Cool NYT blogpost about Americans' changing perception of necessities. I like how they broke it down by demographics as well and the charts do reflect our tendency to resist certain new technologies as we get older. Heck, the fact that online wiring or transfering of money between bank accounts is not that widely embraced here and that modus operandus is still based on cheques and money orders is already indicative of this fact.

one quip though: providing, extending and promoting public transportation should affect the impression that cars are a necessity. I can understand why most Americans see cars as a necessity. Unless you live in a city, most places in the US are built in a sprawl-like fashion. Worse, public transportation is patchy. You wait an hour between buses and if you have to change buses to get somewhere... well good luck then. Metro lines don't necessarily service certain areas either. All this adds up to poorly serviced public transportation and a resistance to investing taxpayer money in such public infrastructure since most Americans don't use public transport anyway. (Gas subsidies however are heavily hunkered after)

Overall, this doesn't bode well at all for creating a green-consumer mindset or trying to decrease US dependence on energy and gas. The whole vicious cycle, chicken and egg problem really needs to be solved at a roots, norms, culture and education level. Somehow we need to build in incentives and frame the context for consumers that they would be persuaded to switch by themselves. Slapping a law on taxpayers just calls for alot of drama sometimes and perhaps needlessly so if we can figure out how to change their choice structure.

I kind of like the example given by the authors of Nudge. Rather than have customers go after the most expensive or unhealthy items at a buffet table, the buffet table is typically arranged such that lighter options such as your veggies, etc, are placed first. The average consumer tends to fill up his plate with alot of items when he first goes round the buffet table. By the time he gets to the end where the more unhealthy food items are, his plate is already mostly filled up (or if he was on his 2nd/ 3rd round... his tummy is already mostly filled up). So the establishment has successfully curbed the consumer's consumption of unhealthy items without putting any formal restrictions on the consumer. This gives the consumer a sense of freedom even though his choices were framed from the start.

It'd be interesting to see this applied for green technology and policies used to embrace climate change.

ok this was a bit of a ramble with thoughts just flowing out from my head. back to reading up on trade and intra-industry reallocations of labour and productivity cycles....