Attention Span
Kevin Grandia, Dave Roberts, and Brad Johnson (my photo available under cc license)
I’m sitting here at a climate change panel and one theme in a lot of folks’ presentations is something I’ve heard at pretty much every climate panel I’ve attended in the past two years—people complaining that the progressive community isn’t sufficiently interested in their issue. And, yeah, climate change is really important! But is there any issue community that doesn’t feel this way? It seems to me that health care gets about as much coverage as a substantive policy issue possibly could be and then after that everyone else is just starved for attention.
I mean, how much do I read about tax policy? Or housing? On some of my pet interests in transportation and land use, you pretty much only here about these things as a sub-set of the climate change issue. And of course that’s an important aspect of transportation and land use policy, but there’s more to it than that.
At any rate, people don’t necessarily focus very much on this, but one of the fundamental facts of the modern world is that technology progresses and the stock of human culture grows, but we don’t add any more time to the day. Attention is, in many ways, the scarcest resource of all. This is why people don’t cook as much as Michael Pollan thinks they should, people don’t read as much as they used to, and people don’t pay as much attention to climate change as they should.
20 Responses to “Attention Span”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
August 13th, 2009 at 9:35 am
Cooking is an annoying time consumer, especially if you live in a two earner household. Unfortunately, if you’re dining out, you’re subject to the foolish whims of the marketplace.
August 13th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Okay, but not too many issues involve existential threats to civilization. We can prioritize those.
August 13th, 2009 at 9:41 am
And its also why Health Insurance Reform isn’t getting done correctly. The Dem party is made up of way too many fractured interest groups and so none of them get the attention they rightly deserve.
August 13th, 2009 at 9:53 am
I think you could rephrase the climate change community’s position as: “If you don’t address climate change now your health care reform, tax reform, transportation policy, and any other progressive reform you can imagine will be pointless.” The scientific and policy community that studies climate change has become convinced that it will devastate our economy, plunge millions in the united states into poverty, plunge the developing world into a desperate struggle for survival and potentially wipe out western civilization as we know it, or at least that’s what their rhetoric would suggest. Who knows what will actually happen, but if you truly believe that this will happen why waste time on other policy issues?
August 13th, 2009 at 9:54 am
The problem is not that people aren’t paying attention to Climate change. Its that the people who are paying attention to climate change are basically trying to get congress to let them destroy the planet or else at least make sure that efforts to not destroy the planet also involve them getting richer.
August 13th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Health care reform has to be the progressives 1, 2 and 3 highest priority because if they get it done right it will buy tremendous good will among voters like no other issue will. Once progressives have that good will the voters are more likely to listen to proposed solutions for things like climate change.
August 13th, 2009 at 10:03 am
There’s a different spin that could be put on this — if there were a little more cultural memory (aka old people) involved here.
Time was when everyone on the left had a pet issue, and promoted it ceaselessly while ignoring other issues. At any rate, that’s what the 70s and 80s — even 90s — felt like to me.
Right now, I think we have a healthier situation. For how many of us, really, is health care priority #1? It’s not for me. Climate change is priority #1 for me. But health care is the issue that’s at the top of our collective agenda this year, and the one where action is most likely to make a difference. So I’m going out to events, donating, and getting my face (or at least the back of my head) on the local news for that issue.
What I’m trying to suggest is that the exhaustive focus on health care reform — as much as it irritates MY qua pundit — is a sign of a newly disciplined and cohesive left. We take it for granted that all of these issues matter, and we’re paying enough attention to the political process to realize that pragmatic considerations (not shouting or guilt trips) are going to dictate which one is ripe for action at a particular moment.
Really, I don’t recognize the left I used to know.
August 13th, 2009 at 10:06 am
If you die early without proper healthcare climate change will be irrelevant to you. With a healthier, happier, and hopefully more economically secure populace we will lay the groundwork for taking on climate change.
August 13th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Napoleon nails it.
Conservatives understand this. That’s why lunatics from every interest issue are showing up at healthcare town halls (I mean, 2nd Amendment guys? Seriously?). I’ll bet you that the oil lobby is supporting the guys organizing the teabaggers.
But climate change organizations seem to believe that the failure or success of healthcare has nothing to do with them. They couldn’t be more wrong. If healthcare fails, or even barely passes, then climate change is dead in the water.
Back in January and February, when Obama was choosing his top priorities, the attention paid to healthcare vs. climate change was zero sum. But by March, climate change had lost. The Obama administration decided their issue wouldn’t get the full court press. Once healthcare won the “what will the President do first” primary, the fight over healthcare became a zero-sum between every conservative priority and every liberal priority–climate change included!
It’s appalling that the issue progressives don’t understand this. Seriously, the circular firing squad thing has to end. The stakes are too high.
August 13th, 2009 at 11:07 am
There are several problems with reacting to AGW.
First, the attention span required is decades long. It’s not uncommon for sentences to begin, “By the end of the century.”
I’m going to be gone. My kids will be gone. And (knock wood) any potential grandkids might be gone as well. It’s hard to push attention down 3 generations. It was too hard to get Simon Peter to stay alert for a single evening. Altruism doesn’t time travel well, either. The future, Mr. Gits. The future. Fark the future, eh?
Second, what we actually have in store is poorly defined. We’ve already had .9C of a potential 2C increase. (It could be more, but a total of 2C is within the 95% confidence level.) If the next 1.1C is like the current .9C, AGW won’t be too bad. It’s true that 4C is also within the 95% confidence level and to keep the increase at 2C there can be no feedbacks at all, so 2C is probably a pipe dream. But the current scientific literature doesn’t address that. The IPCC documents, such as they are, are what we have to go by, and 2C doesn’t look too bad. We’re in the midst of the worst financial crisis since our grandparents’ day, and sticker shock on the scope of the crisis is bad enough already. We see people who would only normally wring their hands in anxiety are now capable of insulting the president in public. And worse.
I can’t see us doing spit about AGW. What is in store for us will hit us like a North Sea gale hitting an overloaded Belgian ferry boat. People who believe in Gaia (I don’t) no doubt see it as part of Her plan to rid the world of a nasty virus (us): addict the pests to fossil carbon energy and then just sit back and watch.
August 13th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Bingo. In the modern world, time – or more accurately, the time required to absorb and integrate complex information – is by far the scarcest factor for most people. It’s even a daunting task to sort out just who is a credible source for complex issues. I think that’s why a large fraction of the population falls back on such magical thinking as relying solely on the Bible for truth. It alleviates the anxiety of not having a clue who to believe.
August 13th, 2009 at 11:32 am
1. Nuclear Proliferation
2. Global Warming
3. Proliferation of “The Real Houswives of ________” shows.
4. Resistant strains of TB and MRSA.
August 13th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
… Which is probably why most of those teabaggers are seniors.
August 13th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
akbar and jeff’s bloggers convention where the elite meet for face-to-face tweets
August 13th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
The tragedy is that if we don’t pay enough attention to transportation and land-use we get inefficiency, but if we don’t pay attention to global warming and worst case comes true we get dead.
August 13th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
zyxw: Unfortunately, by the time you lay the groundwork for taking on climate change, it will most likely be too late. We are likely within a few years (either in the past or the future) of where future scientists will determine that climate “tipped” into permanent warming.
August 13th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
About twenty years ago I had a fortune cookie that said, “Time is your most valuable coin; be careful who you let spend it.” Some of the best advice I ever got.
August 13th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Teddy Roosevelt was a Man of Action who read a book a day. He could shoot bull mouse with one arm while reading Dickens with the other. Napoleon worked 25 hours a day, and slept minus one. Angelina Jolie is raising 47 children while making movies and looking gorgeous.
So get to work, young fella, and stop complaining about “time” and “attention spans.” Learn how to become a metaphysical juggler, or drink more coffee.
August 13th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Wow, that bloggers conference must be like a cluster of black holes that can bend time and space.
Liked the ideas from the thread that we could decide whether to deal with AGW or health care- or not! Prediction, the fine art of drawing a straight-line projection from all our yesterdays into the future.
What is the real timeline? Maybe 7 years for oil to reach $200. Maybe 15 years until health care consumes a quarter of our GDP. I’ve got cats that are older than that, and they’re barely broken in.
Time to stop thinking about how considering one problem “takes time away from another”, and start thinking about how improving one problem can also be an improvement to other problems.
August 13th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
I suppose the thing is that climate change is unlike any other issue (except nuclear proliferation, perhaps).
Healthcare, in a nutshell, is about whether Americans continue to enjoy improved standards of living. If it’s not dealt with, things muddle along as before for another 15 years until another Democratic president has a crack. It would be a massive wasted opportunity, but not a disaster.
The potential consequences of screwing up the response to climate change include the end of global civilization. Human extinction is highly unlikely, but can’t be ruled out entirely.
That said, I take the point that given the focus on health care right now, it makes sense to focus all the efforts on it for the next couple of months.