Everyday Ingenuity and Social Change
I just read a book titled Why Not? and it gave me some ideas about promoting social change, designing better social policies, and other topics of interest to those who want to make society better. So here are my ideas:
Incentives - It is easier to change behaviors if you reward people than if you threaten to punish them. The challenge is to offer incentives that really promote the behavior you want.
Unconstrained Consumer - If you need a good idea try thinking about what an unconstrained consumer would do. If money were no object how would you solve the problem? What would an unconstrained socially conscious consumer do? What could the government, any level of government, do if there were no budget restrictions? These questions can yield an idea that can be modified into a workable form. This is what you could expect from any brainstorming technique.
Internalize Costs - Many social and environmental problems come about because the people causing the problems are not paying the full costs of their actions. So, can we identify these costs and create policy or legislation that forces the "bad actors" to internalize those costs?
Air pollution from motor vehicles provides a good example of this problem. The solution, at least the conventional one, is to raise the gas tax so drivers pay the health and environmental costs of the fuel they are burning. There could be similar solutions for other sorts of costs that people impose on others. And the solution does not need to be a tax.
Principles - Ask yourself about the principles on which a solution must be based. I'm not talking about moral principles here, just the practical rules, regulations, mathematical laws and such that a solution must follow. Failing to identify and respect those principles leads to wishful thinking (or worse - complaining about how stupid people are or how "messed up" society is).
Problem Search - Another generic strategy is to copy a social practice, policy, or whatnot that works in another country or another area of society. Some concept from banking may yield a new way to fight teenage drug abuse. Who knows?
Incentives - It is easier to change behaviors if you reward people than if you threaten to punish them. The challenge is to offer incentives that really promote the behavior you want.
Unconstrained Consumer - If you need a good idea try thinking about what an unconstrained consumer would do. If money were no object how would you solve the problem? What would an unconstrained socially conscious consumer do? What could the government, any level of government, do if there were no budget restrictions? These questions can yield an idea that can be modified into a workable form. This is what you could expect from any brainstorming technique.
Internalize Costs - Many social and environmental problems come about because the people causing the problems are not paying the full costs of their actions. So, can we identify these costs and create policy or legislation that forces the "bad actors" to internalize those costs?
Air pollution from motor vehicles provides a good example of this problem. The solution, at least the conventional one, is to raise the gas tax so drivers pay the health and environmental costs of the fuel they are burning. There could be similar solutions for other sorts of costs that people impose on others. And the solution does not need to be a tax.
Principles - Ask yourself about the principles on which a solution must be based. I'm not talking about moral principles here, just the practical rules, regulations, mathematical laws and such that a solution must follow. Failing to identify and respect those principles leads to wishful thinking (or worse - complaining about how stupid people are or how "messed up" society is).
Problem Search - Another generic strategy is to copy a social practice, policy, or whatnot that works in another country or another area of society. Some concept from banking may yield a new way to fight teenage drug abuse. Who knows?
posted by Dr Society | 10:21 AM
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