Friday, June 06, 2008

Life on the Default Setting

I bought my lovely spouse a mug of tea the other day at a local café, and for myself, one last hot chocolate before summer cranks up the heat. For here or to go, the clerk asked. For here, I replied. Soon the drinks arrived, a nice ceramic mug of tea and a Styrofoam cup of hot chocolate tucked beneath a plastic lid.  It hadn’t occurred to me that my for-here-not-to-go drink would be served in something destined for the landfill, but there it was. I asked the clerk about it.

“Oh, we always serve those in Styrofoam,” she said.  “So many people would get them in the mug and then ask us to pour them into Styrofoam that we just go ahead and make them that way now.” I urged the café staff to take a less wasteful approach. That foam cup will still reside in the county landfill when our great grandchildren are driving their offspring in a nuclear-powered mini-van to gymnastics classes on the moon. “Will you look at those kids jump!” By then the landfill will be the tallest manmade feature in north-central Indiana, visible from earth orbit.  Astronauts will steer their sleek ships by the neon glow of all our waste.

There is a term for what they’ve done at the café – they’ve made the foam cup the default setting. It’s a familiar situation – unless you choose otherwise, you get the default setting; in this case, the foam cup. In a new book called Nudge, authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein talk about the constructive changes we can make in our personal and civic lives when the default setting is actually something good. People are still free to choose, but since we coast along on default so much of the time, life is improved just by having a smarter default setting.

An example would be curbside recycling.  A civil libertarian might urge us to make it optional, and it is – nobody forces you to toss those cans or bottles in the recycling.  But the default setting in our town is that we all pay for recycling on the utility bill.  Hey, we’re paying for it, so most of us will probably go ahead and use it.  If paying were optional, many people would probably not pay or recycle – neither one.

You can tell how we’re doing as a society by looking at our default settings.  For most people, the default setting is: don’t vote, don’t go to church, don’t belong to a community group.  For many of us, both the living room furniture and our leisure time are organized around a television set, and the default setting in the evening is to watch a little tv.  Hey, we need to know if Lucy’s going to fall in that vat of grapes again, if Fonzy can still get the juke box started with just a tap, if Will & Grace’s new boyfriends will work out.

We’ve set up our cities, even our smallish Michiana cities, with a default that gets almost all of us into cars for a commute to work.  A few can take the bus, a few can ride a bike or walk, but that’s not how we’ve set up the city, so we turn to the gas-guzzling, ozone-altering default.  We don’t have to live that way – by supporting buses and bike lanes, we could change the default. And that’s the whole point of Bike to Work Week, isn’t it?

Take a look at any element of the day and see if the default setting – the ordinary pattern that you just fall into – could be shifted.  Go ahead and change the default.  That’s another way of saying that it’s up to us to decide what’s normal in our lives.  What do you want your day to be like?  Let’s make that the default, shall we?

Broadcast by Ken Smith on June 06, 2008
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