[nyerp]

> "Say you have a certain amount of time and money with which to make change – call it x, since that is what we mathematicians call things. The trick is to increase that x by multiplication, not addition. The trick is to take that 5 percent of people who really care and make them count for far more than 5 percent. And the trick to that is democracy."

> That is, private individual actions don’t increase at a rate sufficient to affect the problem in a timely fashion; collective action seeking changes in policy and law can.

This is actually a description of the politics of "special interest groups" and it usually leads to horrible things. If an idea is only supported by 5% of the population, we generally do NOT want that 5% of the population driving the legislative agenda. Instead, ideas need to first gain broad support among the general population, at which point enacting legislation may be desirable in order to solve collective action problems such as preventing free riding.

[jfim]

> If an idea is only supported by 5% of the population, we generally do NOT want that 5% of the population driving the legislative agenda.

It depends. The other 95% of the population might be agnostic or unaware of the idea, or the other 95% of the population might be opposed to the idea.

If Congress were to pass a law mandating funding for WWVB radio until 2050, for example, would even 5% of the population have an opinion on it either way?

[turbinerneiter]

Probably, if you used words they know instead of acronyms they don't.

"Do you want the radio signal that allows clocks to sync to keep running? Here is a list of devices you might know and use that rely on them: ..."

[olyjohn]

I guarantee nobody would care. Even when you tell people the impact it might have on them... they may only have to replace one clock, or not any at all. Their cell phone clock works just fine.

[turbinerneiter]

Well if it has no impact on them then maybe it's not so important.

[_djo_]

There's a difference between them perceiving it to have no impact, and it having no impact.

It also may be important enough to keep funding with 0.0001% of the budget or whatever it costs, but not important enough for a higher level of funding. Still requires advocacy.

[majormajor]

That's not how I interpret that quotation from the article at all. "The trick to that is democracy" not "the trick to that is lobbying."

Instead of spending your time trying to reduce your own "carbon footprint" spend it convincing other people to support legislative action.

"Big Oil" wants you to spend your time working just on yourself instead of spending your time sharing the information about why we need to reign them in. The private individual efforts of 5% of people will do less than the evangelical efforts of that same group.