On the one hand, this post is a bit late. Many, many people are losing "endowments" of various sorts every day now--jobs, houses, retirement accounts...This is taking a huge emotional toll on those involved.

On the other hand, the theory presented would be more helpful if it indicated which types and what quantities of negative and positive inducements can prompt people to give up a specific "endowment" such as a car.

If I may be loaned a third hand, I would say that beyond any kind of basic "endowment" effect is the huge effect of massive advertisement industry. The ownership of not just a car but a monster vehicle becomes normalized by the constant bombardment of images of said cars and trucks on TV. I rarely watch myself, but visiting the fam for superbowl, I was again amazed at how many car adds there were. Do people really watch an ad and run out and buy a car?

Maybe not, but cumulatively they lead the populace to think that these metal coffins are legitimate ways to haul our carcases around; that hurtling down a highway at speeds faster than any terrestrial animal can match surrounded by thousands of pounds of metal and commanding dozens or hundreds of horses worth of power...is a natural way of going about our daily business. Imagine how bizarre it would have been a hundred years ago (or any time, really) for someone to hitch up a hundred or more horses to a cart to get pull their body to the next village.

If we could recognize many of our everyday activities as totally bizarre anomalies from any kind of historical perspective, perhaps it would be easier to give them up. But nothing in modern mainstream media invites such a view, quite the opposite. People commonly accuse those who look longingly at simpler forms of living of romanticizing these often hard lives. But nothing has been more incessantly romanticized than our current total-planetary-death-inducing way of life.

Sorry, this turned into something of a rant. Demolish at will.

So many threads Nate, where to begin...

Stimulus Package:
Will it work? I'd be amazed if it did, seems to me the best we can hope for is that it will be an effective "Orlov-ian Boondoggle" ( http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/01/boondoggles-to-rescue.html ) but that's o.k. as I've seen no real evidence that "we", collectively, have the ability to successfully plan and then achieve implementation of societal change in a desired direction at this scale. Change happens continuously, but its rarley part of a successful massive scale plan, more the fairly chaotic collective result of a bunch of independent actors each with a different package of goals they are seeking, mixed in with a healthy portion of fate, hap, and chance. And when I say I don't think it will work that comes at 2 levels; First I don't think it will hasten return to "business as usual", and secondly I don't think "business as usual" is sustainable anyway, so, dire as the situation seems to be, and I really do think it is dire, the informing mental state of the Stimulus planners does not concern me much.

The "Halcyon Days" of the 60's:
Well, if your colleagues are now 50 something white male North American or European academics then yep I guess the 60's were pretty cool for a lot of them, even discounting the human tendency to forget the bad and remember the good over the years, for many other races, genders, and classes not so good. A lot depends on who you ask I think. If we go back there do we have to replay the chances of not surviving the Cold War, take back Smallpox, undo the civil rights movement etc. or do we just get back the thicker topsoil, plentiful oil, high grade ores, and loose half the population? Things are a product of the possibilities offered by the conditions at the time it seems to me, then and now.

Lots of cars and McMansions:
Its bass ackwards here Nate: The fuel burning will be stopping because the fuel is going away, not because the things that burn it are. Geology will see to this faster than we could plan to do it your way round, assuming we knew how in the deep sense of the word, which we don't. Unless of course we decide to try and burn all the coal as well, in which case Gaia will sort us out in short order. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/james-lovelock-the-ear...

May be a good time to revisit "Shovelcrats: by Craig Ralston to get back on course.

http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/ralston-craig_shovelcrats.html

Imagining what the world would be like if we could design it anew is indeed a delightful and useful thought experiment. However, the imaginary new societies usually require a re-engineering of humanity itself.....the utopian worlds envisioned usually won't work with the same kinds of greedy, short-sighted, diverse, religious, capitalist, etc. (insert your favorite epithet here) people that inhabit our current fouled-up planet and economic system. The real-world transition to a society where people leave their cars behind and start riding bicycles and scooters and over-crowded buses isn't going to happen without a lot of pain and poverty and economic dislocations in our societies.

In looking for "solutions" to the financial crisis and energy and resource limitations, we're desperate to "not lose" what we think we have. Having run off a metaphorical cliff, perfectly good advice about how to survive a fall is not considered because the goal is to keep flying. Thus we may expect much flapping of arms.

Age was mentioned up thread and I believe it is an important issue. Those of us who are old have had far wider experiences than younger people. "Going back" is far different than "giving up" something for an unknown. When I was a kid, a neighbor was still using draft horses. So, I wouldn't be upset if Ag has to go this way eventually.

The same thing is true of many other areas. However, I would go balls to the wall with regard to refrigeration and well pumps. As I noted in my Campfire thread a while ago, I have attempted to assure these will continue to be available during my lifetime.

Somehow, an age perspective has to be brought into this discussion.

Todd

- What would we do if all of our vehicles 'vanished' and we had to restructure our basic needs without the sunk cost of automobiles?

-Would the answers to the above question ONLY be implemented IF all our vehicles 'vanished'? Why or why not?

I think it's not just the cars that own us. We're also addicted to the ability to rush through our world faster than racehorses without ever tiring; our world moving by in a rhapsodic blur as we alter our coordinates with minor effort of will. This may be a rather strong addiction, it certainly is in me, although a good downhill bicycle run is at least as good in terms of stimulation. I think we would also need to lose the perception of "cars as extension of self", which is to say redefine our self-image away from a need for speed. The immediacy and extent of our volitional control using cars is, IMO, one reason that mass transit suffers. It feels different to the brain to be a passenger. Even the weak, old, and infirm can feel superhuman in terms of sensory input, and to a large extent BE superhuman.

Of course, as all readers of TOD are aware, we have co-evolved our living systems around these superhuman abilities as though they were now intrinsic to us. Getting rid of cars is not simply a materialistic attachment of ownership; it represents a fundamental change in self-image for those who don't spend a lot of time in self-examination, as well as necessitating changes in how and where we live. At this point, cars are more a prosthesis than a possession, and if they were removed we would try to recreate them. Those now alive in developed countries grew up seeing them as an attainable birthright, a source of personal pride, and the ability to drive as a rite of adulthood.

I'm saying that the sunk financial costs of cars per se are not the core issue, although the sunk costs in a nation like the USA which has evolved its very structure around the abilities of these grotesque protheses arguably are close to it. But I think we face nothing less difficult than abandoning part of our collective self-image, and that's a sunk cost indeed. Short of massive self-enlightenment and dematerialism in the short term, (and good luck with that), private cars will probably only go away once so few people can operate them that doing so causes a dangerous level of anger in others at the disparity in perceived relative wealth.

It is a difficult thing, to become less godlike in one's own eyes.

Nate,
"What would we do if all of our vehicles 'vanished' and we had to restructure our basic needs without the sunk cost of automobiles?"

That's what happens today, automobiles depreciate very quickly, faster than homes, refrigerators, roads, bridges, factories. In 20 years almost all cars on the road today will have vanished. That's why I am optimistic that as oil vanishes, so will cars burning oil, to be replaced by EV's or mass transit.
Homes are a very different situation, they generally last several generations if not lifetimes, so we have to live with poor town planning,and poor design for a very very long time, although we can do a little home renovation( still more expensive than replacing the car).

- What would we do if all of our vehicles 'vanished' and we had to restructure our basic needs without the sunk cost of automobiles?

-Would the answers to the above question ONLY be implemented IF all our vehicles 'vanished'? Why or why not?

In some places, this is already the modus operandi; there are many carfree areas (fully or partially) around the world. Some evolved that way before the auto, some became that way by conscious choice.

The questions are so hypothetical that I don't see the situation occurring, but I'll play along for the mental exercise.

What would we do? Walk, bike, take the subway, telecommute. Many do this today. Those in the outer suburbs/exurbs would need at least electric hubs on their bikes.

This would only be implemented if vehicles vanished or a global nuclear war created enough EMPs to knock out all the auto electronic systems.

For your term "social endowment", I've been using a slightly different phrase "cultural inertia".

I'm one of the old ones here. I was talking with a friend ... the college freshman this year was born in 1990. The only president he/she knows is xxx (put liberal cuss word here) Bush and way back somewhere they might remember Clinton's administration. Maybe the worst thing that has ever happened is the remote died and they had no batteries. IMHO if one lets advertisement run their life and it doesn’t work out for them … TS. I’m not much of a sympathetic psychoanalyst. Dr Phil is not my hero.

Lack of personal transportation will be easy to adapt to compared to lack of lack of truck transport because the average potato travels over 800 miles from farm to table. I don't even know where toilet paper is made but I know it came here in a truck.

Many of the above comments are something like, "All those people will really have a problem adapting because they need to keep their endowment." Well, I only have one person to adapt out of that endowment mentality and I have been working on it for years. So I looked at the situation as best I could without a crystal ball and figured I had to change. And I have. Figuring out how you have to change is different with each person so I will not even suggest how someone else should change. I am quite different than I was 15 years ago. I believe part of the solution is to understand better that we are not separate from nature. It is really quite simple, accept reality, here and now. If we use all the crude oil, we don't have any more so make do without. In our PO case we haven't run out, it will just get too expensive to do much, so make do with what you have. I’m learning how to garden and store food because I think I might need it. No big deal, just garden and store food. If you learn how while you can still run to the store and pick up something, all the better.

There are a lot of new things to think about in different circumstances. A criminal with a gun is easy, just kill him. A hungry man with a hungry family and a gun is not so easy. In a really bad scenario, the worst of Black Swans, this may be the reality we face. There are a lot of things worse than losing one’s present endowment. I personally found my bottom line in Vietnam 1967, in a fetal position, in a very lightly built bunker with rockets landing all around. My motto since then: Happiness is no incoming. A lot of people will find a much lower bottom line in the generations ahead and a SUV and McMansion is trivial IMHO.

A little off topic, but I watched Tora! Tora! Tora! today. It's a historically accurate documentary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tora!_Tora!_Tora!
The attacked was provoked by the U.S. embargo that cut off raw material supplies to Japan. The Japanese army leaders and several political leaders were eventually able to persuade the rest of the leadership to plan and undertake the attack.

Lately I have had recurring thoughts of a major resource war. I see us as vulnerable, especially in a few years when we will not have enough domestic oil to survive should something happen to oil imports. Looking further back at history to WWI, the blockade against Germany resulted in the starvation of 750,000 Germans. Not having gasoline for cars is one thing, but not having fuel for trucks to deliver food is something else.

Anyway, if you are interested in military history, I recommend this movie.

"the familiar phenomenon that a dog will fight harder to keep it's own bone than to take a bone from another dog."

I wonder...

Just shortly after dawn this morning I woke to find a group of 3 coyotes who had freshly killed a deer just outside our garden fence. A foreleg/shoulder was partially eaten, but they were backing off of it. A pair of our dogs barked from the far side, all within 20 yards of the kitchen window. As our dogs were without any sign of blood or such, I can only presume that the domestic dogs were backing them off their kill.

It really surprised me. It's been a long winter, the air was cold, the snow 12-18 inches deep and frozen fairly solid in it's fitful progression to spring. The coyotes, in contrast, looked quite healthy and large. Larger than the smaller Australian Shepherd cross domestic dogs. Seems an element of trespass can play havoc with the endowment effect.

I toted the carcass far off into the valley, no sense in teaching the coyotes to dine next to house. At least it wasn't the sheep for dinner this time.

Collectively we have invested much time in trying to understand the dynamics of oil depletion without ever achieving a non-heuristic quantitative model. "We" still don’t understand it at a universally accepted level. Yet, we will likely retain most of the conventional wisdom and tribal knowledge due to inertia and group-think and without having any better information available. As an appeal to the economists, who should know best to avoid this quandary, this is also a sunk-cost effect. I agree that sunk-cost relates to the "dogged" persistence in people that have invested their own money and ordinarily would show rational behavior if they happened across found money. The field of economics teaches us the fallacious reasoning involved in falling prey to sunk-cost arguments. This becomes problematic because it often leads to emotional rather than rational decision-making. All the past mistakes in theorizing have become “sunk” and the arguments we present provide an alternate and ultimately more realistic view for the path forward. If the emotion gets down to a personal level and each of us has to deal with our own experiences with resource constraints, the rationality of our plight might just hit home, with the sunk-cost and group-think fears cast aside.

... And why didn’t a consensus of economists at universities and other institutions warn that a crisis was on the way?
The field of social psychology provides a possible answer. In his classic 1972 book, “Groupthink,” Irving L. Janis, the Yale psychologist, explained how panels of experts could make colossal mistakes. People on these panels, he said, are forever worrying about their personal relevance and effectiveness, and feel that if they deviate too far from the consensus, they will not be given a serious role. They self-censor personal doubts about the emerging group consensus if they cannot express these doubts in a formal way that conforms with apparent assumptions held by the group.from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/business/02view.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

So these group-think and sunk-cost arguments are not just isolated to material possessions and lifestyles. It also enters into the realm of understanding and theorizing. Peak oil analysts on TOD have essentially torpedoed years and years of cornucopian analyses generated by the corporate and political establishment. We have yet to see how that end shakes out. How long until they actually seek out fundamental answers?

This has been on my mind as I don't understand why any established economists tread where we engage in useful discussion. Some sort of sunk-cost or group-think ideas have to be the basis for this.

I'm afraid going back to 1960s level probably won't do it. It looks to me that for the USA to get to anything close of a sustainable standard of living, we'll need to drop back to at least 1941 - a decline in real per capita GDP of about 75%. That puts us about on a par with places like Costa Rica, Uruguay, or Cuba.

It may take many decades to get there, but I am assuming that a decline of at least that much is inevitable and unavoidable. I am hoping that somehow we can at least level off there instead of collapsing all of the way down. Maybe that hope will be in vain, but I can still hope.

What this means is that we - individually and collectively as a society - are going to have a lot of giving up to do. We are simply going to have to learn to get along with a lot less than what we had come to enjoy as a booming consumerist nation.

All of this giving up of things isn't going to be easy. It goes against the grain, as this article explains. The natural inclination is to fight against it, to try to hang on. However, there is some wisdom to be found in several schools of thought (religious or otherwise) to the effect that it is better to do what is counterintuitive, what is against our nature: to willingly and quickly let go of things rather than to expend energy and stress in grabbing on.

The old story of the monkey traps comes to mind. There are people that catch monkeys by tying a jug to a tree and placing food inside. The jug has an opening just big enough for the monkey to reach inside, but too small for the monkey to extract its hand if it is clenching anything in its fist. The monkeys refuse to let go, so they are captured, lose their freedom, and maybe their lives. They would have been better off to just let go.

This doesn't come easily or naturally, it is an attitude and way of living that needs cultivating. It helps greatly to get in the habit of giving up small things even when one doesn't need to. The more one is practiced in giving up things, the easier it becomes to give up even more.

I believe that this is a key survival strategy for the decades of decline that are sure to come. Don't wait until you are absolutely forced to give up things to learn living without them - get ahead of the curve. For example, I could still be driving to work, I don't absolutely HAVE to walk to work now. But I have been walking anyway, I've gone ahead and given up commuting by car before I really had to give it up. This means, at the very least, that I don't have to worry about how I get to work any more, and it has a whole lot of other benefits too - financial, environmental, energy, psychological, social, etc.

At the national level, what this means is that trying to sustain the status quo ("BAU") is counterproductive and doomed to failure. A better strategy would be to identify those few things that are truly important, and to develop a strategy to sustain those, while also to develop a strategy for a progressive and orderly abandonment of things that are of lower importance. This way of setting public policy and conducting our national business is so foreign to the USA that I very much doubt that we'll ever do anything of the sort, unfortunately. This suggests that we'll decline faster and harder, and level off much lower, than we really would have to.

Questions to ponder:

- What would we do if all of our vehicles 'vanished' and we had to restructure our basic needs without the sunk cost of automobiles?

Of course, we--those of us willing and able--would build new automobiles, barring state intervention, actual governmental control of transportation disallowing privately owned vehicles. Any power train will do: gas, diesel, gas- or diesel-electric, battery-electric, fuel cell, alcohol . . .
Presently, I drive a hybrid most of the time, and a 3/4-ton pick up if I have to haul big stuff. The convenience is wonderful but I would like much simpler wheels; rather, something like my old '68 VW bug and its big brother the VW microbus.
Were these to disappear, I still have a bike, outdoor clothing and two legs that will carry me about a mile in 15 minutes, up to about 10 miles. I have neighbors who weathered Katrina with me and my family, and we cooperated well to make life bearable without electricity and water.
The suburban model of residential living will have to go, an idea eleborated well by James Howard Kuntsler in his books and interviews, as in The End of Suburbia (http://www.endofsuburbia.com/).
Models for replacing suburbia can be found in a hefty, marvelous book entitled A Pattern Language (Alexander et al, Oxford, 1977), still in print. see http://www.patternlanguage.com/.

-Would the answers to the above question ONLY be implemented IF all our vehicles 'vanished'? Why or why not?

There are now pockets were smarter people gravitate, as seen in several cities with good public transportation and a penchant for sustainability. Transition from borrowed to sustainable, if left to occur peacefully, is still going to hurt even if it is voluntary and a critical mass of awareness is reached.
On my end, I am steadily reducing power consumption by planning my trips in detail, using the telephone and on-line sources, working as much as possible at my residence.
Are others?
Yes, maybe 20 percent of those in my circle of friends and family.
Will everyone catch the drift before sharp pain sets in?
Not if history is our guide.

I fear the consequences if we cannot convince everyone of the dire need to get off the juice.

May I make a suggestion to the TOD editors?

I would like to see the equivalent of a set of "sticky-pages" (perhaps linked to in a column on the right or left?) that where links to the various energy related 'theories' or 'laws' that people refer to, e.g.;

"Law of receeding horizons"
"Export Land Model"
"Hyperbolic Discount Function"
"Sunk Costs and the Endowment Effect"
etc.

-The intention is twofold;

1. It allows people a quick reference in order to expand their knowledge if this is their first time here.
2. It ensures that any reference to these can be replied to -after quickly reading the section- by people 'on the same page' wrt. their understanding of said theory/law.

I guess it could be done as a Wiki entry for each with a menu link in TOD or erhaps a single "TOD References" wiki page that might be updated by a contributor at the time of submission of an article on a new theory/law...

Regards, Nick.