I've long been astonished by a particularly irrational form of loss aversion that I've taken to calling "Zero-sum NIMBYism". Here's how it works:
A lifetime ago, I was living in a little seaside village which had an annual festival day that the local chamber of commerce would put on. Every year, the chamber would arrange to close the main street, invite stallholders, entertainers, and so on, and a lovely time would be had by all. Visitors would come from all over the country (in the off season!), and cars would be parked all along the streets for anywhere up to a kilometre. A day wandering up and down the street in the sunshine, snacking and drinking; what's not to like?
And every year, the owner of the local surf shop, plus one or two similarly entitled misers, would complain bitterly about the cost to the chamber of organising the thing, and the loss of on-street car parking directly outside his shop.
Eventually, I lost patience with this behaviour, and at one chamber meeting, as he was banging on about it yet again, I stopped him in mid-flow to ask tetchily, "Do you actually lose money on the day?"
"Well, no, obviously I don't lose money!"
Well, then! I sat back, feeling as though my point had been made, but he clearly did not get it, and remained steadfastly outraged that the chamber was spending money in ways that did not directly and immediately result in a measurable increase in sales of ludicrously overpriced swimsuits.
Doesn't he see that he's almost certainly getting a host of indirect benefits from the fact that other local businesses were doing better on the day? Or for example, that some proportion of day visitors might be impressed enough to return for a longer stay in the summer and be in the market for beach accessories, or that the village inevitably got positive press coverage out of it, bringing still more visitors, and so on?
I keep coming across this attitude. The last time was a few months ago, again about the loss of car parking space, again by people who couldn't point to a direct harm to themselves by the loss of the amenity, and again driven by the intuition that if somebody else is benefiting, they must be losing in some way. If pressed, they'll extemporise the most oddly specific scenarios about foreseeable imposts.
"What about the eighty year old lady who has driven to [name of suburb withheld] from Ballarat? Do you want her to have to walk a whole block? Or more? In the dark?"
Surely the drive from Ballarat is the difficult bit? If she's up to that, she'll doubtless have factored in the arrival time and the potential inconvenience of not getting a spot right by the door of her destination, won't she? In any case, are optimistic, far-flung octogenarian motorists such regular visitors to your perfectly charming but unremarkable locale that they constitute a demographic of substantial concern? Have you considered some of the potential costs (which both you and your posited elderly lady may already be paying!) of not employing the space in question in some more socially useful way?
It occurred to me that there should really be a cadre of people who are specially trained to identify and explain the pros and cons of using any given resource (or set of resources) one way and not another. Communities, at any scale, are complex organic things, and not everybody is equipped to see further than what's in front of their face at the current moment. Costs and benefits of a particular course of action ripple outwards, crossing and merging in ways that yield unpredictable consequences.
Some little initiatives of apparently marginal benefit can have wondrous outcomes. Some huge projects that promise the world can be disastrous (in fact a cynic might argue that this is the rule, rather than the exception). The loudest voice in the room is hard to miss, but is there some relevant group out there whose interests might be affected in ways you would never consider? What you really need is a cross-disciplinary, big-picture, expert on everything.
"What might we call this new practice?", I was wondering to myself recently.
I settled, provisionally, on "Joined-up-thinking." Never mind; I'm sure I'll come up with something better. But where are these polymaths, and how can we press them into the service of the public good?
Often I get an idea that's so splendid I can't believe that nobody's ever had it before. Usually I find that somebody's had it before. That always comes as a relief, because otherwise I'm either wrong in some obvious and fundamental way, or I'm some kind of exceptional genius. And I have decades worth of evidence that the latter is very unlikely.
So I was relieved when I chanced upon a new (to me) portmanteau: "multisolving". (A bit clunky, but I can think of worse.)
"A multisolving innovation is a practice, program, policy, or technology new to a community that offers co-benefits of more than one type." (Dearing & Lapinsky, 2020)
Here's Elizabeth Sawin, who coined the term, doing the traditional stiff and awkward TED talk hand-wavy thing about it:
Okay, cool. So a multisolver is some person who you can call on who'll look at your objectives, and the set of available options to achieve them, from a variety of perspectives, drawing on a wide range of fields of expert knowledge, identify the potential benefits and costs across society (including future generations), and basically give you everything you need to make an informed decision.
Great. This sounds like just the ticket.
Only it eventually occurred to me that we already have a name for this practice: "economics".
We don't actually think of economists that way, because for half a century they have functioned as court astrologers. You tell an economist the course of action you've already decided upon, and they'll provide a supernatural justification for it, by reference to a blend of holy writ (the books of Samuelson and Mankiw), eternal verities of human behaviour as revealed by mystical insight, a cherry-picked record of tendentious statistical correlations, and a common sense "everybody knows" folk wisdom.
Perhaps it is more practical to outflank and ignore mainstream economists than unseat them. Call real economics something else, just ignore them, and eventually "economics" will be spoken of in the same terms as phrenology. I don't know; tactics is hardly my strong suit.
Well, to be honest I think it would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater to discard the work of honourable economists of earlier ages, and more egregious still to tar the brilliant work of current-day heretics of the discipline with the same brush (if indeed it makes sense to paint metaphorical bathing babies with tar in the first place). Moreover it rankles that the mainstream can be so esteemed and well-remunerated for clear, consistently repeated failure to do their job with the tiniest degree of actual (rather than performative) rigour, competence, or professional ethics.
The cost of car dependency, for example, is more than the sum of the prices of all the cars on the road plus running costs. The cost of a motorway is more than the price of building it. The value of a car park must be measured against the value of any reasonable proposed alternative use of the land, not just the absence of the car park. How do you reconcile the cost of bulldozing an entire neighbourhood against the benefit of a few minutes shaved off commuting times? Have all, or even any of, the other solutions been considered? How certain are you that all the factors you've assumed to be constant (or irrelevant) will not change in the future?
If you have a difficult and complex question, it is unreasonable to expect a simple and certain answer. Anybody offering one is likely scam artist, a cretin, a religious fundamentalist, or some hybrid of these.
In the realm of policy, cost and benefit can never be summed to a single, precise, comparable value; they must be evaluated in the context of a host of fundamentally irreconcilable concerns, few of which can be known with certainty, across a potentially huge and diverse constituency, over the course of generations. To pretend otherwise is, according to Cory Doctorow:
…the quant’s version of the drunkard’s search for car-keys under the lamp-post: we can’t add, subtract, multiply or divide qualitative elements, so we just incinerate them, sweep up the dubious quantitative residue that remains, do math on that, and simply assert that nothing important was lost in the process.
This irreducible complexity isn't necessarily a sorry fact of life we must grudgingly accept. Adopting the glass-half-full perspective of the multisolver, we may see that broadening the scope of our enquiries, and including messily qualitative, uncertain, and imprecise factors may turn an arguably good idea into an indisputable no-brainer, or render an necessary but politically unworkable set of policies into such a vote winner as to scatter the opposing massed armies of corporate lobbyists into hopeless disarray. Whatever the outcome in any given instance, it must be better to be uncertain based on all the identifiably relevant knowledge than it is to be implacably precise on a meagre sample of firm but dubiously-derived figures.
Moreover if, in discarding the methodological blinkers they made for us, we coincidentally introduce some acclaimed prize-winning sages to the very unemployment queues they have worked their whole careers to keep fulsomely stocked, that would also be serendipitous.