 Hello everyone, can I have your attention? It's my great pleasure to be here at the Sam Bulls lecture after a long three years of not having this type of event. It's really great to be able to kind of relaunch the Sam Bulls lecture and to kind of recognize and honor Sam's contributions to shaping the unique character of the UMass economics department through the years. And the great news is that Sam's actually here. So for me, this is a little trippy because Sam was my dissertation advisor and now I'm chair of the department introducing the Sam Bulls lecture. And our speaker today, Juan Camiles Cardenas, was in graduate school with me. Different programs, but we overlapped. And so it's kind of a full circle type of moment. I had a bunch of comments trying to draw the parallels between Juan Camiles' work and Sam's work. But we've asked Sam to actually introduce Juan Camiles and make those connections himself. So come on up, Sam. It's great to be here. I'm always so happy to be at UMass and to see everybody here who I know and even some who I don't. I won't say much about the connection between my work and Juan Camiles. I think it will be pretty obvious as he goes along. I'll say something about this lecture series. When I first heard about it, it was called the Sam Bulls Memorial Lecture. And I don't know quite how that got into the email, but I didn't object to that, actually. I was so pleased to be honored. In fact, I didn't notice that the connotations weren't so great. But I was uncomfortable seriously at having this honor. It's really quite an honor. And I was pleased with it. But I've never had anything named for me, except that my daughter named her dog, Sam. And I think that was, I mean, I was very happy that she named her dog, Sam. But who knows what was really going on between daughter and father and dog and so on. I could tell you fantastic stuff about Juan Camilo, but I won't bother to tell you what you can find out by just going online and looking at his massive CV, many, many pages. But I do want to say a few things about him as a human being and as a scholar. As you already know, he has a PhD from UMass in REZEC, Environmental and REZEC. He was a student with me. He was one of the many survivors of Economic 700. And many are in the room, some are in the room and all of you in the room who are taking 700, I'm sure will survive. He, over the course of the last quarter of a century, almost quarter of a century since he got his degree here, he's been a visitor at Harvard, also at the Santa Fe Institute. He was also a visitor for a MacArthur Foundation Network in behavioral economics. It included some of the top people in behavioral economics, including Kahneman and Fair and many others. I think one of the big influences on his development was Eleanor Ostrom and he spent time at the University of Indiana with Ostrom and was also co-author with her. His contributions to behavioral economics and environmental economics are really quite distinctive. Remember 20 years ago, what we were doing in behavioral economics is we were getting a lot of stuff published by essentially saying, home economics is wrong and there were many different ways to do that and it was kind of low-hanging fruit and you could get stuff published by running an experiment and showing that people didn't consistently act in a selfish manner. And that was all done in labs and with students. There are two things I think is really impressive about what Juan Camila did and I'll tell you why he did it in a minute but what he did was right from the beginning he wanted to ask, oh, if what we're learning from behavioral economics is really true, how should we do economics differently? So he took it from being something which was a kind of exciting but kind of boutique field of cool results showing that home economics was wrong into saying, how can we use this knowledge so as to better organize our societies, particularly in ways that are sustainable and which attended the needs of the least well-off. He immediately made that step and I hope more and more people are making that because I think it's time we accepted the fact that the behavioral revolution has happened and now we have to think of what does that imply about other things in economics. At one of those MacArthur Foundation meetings, I think it was in Chicago, we had a conversation and Juan Camilo asked me, I mean, he had enjoyed, as you can tell from what I'm telling you, he had enjoyed being very connected to a really exciting group of scholars in those years and he said he was returning to go back to Columbia because he thought that's where he should put his energies to try to help the problems of his country and he said sort of wistfully to me, does that mean that I'll probably eventually lose my connections with these networks and will that be kind of the end of this tight relationship I have with these people? And I said sadly, probably yes because I'd seen it happen again and again, people return to some place where the airfares are a little high and maybe you're not at conferences so people don't notice you so much and you don't get invited and it's kind of you kind of get dropped out of the networks and so he understood what he was doing but then something really amazing happened. He wrote a couple of papers that really got a lot of attention because they were super good papers and he took off like a rocket and so he showed me wrong. And in fact, for the next few years, I mean I couldn't track him, he was always traveling somewhere to give a lecture or a workshop or seminar and so on. In other words, he succeeded in going back to Columbia to serve the interests of the people of Columbia and also to maintain his status as one of the real stars in the behavioral economics community. Let me close with this. Most people do experiments and do some kind of behavioral work thinking about their job market paper. And where am I gonna put this thing? He started doing experiments as a community organizer. He wasn't thinking about publishing things, he was thinking about how to teach people how to cooperate so that they didn't suffer the environmental damages of their behaviors. And he found out along the way, oh my God, you can publish these things and he got really good at it. And so his success was, I think because he's very, very good at what he does. He started it because he was interested in changing the lives of ordinary people. It's my great pleasure and honor to introduce Juan Camila. Wow, with those words from Sam, I mean it's moving and humbling to hear that from a person that has taught you so much as what Sam has taught me over all these years. And this lecture I hope is also reflecting all that learning that I have received from Sam over these years and the legacy because he is one of the keystone parts of all this revolution if you want to call it yes in the behavioral sciences from the side of economics. But in the side and in the objectives and in the purposes of what I'm going to try to talk today and hearing him say those words are just very, very moving for me and thank you Sam because they really mean a lot to me. I mean this is like a treat. I mean we're close to trick or treat evening Halloween. I put my costume on a little bit earlier than that evening. But today getting this introduction remarks from Sam having the opportunity of giving the Sam Bolts lecture coming from class just half an hour ago that I teach which is political economy of the environment, traditionally taught by Jim Boyce and other of the people that I appreciate and love enormously because he also taught me so much about environmental economics. And then this morning teaching another course, behavioral economics and seeing some of my students of that class sitting here. I don't need more candies for trick or treat. I'm done, I'm filled with joy and with energy to do this. Also because this is an important series of events when you look at the people who have given this lecture before, people that I admire, people that I read, people that I have learned also. It's challenging and it also gives you some extra energy to continue and see how you can maintain this legacy of Sam and his work. And hopefully the next one we will all be here in person and hopefully also enjoying the reception and some drinks and some chat which we all gain from. And that idea of getting together is a lot about what I'm going to try to talk today about these behavioral issues. And yes, it's going to be about revolutions. I don't have to talk about revolutions coming from a country that just released its truth commission report. The truth commission report from one of the longest conflict periods in time with one of the longest attempts by a leftist, Marxist revolutionary group to try to win over the government and ending with numbers that are just terribly saddening. We can talk about 7.7 million people displaced because of the violence according to this report just between 1985 and 2018. More than 50,000 people kidnapped over that process by many of these groups. 121,000 people disappearing over that period of time, 450,000 people assassinated over that period of time. So this is when you ask yourself about what is the purpose of revolutions and what is the purpose of changing the system. So it is familiar for me because over that period of time between the 80s, the 90s and the 2000s I have seen the whole process from attempts to failures to a peace process and then sitting down with the revolutionary groups turning their weapons in and trying to build a peace process that hopefully is durable and then seeing with some hope that maybe some other changes can be happening in other ways. And now we have a new government for the first time, a leftist government in office for the first time in the history of Columbia and that is exciting and at the same time confusing because many things are happening at the same time and it's hard to tell what is going to happen from that, but maybe that could be another type of different revolution in that sense. So the idea of the title of the talk came from hearing about this album, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, that maybe some of you may have heard and then there came this graffiti that the revolution was not going to be televised, it was going to be tweeted and then another graffiti saying that the revolution was not going to be tweeted so how is it going to be the revolution and that's part of that. And I have been part of the behavioral revolution and thanks to some words reflecting on that but basically I feel like a child of the behavioral revolution because I have learned from all these people that started this learning from the origins in the 1950s Herbert Simon, but Ferdinand Enon and then Kahneman Taversky and Enon Enon and I feel like I am a child or a grandchild of those giants that changed all these foundations, assumptions, modeling theories and policy implications that came from that. These behavioral revolution questioned assumptions severely and as Sam said, maybe it was a low hanging fruit but some people took it faster and made important contributions in questioning the assumptions in economics. It changed the methods, incredibly highly so because it changed the way we could think of economics as a science that could be experimental. That was very novel to say in the history of 200 or 250 years of a discipline to say that it could be an experimental discipline definitely changed the methods. The methods of going and looking and seeing what actual humans do instead of making assumptions of what they do. It changed theories of course and now we have many more better theories to explain these behavior of humans and it began to change also policies in several ways and many of these applications of changes in policies came with this package of what has been called nudging which has been intriguing to me in several ways and I'm going to talk about that several ways but there was something else going on in my mind that has been happening probably motivated by also what Sam said which was this decision to go back to Colombia after getting my graduate training in this amazing university because that training came not only from the research economics department but from the econ department. I mentioned Carmen Dier, I took classes with her, Jim Boyce but also Sam who was in my committee and who was a main advisor into the whole process in my committee and Sam was the very first one supporting me with this crazy idea of replicating experiments but in the field and nobody was doing that at the time and he was saying go ahead, go for it and help me even finding funding to do that and jump into the river and swim those strange and uncharted territories of doing experiments in the field but probably since then I keep wondering something and it's a disconnect that makes me always ask what's going on and this disconnect has to do with the idea that of course we find that people are kind we are not surprised at that now and we have lots of support that people are kind people are honest, people are fair they are cooperative, they are willing to invest costly resources to punish others to maintain social norms, to reduce inequalities they dislike unfairness and we have done this the whole thing theory, modeling, simulations, archeology, paleontology Sam has worked with collaborators from so many disciplines in realizing that this is something that we know it is in the workings and in the nature of humans and this has been supported by many other methods from MRIs, neuroscientists all the way as I said to paleontological evidence on how all these mechanisms work and yet at the macro level we keep finding that deforestation continues to destroy let's say the Amazon and in the aggregate carbon emissions continue to rise I wrote a paper right at the beginning the first half of the pandemic the United Nations asked me to write a report if we could find some hopeful signals from the learnings of the pandemic and I wrote that it's nice to see people appreciating wildlife coming into the cities like if they were not there they have been always there but hiding from humans and now that humans were not there they just showed up and now we paid more attention and they asked me to write something hopeful in the sense of are we going to change our behaviors? Are we going to change from a behavioral standpoint? Are we going to really learn from these and appreciate the improvement in the quality of air? Are we going to appreciate better biodiversity and the like? And I wrote something like that like two years ago, less than two years ago hoping for those better behaviors and yet we are looking at carbon emissions stealing the same patterns and with all this energy crisis and now we are seeing not much changing in the aggregate but also in the aggregate we can see the issues of corruption and yet we find that most people are honest and we continue to see waste of valuable public resources and then you wonder why people like fairness and they enjoy these different things and poverty and inequality remain high in many parts of the world acknowledging that some parts of the world have been very effective in reducing in some parts more poverty, reducing poverty than inequality but this is something that has been always in my mind why if at the micro we see this it doesn't happen at the aggregate and what are we going to do about it from the behavioral point of view and the experimental tools? So what are we missing in that sense? And then two papers came and sort of made me think about this lecture and hopefully a paper and these two recent papers may have some clues to get us on the same page in the facts about what is happening one of them has to do with a vast data set that more or less support that most of these nudges have very small or even null effects when seen in perspective and this is a paper by the La Viña and Lino's published in Econometrica this year so they took data from 126 randomized trials about 23 million people participating in this so this is a large representation it's not like a few hundred people in the lab this is lots of people represented in this sample and what they find is that in general the effects of these nudges when they have tried to implement one of these little pushes to get people doing the right thing are having very small effects and also the two graphs on the left and the right have also shown something that is even more interesting which is the policy question the graph in the left are the effects that they have been finding in papers that have been published in academic journals in good recognizable academic journals maybe it is an issue of publication bias which we all are aware of and that makes more sale in these papers that find some effect but then the graph on the right shows the effects of nudges that have been implemented by these so-called nudge units which are these behavioral inside units that they have put together in so many countries around the world so most governments got excited with this and you will see in a second why they got excited and they began to implement all these nudges and then they put together this data set and with a few handful of cases most of them just show null results so that should make you wonder about this this particular idea that we can use these behavioral insights to get people to do the right thing and again remember my disconnect especially thinking about environmental issues that if we need to change the environment and we need to change at the aggregate level major things and yet all these traits that human have that are demonstrated in the lab and in the field over and over at the micro level in the aggregate are not happening and that's the open question that I have so that's one point but the second point so that's one point nudges might not be having such an impactful effects they are very small but the second one is what if these nudges are distracting us from thinking about the aggregate levels which is the point by this recent paper by Chatter and Lowenstein including both of them important figures in the behavioral area in the behavioral community and they themselves in the paper that is now going to be published soon acknowledge that that they have been part of that and I think I have been also and I am going to plead guilty in a second in an example of these kind of things and they are putting for us a framework that I like of thinking about this discussion which they call the I frame and the S frame so let me go in detail into what they mean by that because I think it's going to be important for putting this together so I'm going to use their own words they will call I frame the neural and cognitive machinery that underpins their thoughts and behaviors of humans so this is what they call the I frame and then they're going to call the S frame the system of rules norms and institutions by which we live in many ways the four C's course the Econ 700 course is all about these two things interacting together and I learned most of what I have been doing thinking out of those four C's in that particular course because it's about that interaction between the human nature and the surrounding of that human interactions but especially social interactions the social exchange of individuals surrounded by this set of norms, institutions, rules formal and informal and of course some mentioned the work with Elin or Ostrom that will come in a second handy here for that because that was one more piece of major influence to try to respond to this critique that Chatter and Lohenstein have so what they claim is that these I frame policies policies aimed at the I frame are about changing behavior without changing the system okay, without changing the rules of the game and think about it these are ways of doing this cheap and politically less controversial so you can imagine why all these governments are excited about these not units because you can propose changes of behavior for people without having to go through the political contestation let's say in Congress or with the political forces in Congress or with the different stakeholders that the government has to deal with because it's basically let's change let's not change the system the infrastructure of rules, norms and the like regulations and let's just try to get people to do the right thing in a cheap way because it's rapid, it's quick to implement you don't need major legal reforms to try to do some of these things including collecting more taxes or getting people to do more recycling or getting people to save more energy but in fact, when you read the paper by Charler Noystein they upfront put it on the table that most of the major S frame transformations that happen in society they have been not because of I frame changes but because of changes in the structure, in the S frame and therefore with this idea that the I frame is showing this very small or null results along with the need for major transformational changes in the structure then one think about that and I'm going to quote exactly some sentences that I think are very illustrative of this on why the attention to the I frame may delay or distract us from thinking about S frame changes history seems to show that the solution to individual human frailty has been to change the system not guide the individual the gold standard of experimental testing provides a further push towards I frame interventions where different individuals may randomly assign distinct interventions and away from S frame interventions so I'm going to try to tackle this challenge and see how we can move forward in that sense and Charler Noystein put some examples there that I think are very interesting one of them is very interesting about climate change and carbon emissions so we know that social norms of emulating other people works and people put more solar panels when they see more neighbors putting solar panels but then we need to do something about carbon pricing and building codes on different buildings and what if putting attention on the former is going to distract us from doing major changes that are needed in the latter in terms of plastic waste the idea of promoting voluntary recycling versus regulation on single use plastics on obesity the difference between nutrition labels as opposed to sugar taxes in healthcare the idea of sending messages to remind people of using medications as opposed to having governments cap pricing certain drugs these are examples of the destruction on I frame that are taking us away from thinking about the S frame in retirement the idea of saying more tomorrow inducing certain changes to induce people to voluntarily contributing more to save for their pensions as opposed to getting legal action to get employers to support and do co-payments so that the workers are going to be having a safer future in that sense and in the environment there's an interesting case because again and this is one of the points that later I will highlight with this pandemic and with this idea of the energy transition and then comes the invasion on Ukraine and then we come with all this mess regarding the energy sector one thing if just by nudging people to save energy is going to be enough for the time we have not to reach the 1.5 degrees extra that we have sort of agreed with scientists that it's a cap that we should not try to surpass so time is going to be important because eventually this might work in the sense that you get more and more people to switch their cars, to switch their panels to change their practices and the like and eventually this could catch on and create those changes but what if it takes too much time? I'm going to talk about slavery abolition in a second it took a hundred years to abolish slavery from the first country that abolishes slavery Haiti all the way to the last one Brazil about a hundred years maybe we don't have a hundred years to solve some of these environmental problems and there's a paper which precisely Lowenstein worked on is very interesting and it was published in nature in nature climate change which is an experiment in which they show that when they offer people nudges about saving energy it reduces their likelihood to vote for a carbon tax so think about that carbon tax is one of those examples I was sharing this with my students this morning carbon tax is one of those few, few examples in which you can get a lot of economists agreeing on so it's like a policy solution that we all think it's more or less okay maybe a second best but it could work but if by nudging people to save energy we are taking away the possibility of people passing a carbon tax in Congress or in litigation or in the different arenas in which these negotiations are going to have then one thinks, one wonders about this so this is if you guys are looking for thesis topics there are so many things that could be thought of for example this whole movement about ESGs in companies in the private sector they are so excited about ESG but then they're also excited about the nudging and the behavioral actions that they can support which in a way from the standpoint of the private sector is similar to this excitement by the public sector to set not units is in the private sector to implement all these strategies so that they don't have to touch the structure they don't have to touch the structural issues that are at place and I don't have to justify in this building, in this department, in this university why it would be eventually important to think about more structural changes let's say from the standpoint of companies so with that think about slavery that I was mentioning before this is just a thought experiment and it makes sound cruel but imagine that we were going to deal with these kind of strategies trying to notch slave owners to be kinder because they are pro-social and then this could postpone the idea of abolishing slavery just trying to create another set of strategies to improve the relationships between slave owners and slaves this is the kind of question that that would think in what things about the moment, the historic moment of something that needed the type of major transformation and agreement throughout the world so that finally, but again, over a hundred years period ended up with all the countries in the world abolishing this particular practice and with the behavioral tab I have to plead guilty too I just finished a paper with a number of colleagues because a major bank in Colombia, a private bank asked me if we could put in practice this idea of behavioral sciences the idea of tackling an important problem that banks were going to have during the pandemic because people were going to be in heat severely because of the pandemic and they were going to suffer but at the same time, the credit default in many players in the system would be risky in general for the financial sector and I said to them, I would be willing to try what I know about trust and reciprocity and these kind of things if they work and eventually they worked in an interesting way by the way so we use one of these ideas, one of these strategies to use behavioral messages to get the clients of this bank who were in default they were already in delinquency in their crates mortgages, credit cards and personal consumption and we improved and recovered in average some four to five percent of those clients who were in default to get back to their payments on time the interesting thing which is going to come back later is that the result was only positive for the messages that had to do with social norms and moral norms other messages about the contract or the cost efficiency of these or that the bank would be better able to provide more credit for others other kinds of things were not as effective as the messages that have to do this is the right thing to do because you will feel better with yourself and others and because other people are paying on time in their crates in the bank so I plead guilty on being part of also using this and see how this can be implemented but then again the point to summarize so far is that we have been paying too much attention about this eye frame in the bottom and we are losing the connection with the S frame and too much focus on this eye frame will reduce the possibility of these changes and in the structures that I have been mentioning and furthermore and I have mentioned a couple of examples the problem of this over attention to the eye frame and less attention to the structural changes may crowd out that possibility of getting citizens to push for major changes not only in the case of these people who were invited to do a kind of a behavioral change in terms of energy and then decreasing the probability of supporting a carbon tax one of my papers from my dissertation was precisely about the crowding out effect of introducing a material incentive in sanctioning materially people who were not cooperating in protecting a commons and ended up eroding the intrinsic motivation of those people to cooperate to implement self-governed self-enforced actions to protect those commons so definitely these fears of crowding out from too much attention into the eye frame are there and so this continuing disconnect I wanted to respond to that and my proposal in a way is to think about the C frame and the C frame as a bridge between this eye frame and this S frame and let me say a little bit of what I mean about that C frame idea the C frame with the C is about communities, cooperation, collective action and it is about thinking how these small groups build institutions, they shape institutions institutions at the local level through social norms, through structures that they build to themselves through these self-governed ideas and this happens in many ways in contemporary modern economies in the workplace, in neighborhoods but also in villages, in the rural areas everywhere and this idea that the community is capable of designing institutions formal and informal to make things happen that aggregating a smaller number of people achieve changes and that's the starting point of what I'm trying to say these communities, these groups constrain they align individuals towards group-oriented goals and these group-oriented goals is our ultimate work what we are caring about how do we get group-oriented goals adding up so that we end up in a situation that we would like to be and also because they may aggregate as more and more groups aggregate this collective action they may elevate the political cloud to create the transformations and I'm going to give you three examples that I have been working on more detail in thinking about this particular paper so in a way the idea is to bridge between this disconnect between the I frame and the S frame and because I think it's in this C frame in this intermediate level that formal institutions encounter the individual action this is at the end the actual changes or lack of changes of citizens towards what happens in the formal institutions is happening through the communities the communities or the groups are the ones that make formal institutions be accepted or rejected they make them transform the individual action because they legalize in a way they make more legitimate within the group the acceptance of certain formal institutions but they can also block through civil resistance that formal institutions make or play a role in that sense so that's where this disconnect could be then connected back and when these informal institutions emerge or sustain or die at this local level within those groups and in aggregation creating the political cloud to push changes from the bottom up might be some clue into the future and in that way we can think less naively about how sometimes the S frame transformations are not working many cases one wonders why these are not working why very well-intentioned legal mechanisms end up deviating towards other goals and through many dynamics that can have from rent seeking to political control to corruption deviating from the original objectives that's going to be problematic and this was supposed to be read or I don't know about sound and yeah yeah I'm worried about the recording the sound is okay it's okay okay great so before this I wrap up the idea of the C frame and give you these three examples there's something that has been intriguing me and I I'm thinking about the family also as an institution how does the family play a role here and how does it play a role in this particular discussion and of course one has to talk about Nancy and Nancy kindly sent me an email saying she couldn't be here because this was going to be about her work too but precisely sitting with her recently having lunch and talking a little bit of these ideas of course we have to think about Nancy Volbria in these issues how does the family fit in here and it fits in several ways and this is a nice quote by Heckman and Mosso that says childhood is the province of the family any investigation of how conditions in childhood affect life outcomes is a study of family influence and Heckman has been pursuing this study of the family context to think about child development one of his major areas of contribution and one of the intriguing interesting things that he has been finding is that even in Denmark where they have the most precious panel data set of people from birthplace to the grave complete of Danish people from all these long periods of time is that even there with such society that has been strengthened by the action of the government and being redistributed and progressive the family still plays a major role in explaining a great deal of the social mobility of the and it's really fascinating when he's arguing why this is not only about the state creating the opportunities but also the family creating that so I hope you see what I'm trying to do here is again the family building something around the individual that is not exactly the S-frame but is creating around the individual something that is empowering is enabling and we need to think about that there's another interesting thing the piece of data that I found interesting by John Listing his latest book The Voltage Effect in which they have been doing a follow-up of children who entered this and this particular project this intervention that they have been doing in the Chicago Heights project one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago and they have been putting all these children but they are doing also a parents school along with the with the early childhood program for these children and one of the interesting things that they find is that the very few positive effects that they have been finding and investing in these children are in Hispanics and why? because of the multi-level family structure with Hispanics they always find an aunt a cousin a grandmother a grandfather I can name you right now from memory the names of my 34 cousins only from my father's side right now I can tell you all 34 of them and they are strong quick family in a strong and close family in that sense so this is an interesting piece of that evidence too how is the family feeding in all this so I I keep wondering how much is the family part of not all of this C-frame so there's going to be something there that is jumping in my mind and I need to have two or three or more lunches with Nancy precisely to talk about this because it's the community and the family in that sense so back to the community to the C-frame let me give you three examples that I think are going to be interesting one of them and these are examples that are just beginning to dig into the history and the literature to understand what is happening there one of them is the women's war in Nigeria in the late 1920s the other one is the decline of food binding in China and the third one is back from home which is resonating in some things that I have to do precisely with my graduate work here at UMass and so quickly the first two that the women's war or the Arab women's protest in Nigeria is a very interesting case because it was a movement that ended up toppling these chiefs that the British colonial system was imposing on communities that were called the warren chiefs and these were people locals that were appointed by the British colonial rule to control things they were supposed to be the the delegates of the imperial colonial system to rule this part of Africa but it so happens that in those cases things were working in a different way so these women began to organize against that and because they were resisting the patriarchal system of putting only men because only men were warren chiefs only men to have this role of representing the British colonial in an indirect rule type of governing and to control taxing control the economy and even to control family issues and women began to resist that this idea of these men because at the time there was more equality of access to power but by men and women in many affairs of the people of the families in Nigeria and they applied certain techniques that were interesting one of them was what was called sitting on a man and sitting on a man was surrounding a group of women, surrounding a man and beginning to shame the man or surrounding his heart and beginning to shun or shame this person in public because of the things that they were trying to complain because of the behavior of this guy so they began to apply this tradition that has always been happening there towards these warren chiefs so it included chants, it included dancing, it included music, it included all kinds of things but also even destroying precious properties of things that they valued these people and even the wives of these warren chiefs ended up joining the sitting on the man practice probably the pressure and also sharing the same concerns that this institution was creating this at the end major changes were made and finally the British colonial system ended up taking away these warren chiefs away and some people, some historians claim that this was an early start on major changes on taking down the British colonial system at the time so begin to think what kind of practices are happening there and why that is interesting the other case on the on the food binding you all know this lasted for about a thousand years, I mean thousand years with this practice and then things began to change and within one generation food binding disappeared and Mackie has been studying this and this paper by Mackie and Legend they identified three mechanisms that I found that are going to be very interesting for that one is that the reformers began to educate the public saying hey nobody else is doing this around the world we are the only ones second mechanism, hey there are good things about having natural fit advantages and there are also disadvantages of maintaining this food binding in terms of the health of the girls and third they created this natural fit societies small clubs societies in which they committed within the natural fit society if you had a male child you commit so that your child will marry a girl that didn't have her feet bound and if you had a girl you will commit to marry a boy who accepted that and you commit then not to bound to bound the feet of your of your of your daughter and over a generation this whole thing this practice disappeared but these natural fit societies were these small groups that were creating this and they just began to replicate and replicate and replicate all over and the third case is is a little bit more detail and this resulted with what I called sometimes the most successful land reform that has ever happened in Colombia and probably in Latin America about six million hectares which is more than 14 million of acres were titled to black communities in Colombia over a short period of time I mean this government the current government the petro government in Colombia committed to have three million hectares redistributed in an agrarian reform and now they are acknowledging that they won't have the money and now they went down from three million to one and a half million and then the minister of agriculture just said last week we might reach half a million hectares in the first couple of years six million hectares were titled to black communities in Colombia in one of the poorest areas in the country there was a guy writing a dissertation here back in the late 90s and this is the first page of that dissertation that Sam was one of the committee members and a major advisor and helped with all that and I wrote there on February 11 1998 just recently at the time the colombian government title the consejo comunitario mayor del medio atrato a group of 110 rural communities of about 45 000 people with almost 700 hectare thousand hectares about 1.7 million acres of land in the pacific of of Colombia imagine one single title of 1.7 million acres for forty seven forty five thousand people a families a 45 000 people to govern collectively this piece of land and there was no better motivation for me for my dissertation found for doing field work than thinking the start of this so precisely combining different methods going into the field and doing experiments in the field and I'm not going to go over those experiments now but doing these experiments to try to understand the dynamics at the micro level of these groups I have been working in that particular region because those four states if you want to call them departamentos are the region where most of the black population in Colombia has moved to and is living today and in those places was where this land title was happening and asking ourselves and with other colleagues two questions what happened in terms of socioeconomic outcomes and what happened in terms of forest conservation major questions that I had back when I started my dissertation so I have been working on those issues in and starting this I did experiments in the field these are pictures from those first experiments that I was doing in the field but also doing those experiments included doing workshops with the community members and listening to them and having them to tell me stories about what is happening in reality that is me without gray hair many years ago but I'm not going to blame the gray hair to either the dissertation or my school work or my students and so in this area we were able to collect an immense data set from satellite imagery all the way to the registry of each of these titles and then up census made by the government on the poorest communities because they needed to focalize people so that they could do social programs in this region that is full of it's it has one of the highest levels of poverty around the country but also the fact that the transition was gradual so the blur the image that's the earliest of the resolutions that titled the land to these communities to the weather which is the latest of those okay so there was a period of time within 1996 all the way to 2011 that we could track all these households and all these collective titles and try to understand what was happening because of that but there's a little bit of history that is important here and that history is that the reason this happened as an outcome was the result of what I would call a sea frame type of interaction from the bottom up and that was a major movement of communities mostly black communities organized by themselves sometimes with support with the church the catholic church in some of these places in the region that began to create local associations to resist the arrival of mining companies and the arrival of timber companies because this region at the time and before this titling were public lands and these public lands were more or less open for grabs for anyone who wanted to come and the wealth in terms of natural capital that was available there was incredibly immense the wealth in terms of the possibility of mining and extracting timber of very valuable timber woods by the way in that area so we ended up starting this throughout this period of time and that movement that started in the 1980s to the 1990s found the perfect storm and the perfect storm was the constitutional assembly in 1991 in Colombia so there was a major constitutional assembly that was going to reform a constitution that was 100 years old and in that constitutional assembly notice how interesting this is black communities could not elect representatives not that they were not allowed they didn't add up the votes necessary so they they postulated people for for being they nominated people for being elected and they didn't make it they didn't make enough votes but the indigenous communities did get seats in the constitutional assembly and the indigenous communities leaders ended up representing the black communities and they imposed in the constitutional assembly one particular article that was a transitory article in the constitution in 1991 that said in the constitution the government will have two years to recognize the occupation of black communities all throughout that territory not only recognize but title and formalize collectively the ownership of that land within two years the government has as as a time frame to start issuing a law and implement this so it's not only issuing the law it's implementing that so they ended up implementing that over those years so in 1996 I am starting my phd here at UMass I'm starting to take econ 700 and all these courses and this is beginning to happen and it happened throughout all the years this is the cumulative number of headers that were titled and the number of community councils that ended up being titled so we have in a way not a perfect natural experiment but we have at some point pre-treated town or villages to in treatment and post treatment villages so we could do some econometrics of that and we ended up doing and I'm not going to bother you with the details but let me give you the summary of the findings what we found is that the per capita income increased in these communities this is against the counterfactual being the same community before titling or neighboring communities that are similar and did not get collective title of the of the land so per capita income increased poverty was lower with the indices of poverty that they were wealth was increased in terms of the value of the ownership that they have remember this is collective property this is not private property school attendance improved and home improvements increased you don't have a deed for your house in these territories you cannot sell your house you cannot sell the land the land is inalienable and it cannot be fractioned it's collective ownership and they cannot use this land not even as collateral for credit so you don't own that piece of land personally and yet people were investing in their houses so this is another alternative to the sort of kind of argument assign clear property rights they don't have to be private they can be collective and people will invest in their well-being and then overcrowding decrease compared to the counterfactual so these are some of the facts we did this in one of the papers and in another paper we also demonstrated that the forestation was lower in these places than in neighboring or comparable villages so what happened there I think that the sea framing action is these communities organizing from the 1980s putting pressure and then somehow the perfect storm brought all these things to get the constitutional assembly to pass something and then to get the government finally to push for these changes and then eventually implementing what I think is one of the most successful land reforms that have happened in Colombia and maybe in Latin America in so many ways and so you ended up with an S-frame type of policy so I think there's a place for the iframe here and the place for the iframe is that there's something happening at these communities at the very micro level I was doing to the field in the pacific coast doing experiments there not only for my dissertation but later and I repeated many experiments to understand what was happening in these dynamics at the group level that may cooperation happen collective action happen maintain trust maintain reciprocity and this type of mechanism so if I think of putting together these three examples in a quick way the problem of the collective titling that I was mentioning or the women's war in Nigeria or the elimination of food buying there are certain iframe type of mechanisms that we have been studying all along in this behavioral revolution that have to do with identity the data would have to do with trust with reciprocity with prosociality most of the contributions that have to do with understanding how individuals become prosocial are the result of research of the type of work that some has done and a cooperative species is a landmark paper in that sense but also a moral economy in that way for for that matter too and and these two books are exactly are explaining a lot of what is happening in terms of the iframe but how it is a permanent dialogue with the iframe because it is within groups that these things happen it's not in isolation it's like that the citizen in isolation is a citizen in community a citizen in place a citizen with something surrounding maybe the family too this is again that asterisk part of the story and then at the end you see iframe changes happen so this is this is for me sort of the challenge to look for how we can rethink again about this iframe idea and instead of thinking that anything that is iframe is because it is nudging and therefore we should sort of take it away from the picture it's more like how is this going to happen and for me is the iframe the way the the vehicle to try to do that and there are other cases that i'm beginning to think and and they might be the case of the cocaleros in in bolivia with the mass movement that took all the way to get ero moralis in power and major social transformations that happen in bolivia that started with the cocaleros as a major bottom up grassroots movement that ended up going all the way up to these iframe changes and the case of the superjets i think may have some interesting stories there that one i am going to start digging on on how they reach all the way to getting women's right happening and this labor abolition movement may have some insights there because there might be some cases in which this began as local dialogues among certain communities that begin to add up and these local movements pushing from the bottom up the forest rights act in india i think is another interesting example that i should dig into but women organizing for the rights to tribal land to get more empowerment or more recognition by the formal system to manage their land and to manage the forest so if you have more ideas of these kind of examples where at the local community level something begins to happen and in aggregation begins changing this frame that's the kind of levels that i'm trying to think so i think there's theory that we can work on this in terms of using if we can use the shellings type of language of thinking that the collective action problem is difficult because the incentives because of the temptation will get us to the to the national equilibrium where everybody's going to end up not cooperating but we would like to be cooperating but then it depends on the level of the number of cooperators to me the the the the more interesting question in taking this one step further is in thinking on the non-linearities of these cases and you probably have seen all these these particular diagrams again using the shelling model that may be by transforming the payoffs or at least the subjective payoffs that people perceiving these games maybe you can end up with some kinds of other type of dynamics that can take you to interior equilibrium or to the corners or to the extremes and when thinking about that i began to remember this this particular framework that i was using that emerged from my dissertation but then i enriched with the conversation with Elanino Ostrom and Sam is guilty of that too because some i think i have told this story before when lean ostrom was invited to thompson to give one of the seminars Sam knew about all these work that i was doing i had just finished my fieldwork and Sam said you are going to take lean ostrom for lunch and nobody else is coming and we're not going to tell anyone no you know if you remember that and you said you are going to take her on your own and i was terrified i mean this this person is the person that i was citing the most in my dissertation and i began to tell her about my work and then we ended up coming up and and and the original the preliminary idea of this framework was in my dissertation and then working with her we ended up publishing a paper precisely about that and the idea is the following yes there are some basic payoffs what we need to look at in the basic game but there are other layers that are playing a role that have to do with the c-frame and the s-frame from the formal to the informal institutions social norms identity reciprocity mechanisms all these things that have been well studied and at the time we're not as clear but thanks to Sam again this became more and more structured in a theoretical way to understand how people end up doing things that they shouldn't if they were home economicus all those mechanisms have to do with these different layers and the whole argument the framework is as you put all those layers you begin to transform the game and eventually you can transform a cooperation game into a coordination game and eventually into games where you have multiple equilibria or even one equilibria that is related to the to the to the desire and let me give you one piece of of of hope in that sense this is a study that we did with the center for the sustainable development goals for latin america in colombia and this is a survey in 13 cities in six in seven latin american countries and it's a major survey representative of the of 13 cities and in this survey we ask all kinds of things including prosociality how much people approved policies that redistribute towards the poor that the state and the vote taxes towards helping the poor and redistribution in general and helping the most vulnerable this kind of questions and then on the other hand we ask all kinds of questions about environmental pro environment behavior whether people were recycling whether people were saving energy whether people were paying more for organic products this kind of behaviors and also favorability of policies of that kind and it is really interesting that regardless of the city or the country there's a very strong correlation between the what we could build as an index of prosociality in these citizens with an index of pros pro environment attitudes and pro environment behaviors and they are strongly correlated so there's something telling us that when people care about the others they care about the environment and vice versa and therefore maybe there's a way to think again about this local surrounding of the individual how is it about protecting the immediate environment and protecting the immediate group of people that they share those spaces with on how these dynamics can happen but again the problem is that we need to get out of this low equilibria those high equilibria and those high equilibria we want to get there and the question is if not just with this little push here is going to maintain us here how much the push has to be to get all the way there again let's say energy transition is going to come from citizens switching their cars their roofs their light bulbs and these kind of things but maybe that is going to take a long time and maybe we don't have a hundred years to make that transformation if we hit some critical thresholds in terms of the climate right so time is a constraint in that sense and so that's to think about how is this going to happen in a way that you get not individuals but groups that's the sea frame climbing this up because of the group that maybe individual action is not going to to happen but then groups being able to climb all the way there and transform that and in a way this has to do with another framework that some has been working on with Wendy Carlin precisely on this idea of going beyond this dichotomy with the between the market and the government you want to think that the market type of solutions are more close to the high frame the government type of solution of this frame and then he's adding this third which is civil society so see again the sea frame and then the idea that at this civil society there are certain transformations that can go into trying to affect the way governments are going to change things if we need governments to change things in this type of transformational situation so looking back at the behavior of revolution I think we as experimentalist and behaviorist we found a niche and I think some in his words made it very clear maybe some of them were low-hanging fruits maybe some of those things were happening but but this niche this comfort zone had some certain interest in features we found a way of having large samples and at even low cost depending on how you design your experiment and you could use cheaper incentives in the way that you can pay very little to college students and even people in the streets and you go to other countries where the power of exchange rate can take you a long way with paying low amounts of money to people you can create low stakes in this or low cost stakes in this kind of experiments and yet maintaining certain salience and external validity and you have found we have found ways of connecting this to external validity which has been always a criticism to that we extended from the weird population to the non-weird population if you remember Joe Hendricks idea of the western educated industrialized and democratic societies and we have collaborated with the RCT community the random control trials community in that sense all this has found an interesting niche but I think we have studied more how the S frame affects behavior but we have studied less the opposite direction how the I frame affects the S frame situation and I think that's that's a major challenge and I think many things have been absent in this comfort zone that we have been in this behavioral revolution and we are not starting how these structures these S frame structures change and because of I frame changes we just take for granted that that's the structure system and then we study how the I frame how the individual changes behavior and we take mostly this frame as given and we have studied less the group dynamics because in a way the comfort zone takes us to do experiments with individuals but doing experiments with groups is way costly it's very costly in the sense of having one observation one community instead of one observation one household one observation one individual and but I think we have a long way to go there one more this is something that with Kevin we have been discussing and and and we are going to try to to see how we tackle this the powerful have been absent in all these experiments the powerful are difficult to get to the lab but the powerful are defining many of these structures and the representatives of the powerful I mean it would be also difficult to put the representatives of the powerful and the powerful within the context of a controlled experiment in in the lab or in the field but we need to introduce that to see how that affects the S frames and how that affects also how the C frames interact and so I think looking ahead we need to get out of this comfort zone I think we have learned a lot about voters consumers and how these individuals respond to these incentives of many kinds financial moral social and the like but we have learned less about how firms and managers hire and promote and fire workers although there is some work there how firms affect public policies they love it to get policies change I think that the behavioral community needs to contribute more on that for example greenwashing greenwashing is an interesting area of research in this sense is greenwashing stopping the changes that need to be happening happening or is just a distraction not to get too much attention from the key stakeholders in the companies or how the politicians manipulate or guide or love it to get certain things done or bribe or cheat and so I think it is hard to get the powerful in in our labs I think we need to do more on the behavioral side of understanding the powerful and it's going to be very expensive but we need to I think we need to do it and it is much harder to think about the S frame as endogenous within the lab and and think about this frame as an outcode variable and not just as a explanatory variable where do we find clues? Ernstfer and John Lees did an experiment many many years ago with coffee growers CEOs in a congress of coffee growers that was interesting to watch and I haven't seen anything of that kind and it was an interesting paper to read and they did experiments with them to try to understand their relationship between workers and managers and of course Oriana and Data and Indra and Rasool have been doing very interesting stuff in doing experiments with managers and workers in the fields and and see how incentives change the behavior and mostly about the behavior of the workers we need to and and a little bit of all the supervisors and the managers and but we need to do again more experiments on groups and group dynamics which is again about the C frame and there are some papers interesting papers about political elites doing some experiments and survey work looking at the at the behavioral traits of these people I think these are important and of course Eliana La Ferrara and Alberto Alessina and those groups who have been doing studies non-experimental about communities neighborhoods and the like are again about the C frame and so the the more general question is if we can understand more this disconnect between the I frame and the S frame or my puzzling question of how if we have humans that can do things and and the aggregate they are happening what is the role that this C frame is playing there and in a way the F frame the the family which I think is important in that sense and so if they're not just are not going to change this system it changes what then and I think the I frame should remain there we need to continue thinking about preferences rationality agency of humans the S frame should be part also of understanding the behavioral factors that drive the the the S frame but thinking more about power bargaining social preferences on the like of the powerful and I think the I frame have the I frame experiments have helped us understand how certain factors find resistance for changes but we need to understand more how those changes could happen and again that's why these three examples that I gave you I think are about that and in responding to to to chatter and loosing about this I frame versus S frame with the C frame is how it sits in between about collective action about social norms about guidelines heuristics network social ties that when aggregating in groups and aggregating from the bottom up way it could end up at the end shaping structural changes that we want we need to continue creating this type of behavioral and experiments to understand that but also to put the S frame variables as an outcome variable in the experiments there are very few experiments that would try to do that to change the S frame type of rules or institutions or outcomes ultimately it's putting more political economy into the behavioral sciences and especially when policies that are making changes from these behavioral insights I think that's the challenge ahead and I think we have a long way to go and I think the behavioral revolution needs to continue contributing to this that we need to get out of their comfort zone and challenge ourselves with these new questions so that's it thank you very much after this we do have a reception downstairs in the atrium to which you're all invited but let me open it up or questions comments observations everybody wants drinks yes uh maybe a basic question so I think I listened to that song the revolution will might be televised like two weeks ago and I listened to it every two weeks oh no by uh religious devotion yeah okay and like most of that song I think it's kind of what you're saying like most of that song he's telling us what the revolution is not but there's like one line where he says what the revolution is he says the revolution will put you in the driver's seat and I was kind of thinking about that throughout this because it seems like a lot of your critique is that the economic theory has focused on individual decisions without looking at like social decisions or social choices or social processes so I'm kind of wondering first off what do you mean by the revolution and like second off like if it's not through nudges how do we get to this point where we democratically collectively make decisions as a society and have the glorious communist utopia no thank you for that comment I even thought about playing a little bit of the song of one of the songs or showing the lyrics but then it would take even more time and but it it's it's indeed has to do with with putting people in the driver's seat but I think it's putting communities in the driver's seat I mean to me it's thinking about how communities can get in the driver's seat civil society in the driver's seat to drive literally and figuratively these changes as in some of these cases that I'm thinking that are illustrative of that kind of dynamic it was these small groups these natural fit societies these women's group been doing the sitting on the men this particular associations of consejos comunitarios in Colombia who started from the community level and began to say hey we can get together and get some help with this priest who is going to help us write down this by laws to create this association and then we can get legal recognition and then we can apply for a collective title of land upon the government but also that pressure that in the constitutional assembly they ended up saying this has to happen because it's acknowledging the presence of these groups that are organized so this is not about a give out this is not about let's do give these to people not let's acknowledge what they have been doing so this is about putting the communities in the driver's seat so I thank you thank you for that for that question and again yes the album is is interesting and and I am not a hip hop kind of a expert or fun but but the the the sentence running my head and then I began listening to the album and then I almost thought about putting some gold here about that or the or the songs yeah but yeah thank you yes kind of following up on that question I think your framework where you have S-frame and C-frame and I think it fits very well in in studying revolution like real big revolution like let's think about the Chinese revolution well the Chinese Communist Party had a agenda to change the S-frame and then they started by building C-frame first local level party of my business and and that led to the big change and then there was the cultural revolution which tried to I mean yeah no no I agree I agree in that sense and again remember that the Chinese revolution had huge influence in Latin America also the Cuban revolution huge influence in Latin America and and the results have been very troublesome at least from the Colombian side and and I am a person who grew up as an adult during the 80s to realize and suffer much of the tensions of this failed attempt but hopefully because the peace process is also a reflect that something survived out of that revolutionary type of movement survived to let things at least they're latent so that a negotiation happened between the government and the Marxist guerrillas from the far mostly and but it's not complete that process but hopefully something will happen out of that but it is interesting that the things that are being discussed today in many ways we sound back to that the idea of going back in the agrarian reform that they're proposing to local collectives at the local level cooperatives and small groups of communities to have back access to the land and to local public goods and see how all the things will go but obviously with lower stigma on the market institutions to allow this to allow this but yeah I mean it could be compatible in that sense to that kind of of historical process and yeah at least the origin of how it transformed things all the way up yeah and yeah I think yes okay great great presentation I want to ask you a little bit about the literature and the daily scar about the the opposition that behavioral economics has demonstrated the capacity of nudges per se and that apparently I don't know about other papers but the moment cited it has demonstrated the opposite with nudges in and of themselves having very very little and you know you said that yeah the literature that had been making this point of nudging behavior was having this major impact was kind of the consensus position within the literature and was it is it simply just this one new paper that you just cited that has now overturned these results or is this something that has been generally acknowledged and that to what extent are we saying that yeah this is group behavior and self-reinforcement that was uh maintaining this position comparable I think you know and what I teach one of the things I teach in that book is the extent to which this notion of labor market rigidity is the cause of unemployment and 30 years of literature reporting to demonstrate that this is true and then over then all of a sudden my friend who was here last week David Howell writes a paper and says the whole thing is wrong and actually Hetman acknowledges that Howell and his co-authors have demonstrated that it is wrong so where are we in terms of the literature on that and to what extent that thing seems changes in the literature? Yeah I mean that I think that's that's a fair question because yeah damn and there is a growing number of studies now that so many people are doing these not studies all over the place so when you are getting those and you begin to see that not not many of them work and the ones that work are the ones that get press and visibility but when advocating many of these the the facts are small or even know and when there are academic papers they have slightly higher effects and to me the the more concerning part is that even if they have positive effects the specs are small and in aggregate they're not going to take us to solve the climate change problem if you want to put it that way and to me that's that's my concern or taking a major change in the inequality in terms of income distribution or land distribution that still is very worrisome in many parts of the world or in changing opportunities and the access of women to certain factors of production or the access to education or the access to political spaces and so my concern is that even if those notches may be working they're not going to make major changes in the in the more in the bigger bigger structural challenges that we have and but but again at the beginning every time one of these new extra study trying to do one of these notches found a positive result it was exciting and and and we were all excited to see wow you can change people behavior but changing the framing or changing the context or changing the many of alternatives of changing information but remember all that was without touching the structure so let's leave the structure and touch and this is why this was so attractive to policy makers around them because it's cheaper politically and economically and but again it's it's it's not making a dent on major challenges maybe it might change some things I don't know exactly which ones of the structural bigger questions but there was that I'm worried about again environmental changes that we need to make to stop biodiversity loss to stop deforestation to stop climate change the way it's happening I I I am worried about the possibility of these mechanisms to be working if we don't have a structural changes at a very high level and again this is why I worry about the powerful in the game and how we study behaviorally the powerful because the powerful are making most of the goals in many of these decisions so there was a question here and then there so my question is kind of a conditional or multi-part question so when you mentioned ESG that made you really think about the purpose of responsibility and diversity of inclusion policies alongside ESG and so my question is do you think that those programs have potential to shape there that the law comes in the S-grade and if so how do you think we can encourage firms to engage in those programs for normal reasons as opposed to instrumental ones like the effects of I mean that I think that the view is still out in terms of ESG as a really transformational dynamic all the way to simply greenwashing to get away with it and so it's going to be case by case but changing the S-frame in those domains in the private sector is going all the way to how profits are distributed between workers and the company that would be a spring type of changes and seeing in the table in the boards by unions that is the type of changes that I think if those are the types of changing in the S-frame at the corporate level the S-frame of the private sector then ESG if ESG type of strategies include getting and trying to get all the way to these type of changes then it might happen but it might not but I mean that the labor the union movement around the world has made major contributions to changing the S-frame by achieving major changes and today they're still in some cases struggling but at the same time union rates are going down in many places in the world in Colombia the union rate is just really too slow why because during the 80s they killed all the union leaders people they formed a political party the union patriotic and they killed all of them 800 of the directives of the union patriotic were assassinated during the 90s 80s and 90s and so again in ESG type of strategies add up to these major transformations the examples that I just gave I I think we should be welcoming and studying how this happens within the companies how these dynamics within the companies are going to grow from the bottom up to push for these major changes so that they say unions have a seat in the boards or sharing of the profits changes in the in the corporate level that kind of changes would be interesting to watch yes um when my question is about the this idea of powerful and power like when you're talking about the powerful or the representative and that they're willing or that they have and they have the opportunity to sit on the table and burn in and negotiate what is is there some kind of of is there a definition of power how would you how would you explore this like because if we're talking about multi-level I would say that one thing is the place power at the middle level another one would be power at the community level and how that power at the community level would like what would be the definition for it to interact with the strong I mean in in core in in core the economy the textbook there's a very explicit definition of power in how individuals get others to do things in your favor and opposite to their intentions if you have that capacity to get other people to do something in your favor and against their benefit that's because you have power and so I would use that the definition I think that the definition in core is very clear in that sense at any level between a manager and a worker all the way to a ceo and the union so if you have the capacity to get the other party to do something that is in your benefit but against the the purposes of the order then you have power I would use that definition and therefore powerful is the one who has the whole spot in any of these social interactions but I would I would go which is interesting because you don't find any other principles of economics textbook that defines power as far as I remember the ones that are out there teaching students about economics in in principles courses you don't see one that has power like defined and let alone important and yet in most of the things that happen in those textbooks about the markets the labor market monopoly monopsony all the things that we teach there are about many of them are about the only thing we say is that market power and we don't want market power so it's ideal that there is no market power so that everybody's interested so this is why core is trying to change that and yes I don't know I'm missing the sequence so yeah yeah it's a terrific talk thank you very much it's really interesting you know I've been doing behavioral economics for a long time we relax the individual utility maximization we relax the individual's unit of analysis we relax kind of a pluralistic area of power we talk about the importance of socialization what we have is back to 1970s as sociology I mean there's a lot of work on this stuff with a process model that we've got in the page of re-revolution marxian and they vary in sociology I mean I don't hear a lot of interaction but I know there's a lot of really good work not so much analysis but have you like explicitly engaged in I want to hear what some things about that and and sociology because you know a lot of this and I don't know I mean I agree I agree in general and I think it's like going back to inventives but what do you think of that assertion in a way it's just the sociology of the sense there are things that I think are new there are external issues but I don't know where do you think well I think I think economics and the combination of using the main theory to design experiments and then to use incentives in the experiments really gave us insights at least convincing results which were not available from ethnographic studies and were not available primarily from sociological and even psychological experiments though the latter were better designed they weren't incentivized so I think I mean it's often said and if you move me on through say the behavioral economics affirm or some people would say I'm kind of discover things that everybody else already knew but it isn't already telling if you really think that we had good demonstrations in the 70s that people were altruistic and reciprocal in the nature of those preferences and so on then you must you're much more valuable than I am in reading literature I've tried to rely very heavily on the ethnographic literature study for example in endogenous preferences I thought it would be easy when I started in 1990 or something to find really well established cases in which you could study the endogenous nature of preferences it turns out to be very hard to find convincing cases of that that's why I think we really have made some advances but it's also true that I think some of the best studies have been done in the area of political science for example there really are good ethnographic studies for example why do people join these communities the sea level I'll refer to the work of Elizabeth Wood who did fantastic ethnographic studies why people joined the FML and in El Salvador studying how people essentially escaped the iframe and got into the sea frame and therefore became a really powerful supporter of the revolutionary movement there truth and advertising is that person is also my wife can I can I add something about the sociology part because I think it's this this is a very perfect conversation of what is happening in economics sociology gave us also networks analysis I mean and you're seeing next to a guy who knows all about that and and the analysis of networks to me is one of the most promising ways of thinking about the sea frame and I was going to have a whole section about that and then I stopped myself because I very often people know me I put too much and then I take too much time networks I think a way of now going back to our that and thinking about the sea frame in terms of the what is happening with group dynamics understanding to the structure of networks and then we have people like Matt Jackson who is really digging into the even more technical details of how these networks operate that the conventional economic analysis of aggregating individuals and groups isn't going to be I think there's a lot going on there and this is cultivating from the old work of the Barawasis and all the old people who contributed to network theory and the like but here's the thing and this is something that it's going to be maybe transformational maybe we're paying too much attention to the nodes in the networks and maybe we should do more economics of the links in the networks but doing economics of the links is going to be hard mathematics is going to be hard and the thinking about economics of the nodes it's probably the way we have been doing in many ways but doing the economy but we are doing for example the econometrics of the links we are doing dyadic econometric progressions on the diets and that's giving us much more insights in many things that are happening but this goes back to understanding it again the dynamics and then again this is sociology working its way and keeping alive in this so if we understand in these group dynamics how the links operate but at the end it's about how humans are we're humans because we establish we establish connections to others it's about the connections to other of belonging and all those examples that I was referring to those are examples of people's connections I have a connection with this and this and this other person and then we can get together and say let's build a natural feed society let's do a sitting on the man on this work chief and take him to public shaming and we take him down let's do this and that that is because of connections and sociology is a lot about connections and not as much about the the dots so i'm trying to solve all the nodes and see frames are about the links in the links between the nodes so it's try to travel that route of network and again that's the sociology and now putting it back into the action of understanding collective action communities on life and I think it's a promising path of work and it's going to take us along and yes one more yes okay i'm looking um okay do you think right now we're seeing these not just in the eye frame because 40 years of whatever programs we've been having deliverance whatever we just destroyed the sea frame destroyed communities destroyed everything we have in terms of how we think about everyone out around us in a way that just is read but i mean it's uh it's it's kind of hard now to recognize that we ever recognize or who tries to look in the last 10 20 years and notice that it's absolutely hard to organize because it's it's hard to find a group in the first week it's hard it's hard to find this sea frame to even do something within it um is that something that we can or how is that we just um saying that it's uh it's a good idea i i am i am worried about that in in the day like a i have been coming to class with a hundred students course the the the economy away the political economy of the environment that i inherited from from g-boys and hundred students and when i arrived to class i have been shocked to see about 85 students are coming regularly i know because i use the itaker so i know how many people are responding right 85 students waiting for me to start class and when i arrived to the classroom because i usually arrive on time and when i arrived in the classroom and they're sitting there i rarely see two people talking to each other is this the result of calling is this the result of a new way of handling things is the it's a new way of now how we deal with things but i have been concerned about that phenomenon because i remember that there was a time in which we were arriving to our classroom of 100 students and we asked them to be quiet so we could start class it's so easy to start classes and to me that's worse just absolute silence each of them on the i-frame no seriously not a single conversation between the two the the other class that i teach is a smaller class and i see these growing in more and more conversations some of those guys are sitting here and they have more of that but in general i see that and it's just a reflection of that in so many other ways and but but instead then it somebody was the other day circulating something that was interesting about the third place and we have always the first place the home the second place the workplace and there should be a third place the cafe the pub in plaza the place where we meet on the job and the disappear of the third places is destroying that why because we have now everything at a click at our home or at a click at our workplace and with the pandemic we fusion the two into one and maybe just one and then the i-frame life became dominant in so many other ways so we need to fight back and see how we recover back the c-frame type of life of those links in the not only the notes separated so i i agree that the fact that so many policies focus on the i-frame can destroy that is one of the concerns as i said one of the papers in my dissertation and this was in the year 1999 one of the papers was about the drowning out of individual taxes or penalties imposed on communities that destroy the intrinsic motivation to cooperate in the protection of the cause presiding the possible cause that i was doing those experiments and so this this concern is there yeah and jimmy's concern all the no no let's have jim voice i just actually wanted to make a plug for a talk that's going to be held here exactly two weeks from today in fact on november 10th which is about sort of the c-frame but it's really about a case study it's called the water defenders and it's about struggles in latin america by communities to defend their rights and access to one of the most important natural resources which is water um john kevana and robert broad have written a book called the water defenders which is about struggles of communities in al Salvador as it happens in this respect and they'll be here and they'll be copies of their book here and you're all invited it's open to the public um november 10th i think one of the things that will come out from that by the way is that very often such community movements like environmental justice movements here in the united states would be another example arise in response to what not to a notch but to what might one might call push um they arise in response to efforts by the powerful to change the facts on the ground by appropriating resources and rights that communities believe belong to them as a as a human right like access to clean uh and safe environment and water so i think it'll be very interesting talking and i encourage you all to thank you thank you informal conversations as well as around to continue all of this and so please join us if you want for the