previous year. Instead, as we all know, climate fluctuates up and down erratically from year to year: three degrees warmer in one summer than the previous summer, then two degrees warmer the next summer, down four degrees the following summer, down another degree the next summer, then up five degrees, etc. With such wide and unpredictable fluctuations, it takes a long time to discern the upwards trend within that noisy signal. That's why it was only a few years ago that the last professional climatologist previously skeptical of the reality of global warming became convinced. Our president is still not convinced of the reality of global warming, and he thinks that we need more research. The medieval Greenlanders had similar difficulties in recognizing that the climate was gradually becoming colder, and the Maya of the Yucatan had difficulties discerning that the climate was gradually becoming drier.

Politicians use the term "creeping normalcy" to refer to such slow trends concealed within noisy fluctuations. If a situation is getting worse only slowly, it is difficult to recognize that this year is worse than last year, and each successive year is only slightly worse than the year before, so that one's baseline standard for what constitutes "normalcy" shifts only gradually and almost imperceptibly. lt may take a few decades of a long sequence of such slight year-to-year changes before someone suddenly realizes that conditions were much better several decades ago, and that what is accepted as normalcy has crept downwards.

The remaining frequent reason for failure to perceive a problem after it has arrived is distant managers, a potential problem in any large society. For example, today the largest private landowner and the largest timber company in the state of Montana is based not within the state but in Seattle, Washington. Not being on the scene, company executives may not realize that they have a big weed problem on their forest property.

All of us who belong to other groups can think of examples of imperceptibly arising problems, creeping normalcy, and distant managers.

The third step in my road map of failure is perhaps the commonest and most surprising one: a society's failure even to try to solve a problem that it has perceived.

Such failures frequently arise because of what economists term "rational behavior" arising from clashes of interest between people. Some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behavior that is harmful for other people. Economists term such behavior "rational," even while acknowledging that morally it may be naughty. The perpetrators are often motivated and likely to get away with their rational bad behavior, because the winners from the bad status quo are typically concentrated (few in number) and highly motivated because they receive big, certain, immediate profits, while the losers are diffuse (the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals) and are unmotivated because they receive only small, uncertain, distant profits from undoing the rational bad behavior of the minority.

A typical example of rational bad behavior is "good for me, bad for you and for the rest of society" — to put it bluntly, "selfishness." A few individuals may correctly perceive their self-interests to be opposed to the majority's self-interest. For example, until 1971, mining companies in Montana typically just dumped their toxic wastes of copper and arsenic directly into rivers and ponds because the state of Montana had no law requiring mining companies to clean up after abandoning a mine. After 1971, the state of Montana did pass such a law, but mining companies discovered that they could extract the valuable ore and then just declare bankruptcy before going to the expense of cleaning up. The result has been billions of dollars of clean-up costs borne by the citizens of the United States or Montana. The miners had correctly perceived that they could advance their interests and save money by making messes and leaving the burden to society.