This article from Potlatch blog is mostly about economics and politics, but has some references to peeing in the urinals. Unless one knows about the comparisons, you won’t be able to understand a single word of it.
There’s an article to be written by someone on economists’ favourite examples. Talk to a welfare economist for any length of time, and they will be sure to mention pollution as an example of a negative externality. I wonder if pollution is more than just an example, but actually a totem to which other negative externalities strive to conform. In fact it’s quite difficult to define a negative externality without mentioning pollution sooner or later:
“So, errr, someone, lets call him John, is producing something… lets say it’s cars.. but his car plant generates these additional costs which aren’t contained in the price of the car”
Like what?
“Oh, err, well, you know it could be damage to someone else… or to another producer… or to the environ…”
Oh, you mean pollution?
“Well, not necessarily… Well, yes, I guess… OK, OK, I’m talking about pollution!”
Interviewed in this article in The New Yorker about the financial crisis, Richard Posner argues that “the mistake was to ignore externalities in banking”. Interesting – I wonder what he means exactly. He goes on, “everyone knew there were pollution externalities. That was fine. I don’t think we realised there were banking externalities.” Hmmm. So that’s what people mean by ‘toxic assets’.
If the future belongs to behavioural economics, it’s interesting to consider what might be the next totemic example. Somewhat disappointingly, it appears to be urinary accuracy. Nudge made famous the urinals in Amsterdam Schiphol airport, pictured here on the right, which feature a small picture of a fly (the dot in the centre of the bowl) as a ‘nudge’ towards greater concentration on the direction of a gentleman’s aim. This example became a metaphor for ‘libertarian paternalism’, of how policy-makers could improve behaviour by altering ‘choice architectures’.
Now the Nudge blog is cooing over the latest in libertarian-paternalist choice architecture, pictured here on the left. It features a football and goal, offering Sir a ‘nudge’ towards slamming it in the back of the net. One must hope that Sir isn’t a defender (or, in the case of Schiphol, a buddhist), or this could backfire nastily.
The truth of post-industrial capitalism is laid bare. Where once we had to be prevented from emitting manufactured pollutants into natural environments, now we have to be prevented from emitting natural pollutants into manufactured environments.
The individualism of behavioural economics has been widely discussed, and is viewed as a strength by many of its adherents (hence the ‘libertarian’ part). But its totemic example raises other questions. Do behavioural economists, in recognising that the economy is governed by emotion as well as calculation, hold men guilty of most of the world’s economic ills, such as the financial crisis? Perhaps it was less that financial assets had become ‘toxic’ (as Posner implies), than that bankers were spraying their investments ‘all over the floor’? And is the state now to be pictured in a cleaner’s overalls, with a mop and bucket in hand? The term ‘bail out’ takes on an unpleasant undertone.
What the metaphor definitely indicates is a naturalistic turn in our politics. Ulrich Beck’s notion of the ‘risk society’ depicted western rationality battling with itself, with pollution again the classic example. ‘Reflexivity’ was a buzz word of 1980s sociology, especially that of Giddens, referring to how modernity had become preoccupied with dealing with its own consequences. By contrast, the new reflexivity concerns how individuals can best come to understand themselves as natural, biological entities – how they can manage their health, brains, urges and co-operative instincts. It is, in Rose’s terms, the politics of life itself, and if you want a symbol of it going wrong, then picture a puddle on a bathroom floor.