Robinson Meyer’s Atlantic piece, “An Outdated Idea Is Still Shaping Climate Policy” led me to “Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma: Why Distributive Conflict, Not Collective Action, Characterizes the Politics of Climate Change” by Michaël Aklin and Matto Mildenberger. I think the implications are profound.

Climate change looks like a tragedy of the commons. Most people stand to lose a great deal as the earth’s climate heats up. However, to prevent or mitigate that process, substantial numbers of individuals, companies, and countries would have pay or forego benefits. Each party will want the others to bear the burden and not make voluntary contributions by itself.

One classic solution to such dilemmas is a top-down rule that alters everyone’s incentives–in this case, a tax on carbon. However, the United Nations can’t tax anything. Each country’s carbon tax costs its own economy without (by itself) solving the climate crisis. Thus the tragedy reemerges at the international level and predicts that satisfactory carbon taxes will be hard to enact. Although 64% of Americans agree that “the U.S. should reduce greenhouse gas emissions regardless of what other countries do,” the theory suggests that this belief is soft and not likely to support ambitious policies. I’ve even made a simple online game to simulate this problem in teaching.

However, evidence seems to be building for a different model. Some people gain tangibly and immediately from decarbonization. Consider firms that build solar panels, low-carbon farmers, individuals who teach environmental science in high school, environmental engineers, and even residents of cities that are powered by renewables and compete with cities that depend on coal.

If some gain while others lose, it is no longer a Tragedy of the Commons. It is regular game in which the winners obtain benefits and the losers bear costs. Aklin and Mildenberger call this a “distributive conflict.”

In a mixed economy, the winning is side is likely to be more numerous (with more votes) and richer (with more buying and investing power). The size and wealth of both sides may change over time.

A distributive conflict makes new solutions appear possible. Governments can borrow or tax and spend the revenue to expand the size and power of the coalition that favors decarbonization. They can also compensate the losing side for reasons of equity or to reduce opposition. The game is rivalrous but not strictly zero-sum; everyone can gain in important respects even if some pay more than others.

According to the Tragedy of the Commons model, spending money will not solve climate change. This model views both costs and benefits in a static way: each dollar reduces carbon by a certain amount. The results are not necessarily very impressive, and they face a limit. There is still a lot of carbon under the ground; it has market value; and subsidizing renewables does not make the carbon worthless. Thus it will be burned. Besides, governments will surely–and perhaps rightly–fail to use spending to minimize carbon emissions. Since they will also be interested in other goals (jobs, health, equity, or ensuring their own reelection) they will not buy as much carbon reduction as they could.

But the alternative model offers hope that spending may be dynamic. Dollars invested in renewables, a new power grid, R&D, an electric car for one’s family, and even environmental education build constituencies for decarbonization. As these constituencies grow, they will use their economic and political power to demand more decarbonization–including the harder solutions of taxes and regulations. In that case, subsidies have leverage.

See, for instance, Liu, Lixia, Yuchao Zhu, and Shubing Guo. “The evolutionary game analysis of multiple stakeholders in the low-carbon agricultural innovation diffusion.” Complexity 2020 (2020). See also: public event on Governing the Commons: 30 Years Later with discussion of policing and climate change; A Civic Green New Deal; a Green recovery; taxing and spending are more compatible with democratic values than regulation is. And see our Civic Green project.

Here is a sample of articles published within the past week alone: “The Right’s Anti-Business Turn“; “The GOP-Big Business Divorce Goes Deeper Than You Think“; “Republicans Will Regret Their Breakup With Big Business“; “Existential Threat-Or Politics as Usual,” and “Is the Business Community At Last Falling Out of Love With the Republican Party?“

The situation is fluid and hard to interpret. Our predictions are inevitably influenced by our assumptions about how business generally relates to politics in the USA. In that spirit, I’ll disclose my own premises.

First, businesses influence government. There is no consensus among political scientists that campaign contributions and paid lobbying matter very much. It’s certainly not evident that companies can decide who wins elections. The main source of influence is what Charles E. Lindblom called the “privileged position of business.” The basic idea is that businesses create jobs in a capitalist economy; politicians want jobs to be created; therefore, politicians cater to business. Direct communications from corporations to politicians are effective mainly because they convey information that politicians are eager to hear. Although companies may exaggerate the costs of taxing and spending, politicians take their predictions seriously because they think their own interests are at stake. Compared to other politicians, liberal Democrats are more skeptical of business and more likely to want to hear from labor, but even most liberals listen hard when a company is deciding whether to move in or out of their own district. This dynamic is built into a mixed economy (or what Lindblom called, following Dahl, a “polyarchy”).

However, people see the world through ideological frames. We do not just behold the truth and maximize our self-interest (profits for firms; reelection for politicians). Instead, we use conceptual frameworks to interpret the world. A politician who believes in “free markets” is primed to assume that a tax increase will cost jobs even if it won’t. At the same time, a business that sees itself as a fair and inclusive workplace is primed to see xenophobic rhetoric as bad for the bottom line (even if it isn’t).

The dominant framework in corporate boardrooms is pro-market, pro-technology, meritocratic/elitist, cosmopolitan, and self-congratulatory about the business’s own fairness and inclusivity. This is partly because of the demographics of the corporate ranks: heavily “coastal” and international and highly educated. The most coveted employees and consumers–the ones with the most buying power–share those characteristics. Businesses observe politics through this lens.

At the same time, businesses do not particularly want to engage with politics. Government can be helpful, particularly if you want big government contracts. But it also presents risks. Politics is controversial, so involvement can hurt your reputation. The last thing you want is to be targeted by boycotts from several directions. Politicians can also extract rents. Businesses contribute to candidates not only to get benefits but also to stave off harms. A stable policy that is fairly expensive to business (such as a higher corporate tax rate) may actually be preferable to a rapidly changing and highly contested policy environment.

Finally, it is much easier to advocate a narrow policy, particularly one that has low public salience, than to try to steer the whole ship of state.

As a result, most businesses probably prefer outcomes in this order:

1. A particular politician of any party and persuasion who champions their highly specific interests–a given tax break, an import permit, etc.
2. Traditional Republicans who instinctively favor business interests, focus on economics, and don’t court controversy.
3. Moderate Democrats, who are practically tied with #2.
4. Quite liberal Democrats, as long as they are forced to compromise. If Sen. Sanders could write the tax code, that would be expensive for corporate America. If he has a seat at the table, it’s OK.
5. Trump. He’s a loose cannon. He’s protectionist. Business doesn’t like his explicit stances on race and immigration; and he may hurt traditional Republicans against Democrats. For instance, with a different Republican president on the ballot in 2020, the GOP would probably control the White House and at least one house of Congress. right now Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez would be in the minority party now, rather than the majority. This means that Trump presents, overall, a bigger problem for business than Bernie does.

If this ranking is correct, then the relationship between business and the GOP is fraught; however, corporations’ calculations are complicated, and they will surely hedge their bets.

The New York Times published a chart showing the number of reported COVID-19 deaths per capita and deaths above normal this year for selected countries. My graph demonstrates that the two variables correlate quite well–except in Russia. That is circumstantial evidence that Russia (and only Russia, among these countries) is failing to report COVID-19 deaths, as Anton Troianovski suggests in the reported article.

I wanted to check this correlation because I am interested in what explains the very large differences in national death rates. An explanation is not at all obvious. Consider these statistics:

The first point you may notice is a very high variation in many of these indicators. The excess death rate is 20 percentage-points worse in Spain than Germany. The UK has lost almost 14 times more people per capita to COVID-19 than Finland. France spends almost twice as much of its GDP on social welfare as the nearby Netherlands. Germany is 26 times more dense than Russia. Sweden is far more urban than Austria. Americans spend an average of five times more on healthcare than Hungarians. The only column with a small range is age expectancy.

The second point is that none of these variables correlates impressively with COVID-19 deaths. In a simple OLS regression, nothing comes anywhere near statistical significance.

It far from obvious why some countries have fared so much better or worse than the others. This is a smallish sample of countries (the only ones for which the NYT presented excess deaths) and maybe patterns would emerge in a larger sample. However, the situation seems noisy because so many variables may matter, and they can push in different directions in the same country.

For instance, Anne Applebaum recently wrote, “if the United States is very, very bad at social trust and public-health systems, it is very, very good at large-scale logistics.” I would gloss her second point this way: once the US government pays big companies a lot of money to do something, we often see impressive results. In this case, firms like Pfizer, FedEx, and CVS are administering millions of doses of vaccine per day with federal support. Yet we do a relatively bad job at changing behavior en masse because we tend to be distrustful and hyper-individualistic. The shifting performance of the US compared to other countries probably reflects these cross-pressures–and every other country has its own mix.

Let’s assume that we hope to get a response whenever we say something to another person. Because of that desire, we do not feel right unless we respond whenever others address us. These tendencies would naturally arise among social animals.*

But then imagine that it becomes very easy to send one message to many people at once. This has been the case since the rise of email. Instinctively, we are going to experience each message that we receive from a human sender as a bid for our individual attention. If we fail to reply promptly, we are likely to feel bad. We have rejected the bid.

The problem is not the electronic medium or the speed of transmission. To type a message takes at least as much time as turning to someone and saying something. The problem is the simultaneous delivery of the same individual-looking message to multiple recipients. Almost everyone perceives the sheer number of incoming messages as a burden. Failure to respond in a timely way feels uncaring.

Social media feels different to me. Posting something in a forum is like speaking to an audience or an assembly. The speaker doesn’t expect each listener to reply separately, and therefore listeners don’t feel obliged to meet that expectation. The particular source of stress created by email (and its successors) is the ability to deliver one message separately to many people as if we were addressing each one individually, only at a much faster rate.

Please go ahead and email me; I am happy to hear from you. I might even suffer FOMO if you leave me off your messages. The problem is systemic and would require a collective solution.

*I’m pretty sure I read a journalistic article making this point, and citing experts. I have not been able to find it again.

The Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life prepares students in all fields of study for lifetimes of active citizenship. Tisch College promotes new knowledge in the field and applies this knowledge to evidence-based practice in programs, community partnerships, and advocacy efforts. Central to the university’s mission, the college offers Tufts’ students opportunities to engage in meaningful community building, civic and political experiences, and explore commitments to civic participation.

These researcher positions are open at Tisch:

Senior Researcher – CIRCLE, Tisch College

CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement, is a non-partisan, independent research organization focused on youth civic engagement in the United States. We conduct extensive research on youth participation, and we leverage that research to improve opportunities for all young people to acquire and use the skills and knowledge they need to meaningfully participate in civic life. In all our work, we are especially concerned with understanding, addressing, and ultimately eliminating the systemic barriers that keep some young people marginalized from and underrepresented in civic life. Our research informs policy and practice and drive substantive change–whether in the classroom, state laws, the county clerk’s office, or the community organization–that promotes stronger youth development and a more inclusive and prosperous society.

Responsibilities include serving as the lead quantitative researcher on a range of research projects that may include strategies such as secondary data-analysis, large dataset creation/analysis, literature reviews, field experiments, and development of original surveys. The Senior Researcher’s tasks include producing analytic plans, methodology documentation, datasets, reports, fact sheets, formal and informal research briefings, often in close collaboration with CIRCLE colleagues. The Senior Researcher will assist with research grant proposal writing, especially with methodology and measurement sections. She/They/he will occasionally represent CIRCLE at conferences, practitioner forums, and press events. The Senior Researcher will collaborate with colleagues who represent multiple disciplines, backgrounds and positions and provide input and assistance, as well as peer training to other CIRCLE staff who produce and translate research (quantitative and qualitative). This staff member will report to the Director of CIRCLE (Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg), who reports to the Associate Dean of Tisch College, Diane Ryan.

Apply here.

Associate Researcher – Tisch College

The Cooperative Election Study (CES) is a large-scale academic election survey funded by the National Science Foundation and housed at Tufts University and Harvard University. The study is built on the collaboration of research teams from dozens of different academic institutions. Since its inception, the CES has involved more than 100 different research teams and hundreds of faculty and student researchers, and it has conducted interviews with over 400,000 American adults. The data from this project are used widely by researchers, journalists, and members of the public to understand American elections and public opinion.

THS IS A ONE-YEAR GRANT SUPPORTED TERM POSITION WITH NO CURRENT FUNDING FOR CONTINUATION. The Associate Researcher will assist with completing the data collection, organization, and analysis of data from the 2020 Cooperative Election Study. The Associate Researcher will also aid the coordination of the project, the development of educational materials, the design and analysis of future surveys, and the dissemination of results. Among other things, the Associate Researcher will help to create the codebook and guide for the 2020 CES, will respond to request and inquiries from researchers and reporters wishing to use the data, and will collaborate with the principal investigators on analyzing data from the 2020 CES. The Associate Researcher will also have the opportunity to engage in collaborative academic research projects with the CES team. The Associate Researcher will report to the Principal Investigator (Professor Brian Schaffner), based on the Medford/Somerville Tufts University Campus. This is an ideal position for someone interested in gaining research experience in political science or survey research.

Basic Requirements:

REQUIRED:

• Bachelor’s degree  
• Competency using statistical software such as R or Stata
• Strong organizational and time management skills. Ability to manage multiple concurrent projects and competing deadlines

OTHER:

• Project management skills
• Strong oral and written communication skills
• Demonstrated customer service or relationship management experience
• Strong analytic and problem-solving skills
• Ability to maintain attention to detail
• Experience working with groups of people representing diverse identities and backgrounds     

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity with Qualtrics software.
• Experience analyzing public opinion data from surveys
• Strong interest in American public opinion and survey methodology

Apply here.

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Civic Science

This postdoctoral fellowship is offered in partnership with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation in Dayton, OH and involves some work at Kettering’s offices in Dayton as well as full-time employment at Tufts in the Boston area. The term is the 2021-22 academic year (June 1, 2021-May 31, 2022).

The Tisch College Civic Science initiative (https://tischcollege.tufts.edu/civic-studies/civic-science), led by Dr. Peter Levine and Dr. Samantha Fried, aims to reframe the relationships among scientists and scientific institutions, institutions of higher education, the state, the media and the public. It also asks about the relationships and distinctions among those institutions, historically and today. With this context in mind, Civic Science seeks to…

• Reconfigure the national conversation on divisive and complex issues that are both scientific and political in nature, thereby connecting scientific institutions, research, and publications to people’s values, beliefs, and choices.
• Define and advance the public good in science, thereby finding ways for scientific institutions to better serve communities.
• Explore the concept of knowledge as a commons (or common-pool resource), developing a line of work pioneered by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues
• Develop curricula that simultaneously attend to scientific and civic issues and that teach students to understand and communicate both kinds of narratives together to a variety of audiences.
• Develop approaches to democratic governance that are attuned to the role of the scientific enterprise in society.
• Ask what it would mean to earn the trust of communities that have been historically marginalized by the institution of science, and what science would look like if this was a priority.
• Intervene at institutional and grassroots levels, alongside a robust theoretical analysis.

A PhD is required. Applicants must also demonstrate a strong interest in investigating the intersections of science and civic matters as the focus of their postdoctoral year.

Civic Science is interdisciplinary, and this fellowship is open to specialists in any relevant field.

Qualifications

A scholar with a Ph.D. in any relevant discipline who is not yet tenured.

Desirable qualifications include, but are not limited to, the following:

• A background, degree, or certificate in a STEM –– or STEM-adjacent –– field, OR
• Work on strengthening, designing, or evaluating democratic processes, OR
• A background in the Bloomington School approach to political economy and/or studies of common-pool resources, OR
• A background in political science or political theory, OR
• Previous work on the connections between community health and civic life, OR
• A background in science, technology, and society (STS), OR
• A background in critical theory, media studies, rhetoric, philosophy of science and technology, or science communication.

The ideal candidate may have more than one of these backgrounds.

The Postdoctoral Fellow will conduct research related to Civic Science, both independently and in collaboration with Peter Levine, Samantha Fried, and the Kettering Foundation. The Fellow may teach or co-teach one course to undergraduates in the Civic Studies Major. The Fellow will attend orientation and research meetings at the Kettering Foundation as requested.

Apply here: https://apply.interfolio.com/59747.

Opens March 17, 2021 and will continue until the position is filled, or May 20.
Questions about the position should be addressed to Dr. Peter Levine, Associate Dean of Tisch College at Peter.Levine@tufts.edu.
    
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Equal Employment Opportunity Statement: Tufts University, founded in 1852, prioritizes quality teaching, highly competitive basic and applied research, and a commitment to active citizenship locally, regionally, and globally. Tufts University also prides itself on creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community. Current and prospective employees of the university are expected to have and continuously develop skill in, and disposition for, positively engaging with a diverse population of faculty, staff, and students.

Tufts University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. We are committed to increasing the diversity of our faculty and staff and fostering their success when hired. Members of underrepresented groups are welcome and strongly encouraged to apply. See the University’s Non-Discrimination statement and policy here https://oeo.tufts.edu/policies-procedures/non-discrimination/. If you are an applicant with a disability who is unable to use our online tools to search and apply for jobs, please contact us by calling Johny Laine in the Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO) at 617-627-3298 or at johny.laine@tufts.edu. Applicants can learn more about requesting reasonable accommodations at http://oeo.tufts.edu.