The Rationality of a Frog

According to our book, rational people systematically and purposefully do the best they can to achieve their objectives, given the opportunities they have. If that is so, then I believe rational people are responsible for the slow destruction of our planet. Last week in my biology class we discussed the negative effects humans have on the environment, and it was rather disturbing. You may be wondering at this point why we haven't made a very big effort to change this. One reason for this is because pollution is a negative externality. An externality is the uncompensated impact on person's actions on the well being a bystander or society as a whole. Being the rational people we are, however, we often ignore this negative externality when we make the personal decision to pollute because it does not effect the fact that our individual benefit exceeds our individual cost. Another reason for this is the Nash Equilibrium. Rational people decide to pollute without regard to the environment because it is the dominant strategy to do so.  If the group decides to pollute excessively it is best for the individual to pollute as well because individually he has a very insignificant effect on the environment. In this case the individual would be worse off if he decided not to pollute because he would sacrifice his personal benefit of polluting and he would not receive the benefit of a cleaner environment regardless of his decision . On the other hand, if the majority of the group decided not to pollute then the individual would still be better off by polluting. Because the individual has a very insignificant effect on the environment, he could take advantage of the group and enjoy the benefit of a cleaner environment while also enjoying the benefits of polluting. It is important to mention that as a society we have also made some effort to decrease the level of pollution. Antipollution laws and pollution taxes are a few examples of this effort. In the first chapter of our book it states that rational people make decisions by comparing costs and benefits.It is beneficial for us to pollute because it increases profit, but If we didn't regulate our level of pollution at all the cost would greatly exceed the benefit because we wouldn't have an earth to pollute. However, I believe that rational people are like frogs. If you put a frog into a pot of boiling water it will try to escape, but if you put a frog into luke warm water and slowly increase the temperature to it's boiling point it will not be able to determine when the water gets too hot. At this point if the frog is not rescued it will eventually die. Our regulation of pollution may  be economically efficient in the short run, but at some point in the long run the water is going to get too hot. Maybe if we would all stop being so "rational" we could see that.