In my most recent post about Skin in the Game, I described an idea about how intolerant minorities can change a society’s preferences. Astute readers may recall that I made this point by adapting an example from the book into a strange cross between an extended metaphor and a parable. Let’s look a little more closely at this idea today without the aid of my assured hypothetical scenario.
Taleb’s main point is that small minorities can force the majority to accept their preferences provided the presence of two factors. The first factor is that the cost of changing preferences is not too high. There are lots of examples out there (that have nothing to do with melons) that illustrate the point. The basic way to identify these instances is to think about widespread behaviors that started with just a few early adopters and became increasingly popular as the cost of joining these pioneers reduced. When I think about the commonness of once-fringe ideas like recycling, text messaging, or online shopping, I note that they became ubiquitous as the cost of adopting these behaviors decreased.
Not all minority preferences are destined to become tomorrow’s norms. I don't think gender-neutral single restroom units, for example, will replace all segregated restrooms anytime soon. And it is true that cost is probably a factor here - I imagine the spending on plumbing infrastructure required to convert all restrooms to single-room units would sink most building budgets. But the long-term reason why I think this preference is unlikely to become ubiquitous brings me to the second factor – a minority must also be sufficiently intolerant for their preference to take hold. In this example, I suspect it is very difficult for the minority to be intolerant enough – the risk of permanent health problems is simply too high for the minority to refuse to use almost all restrooms on the grounds that the omnipresent setup is discriminatory (1).
Of the two factors, I found the ideas about intolerance much more interesting than the insights about cost. I suppose this makes some sense – as a former economics major, I’ve had plenty of experience thinking about the role of costs in everyday decisions. Quite frankly, these days I find myself a little bored by the topic (usually, it just comes down to how someone else estimated a few numbers, then picking the smaller/larger one as appropriate). Intolerance, on the other hand, is a topic I know little about despite seeming to hear about it every ten minutes these days. Based on what I hear and combining it with some of my basic assumptions, I would have guessed tolerance drives societal change while intolerance was the force that kept the status quo humming along. But the most interesting aspect of Taleb’s comments is how it reverses my intuition about tolerance and intolerance – to change the world, be intolerant.
Footnotes / justifying nonsense
1. Just giving it my best shot here, folks…
I admittedly don’t have a great grasp of all the details as it relates to gender-neutral restrooms and I don't want to give off a false impression of expertise on the matter. I just want to keep focused on the idea that minority preferences can become the majority’s norm given a low switching cost and a sufficient level of intolerance from the minority. If the costs of building these restrooms became sufficiently low, I could see this moving closer to the norm because anyone willing to use a segregated restroom should also be happy to use a sufficiently private alternative.
When I thought more about what I wrote here, I realized that this is a function of the law that I never heard articulated before – to codify a minority preference that would benefit all of society yet lacks the required criteria of low cost and sufficient intolerance as outlined by Taleb.
