(featured image: Vu Tran/Flickr CC BY NC 2.0)
(Not a recommendation, but an observation.) We often tend to focus on what is bad, and neglect what is good, and that leads to bad arguments, bad decisions and bad policy making.
This weekend much of Europe moves (or moved, if you’re reading this on or after Sunday) the clock forward for the umpteenth time. Daylight Savings Time had a patchy history for a good sixty years since it was first introduced early in the last century. Countries opted for, then against, then for again, while even within countries, regions and cities were doing their own thing. After WWII, most European countries abandoned it, with only a few countries, like the UK and Ireland, keeping up the practice. But triggered by the 1970s oil crisis, most countries that had stuck to a single time all year-round rediscovered DST, as an energy-saving measure. Since then, every year around this time, ever louder voices argue that putting clocks forward (and necessarily back again) is a pointless and harmful exercise. There is no conclusive evidence that it saves energy, and, especially in the days following the jump forward, it is reported to lead to more fatal traffic collisions, more heart attacks and strokes, and a drop in productivity. These voices were heard by the EU, which in 2019 began planning to abolish the measure. Since then, deadlines have come and gone. What are we waiting for? Why on earth do we still have a measure that saves no energy, wrecks our health and our economy, and kills more people on the road?
Giving up the best of both worlds
Perhaps this reasoning is not quite complete. We tend to be naturally more sensitive to negative experiences. This is very much an adaptive trait: our most distant ancestors had to navigate the primaeval soup and make sure they didn’t end up in an environment that was too hot or too cold, or toxic, or providing too little nutrition. Positive signals (or even absence of negative ones) meant it was cool to stay put, but negative signals meant it was best to pack up and go elsewhere. Organisms that failed to do so died a premature death and their DNA disappeared, while we inherited the genetic instructions from the successful ones.
But our ancestors did not have the sophistication of both our biology and our complex society. For them, the world was simple – things were either beneficial or detrimental. If something was detrimental, they had to move. We, these days, constantly face trade-offs, in which few choices are entirely beneficial or detrimental, and in which we really ought to work out whether the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. But sometimes we don’t, and we just accentuate the negative, while overlooking the positive. Sure, we don’t conserve any energy by moving the clock forwards. But are there no other, perhaps less quantitative benefits to it that this negative narrative is missing?
One of the obstacles for the EU’s aspiration is that the member states must decide whether they will settle for permanent summer time or winter time. And here, the issue becomes clear: most people actually like havinglight evenings in the summer, and like it that the sun rises at a reasonable hour in the winter. In the Far North, summer time is irrelevant – when you have 20 hours or more of daylight, it doesn’t matter when the sun sets and rises. In winter though, when daylight is scarce, people tend to prefer to have some of it before the morning is gone, so permanent winter time serves the Northern people best. Further South, long summer evenings, with a sunset at 10pm or later is much liked, and who cares that the sun is barely up at 6? But if that was maintained all year-round, it’d be nearly 10am by the time the sun rises in Winter, so permanent summer time here, please!
Changing the clocks provides the best of both worlds for everyone. This is a benefit that is not easily quantified, but that many people would be loath to give up. But we tend to overlook the upsides of the status quo, if we accentuate its negative too much.
When the negative rules
A few weeks ago, I came across another example. Hannah Ritchie of ourworldindata.org tweeted a chart, showing the significant growth of renewables in Germany’s electricity production since 2010 (by 145 TWh to 225 TWh), and the fall in the contribution of coal (by 82 TWh to 145 TWh). Great stuff, but Germany also started winding down its nuclear power generation plants in 2010, and their contribution also fell strongly (by 104 TWh to 65 TWh). Ritchie observes that the use of coal could have declined by much more, had nuclear capacity not been cut. Here too, strong motives to cease nuclear power production, fuelled by a negative perception (arguably more inspired by ideology than by facts about its safety and its environmental impact), overshadowed the benefits in terms of carbon dioxide emissions.
And as if I needed further case to pad out this article, in my native country this week, a new campaign was launched by the Flemish Forum for Traffic Safety, an advisory body, to reduce traffic casualties by cutting the maximum speed once again (to 30 km/h in all built-up areas, 100 km/h on motorways and 50 km/h elsewhere). There is no doubt that such measures would cut fatal accidents and those with serious injuries. And here too, we see a case of accentuating the negative, and of treating the proposed measure as if it were costless. Are there no advantages to the prevailing speed limits that would be lost if they are lowered? (The fact that the chairperson of the Forum considers the goal of zero traffic fatalities as a realistic target is a telling illustration.)
Having an eye only for the negative makes us vulnerable to the Big Yellow Taxi fallacy. In the eponymous song, Joni Mitchell sang, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”, and by focusing exclusively on the downsides of the present situation, we do indeed overlook the upsides we stand to lose.
We should of course not, as Johnny Mercer sang, simply Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive and eliminate the negative. Sound decision making means taking a balanced, unbiased view of both the costs and the benefits, the upsides and the downsides of a proposed choice. When our reasoning is inspired by ideology and dogma, or by strong emotions, we will tend to have attention to only one side of the trade-off, and that is, more often than not, the negative: we are predisposed to flee for what we believe threatens us. It is better to be critical of passionate, but uncompromising and one-sided arguments, and of campaigners and activists who make them (and that can mean being critical of ourselves, if we catch ourselves). And we should be especially critical of policy makers whose proposals appear to have only upsides and no downsides.
If we must accentuate something, let it not be either the negative or the positive. Let it be the need to consider both.
Koenfucius 