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Five public pools in Newark, New Jersey, just got an unusual upgrade. Painted in bright neon colors and sporting far-out shapes, five custom-designed cabanas have been installed on the decks of these public pools, one at each location. Created by second-year design-build students at the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Hillier College of Architecture and Design, the cabanas offer seating, shading, and a generally unconventional poolside experience. The cabanas are the result of a 15-week college-wide design project involving roughly 170 students. Initiated through a long-standing relationship between Newark’s recreation department and NJIT senior lecturer Mark Bess, the project was aimed at filling a large void in the city’s public pool offerings. The pool areas didn’t have any types of amenity at all. It was essentially concrete platforms. There was nothing there, Bess says. This provided some useful function as well as giving the students an opportunity to stretch out a little bit. [Photo: Hillier College of Architecture and Design] A public private partnership was formed between NJIT, the city of Newark, and the logistics real estate company Prologis, which provided $16,500 in funding for the cabanas. Cities don’t often have the budget for state-of-the-art amenities like this, so this public-private partnership is a model for how municipalities can find creative solutions to improve public resources, says Donnell Redding, director of Newark’s Department of Recreation, Cultural Affairs and Senior Services. [Photo: Hillier College of Architecture and Design] Erin Pellegrino, an adjunct instructor at NJIT, worked with students on the designs, and held regular reviews with city officials and Prologis to review the ideas taking shape. Participating students initially came up with dozens of concepts that then got whittled down to 10 finalist ideas. Through 3D design and scale physical modeling, the students landed on five final designs that they then built themselves. The cabana designs range from familiar lounge chairs to more experimental shade structures. We actually try to avoid using the word cabana at the early stages, says Pellegrino. We try to tell students this is a pavilion. It needs to host sitting and laying and, you know, relaxing . . . perhaps even eating and communicating. So we try to give them verbs instead of nouns. [Photo: Hillier College of Architecture and Design] One of the cabanas is a row of chairs with rounded backs and an overhang that folds from behind like a crashing wave. Another is a geometrical puzzle of benches, tables, and walls that looks like its made out of Tetris blocks. Another resembles the metal fingers of an arcade’s claw machine, draped with fabric shade cloth. We give them a long leash, particularly early on, Pellegrino says. That usually results in some really interesting ideas. Then, when they have to build it, and they have to sit in it, that’s when they start to refine it and bring it back to reality. [Photo: Hillier College of Architecture and Design] Pellegrino and other NJIT instructors helped ensure the designs were feasible from a variety of perspectives, including the $16,500 budget provided by Prologis, the liability the school faced by putting these objects in public places, and even logistical issues like how much each cabana weighs and how it would be transported from the college to the pool. The cabanas were installed in late May. Pellegrino says an in-kind donation from a local paint store of about $3,000 worth of paint and other finishing materials should set the cabanas up to survive for at least five years, if more aren’t requested sooner. I would love to do it again. There’s certainly room for more of these things at most public pools and other kinds of public spaces, Pellegrino says. But that’s going to be dependent on money, like everything else.
Category:
E-Commerce
Capitalism as we know it is dead. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made that proclamation at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2019. Were going to see a new kind of capitalism, he went on. If your orientation is just about making money, I dont think youre going to hang out very long as a CEO or a founder of a company. Benioffs remarks were striking, but not shocking. He was merely articulating what had become the conventional wisdom among business leaders in that moment. After decades of serving shareholders alone, CEOs were embracing the idea that they should also be concerned about stakeholdersemployees, customers, suppliers, local communities, and even the planet. This notion of business for good had become mainstream. Silicon Valley giants like Google and Facebook rose to power while touting their commitment to transforming the world for the better. Tesla became a trillion-dollar company while talking about saving the planet. Mission-driven startups like Toms, Warby Parker, and Bombas helped reshape the way people shop, giving away one product for every one sold, while high-profile startups like Uber and Airbnb insisted that they, too, were trying to do more than make money. (Airbnb says its mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.) Even big, established corporations embraced the idea that, in Benioffs words, business could be the greatest platform for change. They launched diversity and inclusiveness initiatives and took steps to reduce their carbon footprint, vowing to be net carbon zero by 2030. Doing well by doing good was no longer just a niche concept. It was here to stay. Or so it seemed. Just a few years later, its stakeholder capitalismnot capitalism itselfthat looks dead. Right-wing activist shareholders have bullied companies like Harley-Davidson, Caterpillar, and Lowes into rolling back their DEI initiatives. Investors claiming that so-called environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues were fundamental to their investment choices have stopped talking about those issues entirely. CEOs who confidently issued pronouncements about social justice and the importance of fighting climate change have clammed up. When asked how he feels about this current moment, David Bronner, chief executive of natural soap purveyor Dr. Bronnersa 75-year-old conscious capitalism mainstaysays, Sometimes Im stoked and most times Im not. This reversal has been so fast and so dramatic that even many of the youngest mission-driven companies now look like relics of a bygone era, while the environment that spawned them feels like little more than a dream. But the movement that defined the past 15 years changed American business in meaningful ways that will survive the backlash. To understand how, and where it goes from here, its time to look at why it arose, what it accomplished (and failed to), why it came crashing down, and whats left standing amid the rubble. The forces that led people to demand more from corporations, and that led corporations to demand more from themselves, havent vanished. Stakeholder capitalism may be ailing, but it isnt dead. Its taking a hard look at itselfand evolving. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, may have been the first to coin stakeholder capitalism, in 1971. Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, Paul Newman, and Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerrys proved it could work. But the business-for-good era that defined the early part of this century had an origin of its own. After the 2008 financial crisis, low interest rates and cheap capital fueled a boom in mission-driven startups. They were largely run by young entrepreneurs, geared toward a generation frustrated with big corporations and with a government that had bailed out the bankers and dragged its feet on climate change. Many of these startups were able to grow quickly thanks to the mobile technology suddenly in everyones pocket. Business was now the fastest route to change. [Illustration: Raymond Biesinger] A whole ecosystem to support these companies sprang up, with nonprofits like Fair Trade USA and B Lab auditing companies business practices to certify them to consumers. Social entrepreneurship programs at business schools boomed, as did the number of B Labs Certified B Corporations, which rose twelvefold between 2010 and 2022. Then something interesting happened: The biggest corporations and investment firms in America joined in, largely because their employees wanted them to, and the low unemployment and tight labor markets of the second half of the 2010s forced them to comply. As Jonas Kron, chief advocacy officer of Trillium Asset Management, one of the earliest socially responsible investment firms, says: When government steps back, it doesnt do away with the concerns that people have. People saw the enormous power that corporations represented and said, if that is where the power is, that is where Im going to go to achieve my values. Big corporations changed their policies to embrace diversit and sustainability and began taking vocal public positions on political issues, something they had typically shied away from for fear of alienating customers. Companies pressured North Carolina over the anti-transgender bathroom bill and Georgia over a voter-ID bill. They opposed Donald Trumps Muslim ban. CEOs who hesitated to speak up often paid a reputational price: When Disneys then-CEO Bob Chapek stayed silent about Floridas Parental Rights in Education bill (better known as the Dont Say Gay bill), he was lambasted by employees until he apologized and the company announced it was formally opposing the bill. The moment it became clear that stakeholder capitalism had fully taken hold was when the Business Roundtable, a group of some of the most powerful corporations in America, issued a Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation in 2019 declaring that companies must commit themselves to delivering value to all stakeholders. We thought this was going to be this big reckoning, this watershed moment where everything changes, says Marcus Collins, former head of strategy at Wieden+Kennedy and an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Michigan. People put on a good show. We had some really good thespians in the C-suite that projected a convincing sincerity. It felt like it was real. But the minute that they faced some discomfort, they bailed. That discomfort started in the early 2020s, when inflation and interest rates rose, meaning that cheap capital was no longer easy to come by, slowing investment in idealistic upstarts and labor-intensive capital projects alike. High oil prices created by the sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine led companies to start speaking up about energy security rather than moving away from fossil fuels. In 2022, large-scale layoffs pummeled the tech industry, and the S&P 500 tumbled nearly 20%. By 2023, both Google and Meta had begun to scale back their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. When the stock price is falling, suddenly shareholders become the only stakeholders CEOs can hear. There had been a faddish element about the whole thing, says Ravi Dhar, a professor at Yales School of Management. You had CEOs going to Davos and making a statement about being net zero by 2050, without any real idea of how to do that, and without really asking, If we want to accomplish this, what should we be doing differently? It was just words on a page, he adds. As Rose Marcario, former CEO of Patagonia, puts it, If you never authentically stood for responsible supply chains or diversity and inclusion, no big surprise you drop it at the first sign of tension. Nowhere was this truer than in Wall Streets embrace of environmental, social, and governance investing. ESG-themed funds had ballooned from less than $50 billion in global assets in 2018 to more than $400 billion by 2022. But in 2023, the wind shifted. ESG investments in the U.S. have since suffered 10 consecutive quarters of declines, reflecting the fact that a lot of ESG investing was mostly a matter of marketing. While some investment firms, like Trillium, practiced socially responsible investing by combining fundamental analysis with shareholder advocacy, lots of ESG investments were little more than conventional mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) sold under a new name. The arguments that firms made for ESG were often confused and confusing. Were you trying to make the world a better place with your investments, or were you trying to just divest from businesses you didnt want to be inwhich doesnt really change anythingor were you trying to improve returns? asks Tariq Fancy, formerly the chief investment officer for sustainable investing at BlackRock. Under CEO Larry Fink, BlackRock, the countrys largest investment firm, had been the highest-profile and loudest advocate for ESG. Fancy has since become one of the fiercest critics of the ESG movement. Not all of these initiatives were cynical exercises in marketing. As Fancy says, Maybe the issue wasnt greenwashing so much as greenwishing. But even so, ESG was not seriously trying to answer the problem it was trying to solve. It was offering virtue at a low cost. Or, as he puts it more bluntly, My read of Larry Fink is that he will do absolutely everything in his capacity to solve climate change, as long as it doesnt cost him a cent. (Fink didnt respond to Fast Companys request for an interview.) Plenty of CEOs felt the same way. In its original incarnation, stakeholderism was fundamentally about organizing a companys entire business around social responsibility, doing what was possible to ensure that, in the words of David Bronner, your operations are as ethical and sustainable as they can be. But the way corporate stakeholderism manifested itself from 2019 to 2022 often was less about operational transformations than public statements and grandiose commitments. These pronouncements, usually about the environment and diversity, increasingly clashed with the rhetoric of the ascendant GOP. And there were consequences. The decline of stakeholder capitalism and the political resurrection of Donald Trump happened at the same time and for similar reasons: anger at what many Americans perceived as virtue-signaling liberal elitism, despair about the basic cost of living, and distrust of global corporations. Influencers channeled that anger into consumer campaigns against companies that seemed too woke. [Illustration: Raymond Biesinger] The signal example of this was the boycott of ud Light over a social media marketing collaboration with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney in 2023. Bud Lights second-quarter sales fell by 10%, year over year, and it lost its place as the best-selling beer in the U.S. market. As the University of Michigans Collins points out, Bud Light had a long history of championing LGBTQ+ rights and could have made the case that the campaign was squarely in line with its brand history. Instead, it ran for the hills, which delighted its critics and alienated its putative friends. That strengthened the hand of red-state politicians who were already busy turning DEI and ESG into epithets and used state power to roll back what came to be called woke capitalism. In response to Disneys criticism of the Dont Say Gay bill, the Florida Legislature revoked Disneys ability to operate as a quasi-independent government around its theme parks, which had given it tax advantages. Texas passed a law prohibiting state pension funds from investing in any of 350 mutual funds that boycotted fossil fuels. Other red states pulled their money from BlackRock in protest of its ESG commitments, while legislators in New Hampshire tried to make the use of ESG criteria for state investments an actual crime. Emboldened, right-wing activist Robby Starbuck leveraged social media to get Harley-Davidson, Tractor Supply Co., John Deere, and Jack Daniels to drop their DEI policies. Vivek Ramaswamy, who had started a hedge fund called Strive to use shareholder activism against woke companies, ran for the Republican nomination for president. DEI and ESG were no longer seen by default as win-win for a company; the calculus had abruptly shifted. Robby Starbuck is now a stakeholder, says Allan Murray, former editor of Fortune and author of Tomorrows Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business. CEOs have to take his interests into account. The impact of the backlash was impossible to miss. Nike made deep cuts to the sustainability team that was supposed to help double business while halving its carbon footprint. Companies like Nestlé and Coca-Cola kicked the plastic can down the road (again), as The Wall Street Journal put it, after missing the plastic-reduction goals theyd set. Boeing dismantled its global DEI department, and IBM cited inherent tensions in practicing inclusion. JPMorgans Jamie Dimon warned employees that some of the companys DEI costs were for stupid shit and vowed to cut them. The worlds largest HR professionals society, SHRM, announced that the E was being dropped from DEI, while reassuring everyone that its commitment to the cause nevertheless remained steadfast. If talking about reducing emissions and DEI had felt downright obligatory in 2021, by 2024 it had become a liability. When a bubble bursts, it feels at first as if it had consisted of little more than overhyped promises, peddled by hucksters and embraced by trend followers. In the case of stakeholderism, critics on the right have brushed it off as a woke orgy of virtue signaling, while critics on the left have painted it as one big exercise in greenwashing, built on the fantasy that its possible to get businesses to care about anything other than profit. But the bursting of a bubble also winnows out the weak and the fake, ultimately making it easier to see whats of real value. It would be disingenuous to say that this moment doesnt create some angst that were going backward, says Bombas CEO Dave Heath, referring to the popping of whats been called the Sustaina-bubble. But were lucky we get to set our rules. We can stay focused on the long term. The pendulum swings back and forth. It does. The forces that helped spark the boom in stakeholder capitalismclimate change, a socially engaged workforce, educated consumersremain powerful. Dozens of credible studies in recent years have made it clear that theres a strong business case for things like treating your employees well and focusing on the efficient use of energy and emissions reductions. Often, there is no conflict between serving the interests of stakeholders and the long-term interest of shareholders. Some business leaders, of course, will never see things that way. There are undoubtedly many companies that, having dabbled in stakeholderism, are now happy to be free of it. For others, diversity and sustainability were always an odd fit, given their brand and customer base, and they never really figured out how to make them a genuine part of their operations. As Tractor Supply CEO Hal Lawton said during a quarterly earnings call following the rollback of the companys DEI and carbon emissions goals in July 2024, removing the perceived political and social agendas from our policies had no measurable impact on our business. Others are likely to take a middle path. Theyll roll back their DEI programsas Google, Walmart, and Amazon have in the wake of Trumps electionand talk less about their environmental efforts (which some call greenhushing). Companies are keeping their heads down, says Martin Whittaker, CEO of Just Capital, a nonprofit that compiles an annual scorecard of corporate stakeholder performance. They dont want to be called out. They dont want to attract undue attention. But that doesnt mean theyre giving up on sustainability. In fact, plenty of big companiesincluding those with massive carbon footprints, like ExxonMobilare spending billions to reduce emissions and become more efficient. A few corporate giants are simply resisting the backlash, like Costco and Levi Strauss & Co. have. (Shareholders of both companies overwhelmingly voted down anti-DEI shareholder resolutions this year.) And then there are the mission-driven companies and organizations that gave rise to the stakeholder movement in the first place. They may be emerging from the storm even stronger. [carousel_block id=”carousel-1749174435420″] Take B Lab, for example. The nonprofit faced criticism in 2022 for certifying multinational companies with messy supply chains, like Nespresso. Dr. Bronners famously dropped its certification earlier this year, explaining that the entire B Corporation designation had become compromised. Yet the number of companies certified as B Corporations has more than doubled in the past three years, and B Lab recently issued new, tougher standards. Even David Bronner is encouraged: We do appreciate the real improvement, he says, adding that B Lab upleveled in a lot of ways. Theres now minimum criteria within each of the areas so you cant just run up your score in a few and flail in others. (He describes being in this iterative process with B Lab but says that the company has no plans to get recertified.) Meanwhile, Sarah Paiji Yoo, CEO of eco-friendly cleaning products brand Blueland, says that her companys revenues have grown faster than ever over the past two yearsby more than 40% in 2024 and even more in 2025and its not that were spending more money to grow. We are growing faster and becoming more profitable. The main issue for many conscious capitalism companies, in fact, is the backlash itself. Ben & Jerrys recently sued its parent company, Unilever, over the removal of the ice cream purveyors CEO. The chief executive, a veteran of the brand, had spoken out about support for Palestinian rights, including the brands decision to quit selling ice cream in Israeli-occupied territories. Jay Curley, chief marketing officer for Ben & Jerrys, says that right now the challenge is how to manage all the chaos that is being created by the attempt to roll back a lot of progress that weve made over the years. Its more about how we manage through that than thinking, Oh, do we stop doing what were doing? Because thats never on the table. [carousel_block id=”carousel-1749182439336″] Its easy to understand why truly mission-driven companies are undeterred. Many are privately owned, with investors committed to their sustainable or societal goals. Some, like Warby Parker, King Arthur Flour, and Bluesky, are public companies that are set up as public benefit corporations, which means that working toward their mission is part of their corporate charter. Its hard when public-company structures are committed to shareholder primacy and quarterly returns, says Vincent Stanley, the director of philosophy at Patagonia. Its hard to advance long-term social and environmental goals when you have to maximize the profits every quarter. Most mission-driven companies dont have to do that. They also dont have to worry about Robby Starbuck going after them, because their customers dont care what Robby Starbuck thinks. These kinds of companies have also typically built their value chains with stakeholders in mind. Their commitments to sustainability, diversity, their local communities, and more werent bolted on after the fact. The most successful of them function as what Paul Rice, the founder and former CEO of Fair Trade USA, calls lighthouse brands, models that other companies can look to for lessons in how to blend profit and purpose. Take, for example, a B Corporation and Fair Trade USA-certified company called NatureSweet, which is the largest producer of snacking tomatoes in the U.S. (They come in a container that looks kind of like a volcano.) NatureSweets reason to exist, according to CEO Rodolfo Spielmann, is to transform the lives of agricultural workers in North America. The company has done that, in part, by paying its workers 49% more, on average, than the standard industry wage. Most of these workers are unionized, but the company is still able to use a compensation structure in which most of the pay comes in the form of weekly bonuses pegged to productivity. The higher pay raises NatureSweets costs, but it also makes the companys employees more loyal, radically reducing turnover. NatureSweet says its turnover is less than 1% a month in an industry where that number can top 200% per year. Lower turnover also means the companys employees are more experiencedthe average employee has worked for NatureSweet for seven yearsand therefore more productive. Theyre incredibly good at their jobs, Spielmann says. NatureSweet uses 40% fewer workers per hectare than the industry average, the company says, and it has posted double-digit growth since 2020, to well over $500 million in sales. Thats far short of behemoths like Fresh Del Monte at $4.3 billion and Dole at $8.5 billion, but NatureSweet grows only tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers, and Dole recently admitted that its fresh produce sales arent so great. It reported a $32 million quarterly loss in February, largely because of the fresh vegetable division. Blueland, similarly, has translated its commitment to sustainability into greater efficiency, saying it benefits from a 20% reduction in shipping costs and waste because its products are solid cleaning concentrates. Dry products that are a fraction of the size of conventional equivalents mean lower cost to ship across the country and less warehouse space per product, says Paiji Yoo. From an operations perspective, Ive seen firsthand how weve been able to expand margins: less packaging, shipping fewer things around, not air-freightingthings that are both better for the planet but also better for the bottom line. That all fits with how Stanley describes Patagonia, which does more than a billion dollars in annual revenue while still being the platonic ideal of a mission-driven company. The success of the business derives from the constraints we impose on ourselves, he says. If you have social and environmental constraints, you have to think about alternatives, and that requirement allows you to come up with efficient answers you might otherwise not have. Its not just doing well while doing good. In some sense, its doing well because youre doing good. When business leaders and economists talk about stakeholder capitalism, theres often one stakeholder who goes unmentioned: the consumer. Business for good is a supply-side movement: Its focus has been on changing businesses to be more inclusive, more sustainable, more committed to doing good. What has gotten much less attention is the demand sidethat is, what consumers actually want, what theyre willing to pay for, and how much theyre willing to pay for it. And thats important, because, as the University of Michigans Collins puts it, Capitalism will always bend toward consumption. Where the demand is, thats where capitalism will lean. And right now, the demand for sustainable or mission-driven products is still niche. Its true that the market for sustainable products has expanded enormously over the past 15 years. Organic food products now account for almost $70 billion a year in sales. The segment of affluent, highly educated consumers who are willing to pay a premium for sustainable products continues to grow. The challenge is that in the grand scheme of things, the number of consumers who are actually making purchasing decisions for ethical reasons is still quite small. Organic food purchases, for instance, account for less than 10% of all grocery-store sales. [Illustration: Raymond Biesinger] If thats surprising, it may be because the past decade saw mountains of survey data claiming that most consumers not only cared about things like sustainability but also were willing to pay a healthy premium for products that aligned with their values. In a 2024 PwC survey, for example, more than 80% of consumers said they were willing to pay 9.7% more for sustainably produced or sourced goods. In polls of younger consumers, the premium was even higher. Companies could point to this data as evidence that investing in sustainability wasnt just good for the planet, it was good for business. The problem with these studies? Almost all of them looked at what consumers said, not what they did. And when it comes to consumer behavior, there is very often what economists call a say-do gap. Companies were misled by consulting companies saying things like millennials and Gen Z are willing to pay a 50% premium [for sustainable products], Yales Dhar says. Those studies focused on reported behavior, and companies that acted on them found that the reported behavior never materialized. A 2022 Boston Consulting Group study illustrated this point: It found that while 80% of consumers said they thought about sustainability when making day-to-day purchases, only 1% to 7% were actually paying a premium for sustainable products and services. Similarly, last year researchers from the University of Chicagos Booth School of Business and New York University gave 24,000 consumers information about various companies ESG commitments, then tracked their spending habits. They found that even though most of the consumers said they had a moderate preference for buying from ESG-responsible companies, the added information had only a tiny impact on their actual buying habitsthey increased purchases of sustainable products by 1.2% in the first two weeks, and by week four, the effect had totally dissipated. The sobering thing, says Collins, is that climate change doesnt matter to most people at the point of purchase. The time horizon is so far off that people go, Ah, Ill worry about that when I worry about that. When Just Capital surveyed people in 2024 about what they care about most when it comes to corporate behavior, a companys adherence to its climate commitments accounted for just 2.5% of the overall score. Most people are struggling financially, Whittaker says, and most people put food on the table and a roof over their head ahead of [thinking about] climate change. Its not that values are irrelevant to consumers, but price and quality are always going to matter more when people go shopping, and it was always a pipe dream to think otherwise. This is the reality throughout the economy, all over the country. Lately, its been front-page news. Most Americans say they want to buy products made in the U.S., but what they do is buy cheaper products made abroad. And Trumps tariffswhich are supposedly designed to bring manufacturing back to the U.S.are unpopular for a pretty simple reason: Americans dont want to pay more for T-shirts and bananas. If youre looking for more conscious, inclusive capitalism, then, you cant expect consumers to fund it. Instead, the only way forward is to do what companies like NatureSweet and Blueland are already doing: Use the constraints imposed by a commitment to sustainability to become more efficient and offer products at a price that consumers are willing to pay. Thats very hard, but it can be done, and not just on a small scale. Walmart, for instance, is not normally thought of as a business for good company. It rolled back its diversity programs last year, putting U.S. CEO John Furner on the morning news shows to say, Like many companies all across the U.S., weve been on a journey and we continue to be on a journey. But Walmart has also reduced its emissions from operations by 20% in the past decade and cut a gigaton of emissions out of its supply chain, without any obvious impact on prices. Patagonias products, meanwhile, are expensive, but not necessarily pricier than products of similar quality. And Dr. Bronners runs a sustainable supply chain, relies on farms that practice regenerative agriculture, and pays everyone involved a living wage. And even with all that, David Bronner says, Were delivering our soaps at a very competitive price point in the mass market. You can do this. Consumers arent going to solve these problems. Business will have to. With reporting by Clint Rainey
Category:
E-Commerce
When outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles occur despite highly effective vaccines being available, its easy to conclude that parents who dont vaccinate their children are misguided, selfish, or have fallen prey to misinformation. As professors with expertise in vaccine policy and health economics, we argue that the decision not to vaccinate isnt simply about misinformation or hesitancy. In our view, it involves game theory, a mathematical framework that helps explain how reasonable people can make choices that collectively lead to outcomes that endanger them. Game theory reveals that vaccine hesitancy is not a moral failure, but simply the predictable outcome of a system in which individual and collective incentives arent properly aligned. Game theory meets vaccines Game theory examines how people make decisions when their outcomes depend on what others choose. In his research on the topic, Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash, portrayed in the movie A Beautiful Mind, showed that in many situations, individually rational choices dont automatically create the best outcome for everyone. Vaccination decisions perfectly illustrate this principle. When a parent decides whether to vaccinate their child against measles, for instance, they weigh the small risk of vaccine side effects against the risks posed by the disease. But heres the crucial insight: The risk of disease depends on what other parents decide. If nearly everyone vaccinates, herd immunityessentially, vaccinating enough peoplewill stop the diseases spread. But once herd immunity is achieved, individual parents may decide that not vaccinating is the less risky option for their kid. In other words, because of a fundamental tension between individual choice and collective welfare, relying solely on individual choice may not achieve public health goals. This makes vaccine decisions fundamentally different from most other health decisions. When you decide whether to take medication for high blood pressure, your outcome depends only on your choice. But with vaccines, everyone is connected. This interconnectedness has played out dramatically in Texas, where the largest U.S. measles outbreak in a decade originated. As vaccination rates dropped in certain communities, the diseaseonce declared eliminated in the U.S.returned. One countys vaccination rate fell from 96% to 81% over just five years. Considering that about 95% of people in a community must be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity, the decline created perfect conditions for the current outbreak. This isnt coincidence; its game theory playing out in real time. When vaccination rates are high, not vaccinating seems rational for each individual family, but when enough families make this choice, collective protection collapses. The free-rider problem This dynamic creates what economists call a free-rider problem. When vaccination rates are high, an individual might benefit from herd immunity without accepting even the minimal vaccine risks. Game theory predicts something surprising: Even with a hypothetically perfect vaccinefaultless efficacy, zero side effectsvoluntary vaccination programs will never achieve 100% coverage. Once coverage is high enough, some rational individuals will always choose to be free riders, benefiting from the herd immunity provided by others. And when rates drop, as they have, dramatically, over the past five years, disease models predict exactly what were seeing: the return of outbreaks. Game theory reveals another pattern: For highly contagious diseases, vaccination rates tend to decline rapidly following safety concerns, while recovery occurs much more slowly. This, too, is a mathematical property of the system because decline and recovery have different incentive structures. When safety concerns arise, many parents get worried at the same time and stop vaccinating, causing vaccination rates to drop quickly. But recovery is slower because it requires both rebuilding trust and overcoming the free-rider problemeach parent waits for others to vaccinate first. Small changes in perception can cause large shifts in behavior. Media coverage, social networks, and health messaging all influence these perceptions, potentially moving communities toward or away from these critical thresholds. Mathematics also predicts how peoples decisions about vaccination can cluster. As parents observe others choices, local norms develop, so the more parents skip the vaccine in a community, the more others are likely to follow suit. Game theorists refer to the resulting pockets of low vaccine uptake as susceptibility clusters. These clusters allow diseases to persist even when overall vaccination rates appear adequate. A 95% statewide or national average could mean uniform vaccine coverage, which would prevent outbreaks. Alternatively, it could mean some areas with near-100% coverage and others with dangerously low rates that enable local outbreaks. Not a moral failure All this means that the dramatic fall in vaccination rates was predicted by game theory, and therefore more a reflection of system vulnerability than of a moral failure of individuals. Whats more, blaming parents for making selfish choices can also backfire by making them more defensive and less likely to reconsider their views. Much more helpful would be approaches that acknowledge the tensions between individual and collective interests and that work with, rather than against, the mental calculations informing how people make decisions in interconnected systems. Research shows that communities experiencing outbreaks respond differently to messagng that frames vaccination as a community problem versus messaging that implies moral failure. In a 2021 study of a community with falling vaccination rates, approaches that acknowledged parents genuine concerns while emphasizing the need for community protection made parents 24% more likely to consider vaccinating, while approaches that emphasized personal responsibility or implied selfishness actually decreased their willingness to consider it. This confirms what game theory predicts: When people feel their decision-making is under moral attack, they often become more entrenched in their positions rather than more open to change. Better communication strategies Understanding how people weigh vaccine risks and benefits points to better approaches to communication. For example, clearly conveying risks can help: The 1-in-500 death rate from measles far outweighs the extraordinarily rare serious vaccine side effects. That may sound obvious, but its often missing from public discussion. Also, different communities need different approaches: High-vaccination areas need help staying on track, while low-vaccination areas need trust rebuilt. Consistency matters tremendously. Research shows that when health experts give conflicting information or change their message, people become more suspicious and decide to hold off on vaccines. And dramatic scare tactics about disease can backfire by pushing people toward extreme positions. Making vaccination decisions visible within communitiesthrough community discussions and school-level reporting, where possiblecan help establish positive social norms. When parents understand that vaccination protects vulnerable community members, like infants too young for vaccines or people with medical conditions, it helps bridge the gap between individual and collective interests. Healthcare providers remain the most trusted source of vaccine information. When providers understand game theory dynamics, they can address parents concerns more effectively, recognizing that for most people, hesitancy comes from weighing risks rather than opposing vaccines outright. Y. Tony Yang is an endowed professor of health policy and associate dean at George Washington University. Avi Dor is a professor of health policy and management at George Washington University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
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