Counterproductive activism
Today’s world is full of activism: whether it’s about climate change, feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, inequality, poverty, animal rights, injustice, issues disproportionally affecting minorities and so on. I’d guess that most people reading this are activists in one way or another: you’re trying to change the world for the better. And the beneficiaries tend to be other people, animals or nature.
You can change the world in many ways: you can take the bike to work instead of the car so you emit less of a whole bunch of polluters, and you can choose to buy locally grown food. Some people prefer to volunteer at an animal shelter so they help animals. Maybe you’ve taken part in some protests or marches for one of the things you care about.
A final way that people do a lot, is to try and convince others. If you’re convinced that donating to people in poverty in your city is important, you’ll try to convince others to do the same. This can be a very frustrating and tedious thing to do, and you risk coming across as pushing your own beliefs on other people. You might think “If you say you care about reducing the effects of climate change, why did you just buy a new SUV?”.
This is known in psychology as the value-action gap, although it has many other names such as the attitude-behavior gap or the intention-behavior gap. As the name suggests, it describes a difference between the values that we have and the things that we do. It occurs mostly in environmentally related issues, where we might not always be aware of the consequences of our actions or purchases, or there are other values that you prioritize at the time of purchase. Ethically produced clothing, for example, is more in line with our values than the sweatshop-produced Primark or SHEIN stuff, but it’s also about ten times as expensive (at least here). We might not consider that to be worth it.
But besides money, we often just aren’t aware of the impact different purchases have. I mean, how often have you looked up a life-cycle comparison study between different products before you bought one? Or maybe you’re basing it on some fancy graphic you once saw on Facebook. And it had a source, so it must be true. Or are you trusting your intuition on what is better and what isn’t? Let’s look at some examples:
- Buying a bag at the grocery store
You went to the store to get just a few things and after check-out, you realize you bought way more than you intended. You see that you can buy a plastic bag at the check-out to carry the extra stuff. Next to it is a paper one that costs a bit more. You’ll probably opt for the paper bag, as it reduces plastic consumption and pollution, and the paper is recyclable, so it’s much more sustainable.
Say you want to go all the way. You bought a tote bag from a local company to support it, and although it was expensive, you consider it to be worth it. After all, the bag is made from organically grown and fair-trade cotton. It has a nice print and all and you can reuse it many times. Maybe you even got it for free at an event, or you’re an event organizer and have handed them out to visitors for free.
But is it really more sustainable? Note that sustainability is a broad topic that encompasses many issues in the world. It tends to focus on environmental issues, so let’s look compare the environmental impact of that organic cotton bag to the free plastic bag. On the graph below, you’ll find for every material a bag is made of (y-axis) how many times you have to reuse it to have the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as a single-use paper bag. This means that if a material scores a 1, it’s equally bad for climate change as a single-use plastic bag. Less is better, more is worse. Got that? Good.
Oh no. A bag made out of organic cotton is 150 times as bad for the climate as a single-use plastic bag. It would take almost three years of weekly usage for that one tote bag to have caused fewer emissions than buying a new plastic bag and throwing it away every week for three years. A paper bag is much better, luckily, but it’s still worse than a plastic bag. So when it comes to carbon emissions, the best thing you can do is re-using that single-use bag you bought. Tip: if you take two bags and use them as one bag by placing one in the other, you can use it much longer than you would a single bag.
But hang on there, sustainability is much more than just climate change. What about other environmental factors? Well, let’s look at some more.
Turns out those greenhouse emissions weren’t too bad after all. You’d need to re-use an organic cotton tote bag every day for six and a half years to break even on the average environmental impact (bottom-right) of just one simple plastic bag. And keep in mind that if you reuse that single-use plastic bag even once, those six and a half years double to 13 years. I don’t think those tote bags even last that long. And okay, ozone depletion might be an outlier there, but the organic cotton bags are still hundreds and thousands of times worse on some indicators than that single-use plastic bag.
You might say that plastic bag is still bad because of the plastic, but is it worth emitting 150 times more greenhouse gases for that one plastic bag that you, an environmentalist, will probably recycle or reuse anyway?
So, if we care about things like climate change or ozone depletion and we’re facing a choice between a single-use plastic bag, a paper bag or a cotton bag, buy the single-use plastic bag and reuse it. That’s by far the best thing you can do.
2. Higher taxes for less inequality
There are poor people and there are rich people. This is how it has always been, but most of us would agree that this is probably not how it should be. The rich are much, much richer than the poor, who really need that money to just have a decent quality of life.
One often suggested way to do that is by taxing the rich. They have so much money, that they could easily lose 95% of it without really having a worse life because of it. They, the government, could give this to the people who have been the victim of systematic racism and oppression so they have better opportunities at building their life. This can be done through direct cash transfers or investing in schools or public transit and probably a million other things.
This would, indeed, reduce inequality. But taxes are raised by a country on the residents of that country and that money is, in part, redistributed to all other citizens of that country. This also means that the only inequality that is being reduced is the inequality within a country.
You might say that’s not true because the government also spends money on aid programs overseas. And whilst that is correct, it’s only a very small percentage. For example: in 2024, USAID, the US Agency for International Development, receives 63 billion USD for its operations. This is whilst the budget of the US government for that year is 6.9 trillion USD. USAID is hence getting less than 1% of the US budget, and hence of the taxes raised on rich people in the US.
Can’t other countries just do the same then? Well, no. Billionaires are very concentrated in the US. About half of them live there. So most money of the billionaires that gets taxed would go to the poorest people in the US. And those people are still pretty rich by global standards.
This matters, because if we value every person equally, there’s no reason why somebody who happens to be born in the US deserves that money more than somebody born just across the border in Mexico, or in a small Kazakh village for that matter.
And as it turns out, inequality between countries is bigger than inequality within countries. So if we really want to reduce inequality with taxes, we should probably focus on getting the government to spend more on USAID.
Does that mean that the poor in the US deserve nothing? No, not at all, but the people in the US aren’t more deserving of a good, healthy and wealthy life than people outside of it. In fact, as the graph below shows, the poorest 10% in the US are still much richer than the richest 10% in Burundi, and note the logarithmic axis.
So what is a better way then? Let’s look at two scenarios. Say you have 10 billionaires who each have 10 billion USD, so 100 billion USD in total. Taxing them for, say 99% would mean that 99 billion USD would now go to taxes in the US. If 1% of that gets spent on USAID, approximately 1 billion USD would go to areas overseas. But this isn’t even going to the poorest places. No, this USAID money is getting spread across the entire world, a small fraction of which would only end up in Burundi.
However, say we tax those rich people less, say 20%, so they all still have 80 billion left. If we could convince just one of those 10 people to donate 20% of their wealth to charities using cost-effective and evidence-based methods of reducing inequality, starting with the people who have the least, 1.6 billion USD (0.2*8 billion) would go just to the countries that need this help the most. Maybe the other billionaires can be convinced to spend 5% of their wealth. In total, we can now spend 5.2 billion USD on getting the poorest people out of their poverty.
Considering our budget has quintupled and we can spend that money in a much more targeted way with the goal of reducing inequality, say with cash transfers or by donating malaria nets so people, especially children, don’t get sick and stay out of school, it is evident that this will reduce inequality much more than just raising taxes and giving it to the people who are poor around us instead of the people who are much, much poorer but just happen to be further away or outside our country’s borders.
But how do you get rich people to donate, you might ask? It’s probably worth taking a look at their philanthropy programs to see what they are already doing. You can send them an e-mail asking why they do what they do and why you think they should spend it another way to better achieve the goals they have. Are they going to listen? No, probably not all of them, but remember from the little exercise two paragraphs earlier: just getting a few responses with donations worth a few thousand dollars will probably achieve more than spending that time advocating for tax raises.
These two examples might seem controversial. They’re also not the go-to examples you get when you look for examples of the value-action gap. You’ll probably get something like that guy who cares about climate change but also just bought an SUV. But at its core, that guy and the two cases above are the same: we want to solve a certain problem, but our actions (often unknowingly!) lead to the opposite of what we want to achieve.
So what can we do to prevent this from happening? The answer is simple: research. But research is incredibly time intensive. Hence, I suggest using sites like Our World In Data when we’re thinking about big problems like these. In addition, you can study effectivity of certain measures or interventions for a certain problem. It makes sense to pick measures that are more effective. However, we talked earlier about buying shirts from SHEIN or Primark and how much cheaper they were. So money matters too. For every measure, we can also calculate how much they cost. Combining cost with effectivity results in cost-effectivity.
But we still should be careful with applying these: every situation is different, and the numbers from cost-effectiveness analyses are often rough estimates too. That’s great for comparing, but for very specific situations in real life with a lot of factors that are outside of your control, you should probably use some common sense too. Let’s look at an example
I recently wrote a paper for school about groundwater infiltration. Concrete and asphalt prevent water from getting into the soil, reducing groundwater levels. This is a problem for a variety of reasons, but let’s skip to the solutions. The most cost-effective solution is to remove these hard surfaces. But that’s obviously not always possible, say in narrow city center streets. Another option like infiltration crates is probably the best solution. These crates are installed below the road surface and capture the runoff rainwater which is then slowly released back into the soil.
To conclude: don’t trust your intuition. The results of your actions don’t necessarily align with your intentions as shown in the example of the cotton bag.
