The Utility of Pride (Redux)

When I blogged on Monday about the value of pride, I also placed a premium on something else–that is, non-guilt. In the example I used, I was wedged between making a buck and losing face. And the determiner that ultimately caused me to relent was the sheer cost of guilt. Whatever gain I would have assumed by feeling self-sufficient, I would have been buying it at the expense of my relatives. And that turned the tables. I didn't want to deprive my relatives of satisfaction. (Who does?) And so I decided to reassess–and voilà! Non-guilt was worth more than pride; and pride, while trumping free money, lost out.

And that's pretty amazing, because I'm as proud as they come.

But that's also pretty important. I'm a regular consumer of non-pride–I expend a lot of resources in tending to my conscience. But I'm not the only one: guilt reduction is universal. And sometimes it's something that pays. Consider the odd example of the penalty for parking a bike illegally in Copenhagen. When bicycles started littering emergency lanes, the city decided to fight. And fight they did–by getting nice. They threw away the tickets, scrapped the hated wheel boots, and replaced them with complimentary tuneups a thank you note.

Someone on that transportation board was a behaviouralist. I'm certain of it. Because who else could have concocted such madness? But who else would have foreseen that it'd work, and work beyond all expectations? To quote the article:

When the project started in April, they were moving around 150 bicycles a day. Today that number has dropped to between 30 and 50.

Now, I'm not proposing the measure was optimal. The gravity of the problem is only something a Copenhager could tell you, so I can't really assess the utility in solving it. If it's really insignificant (which I somehow doubt, since the city was willing to throw a hail mary), then the loss of ticket revenue and increase in enforcement costs may have been a bad deal. Who would want to pay more for a solution than the problem it's meant to solve? Who would want to, for example, "win" the drug war by gouging taxpayers to finance more jails? Who would want to fund decades-long wars in the promotion of ideas transmissible to a scarce few? (Oh wait.) But, on the assumption the city of Copenhagen does derive something important through its efforts, its increased outlay is more than outweighed. Besides, how much more could the maintenance of 50 bicycles cost when the baseline is hauling them off instead? How much less could the government be making when all it's relinquishing are parking tickets–and not even real parking tickets. Bicycle parking tickets! These costs don't seem all that prohibitive, and they definitely don't seem hard to justify.

And whom do we have to thank? A fellow behaviouralist, I imagine. ;^