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Ryan Avent is right that the media's quote-and-dismiss strategy is extraordinarily weird. He flags this Wired article where the writer says:
Some doubt rising fuel prices will do much to shrink waistlines. Dan Sperling, head of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis, says people don’t change their behavior when gas prices rise, they simply buy more fuel-efficient cars. Nevertheless, evidence suggests they’re riding bikes more often.It is, as Ryan writes, an odd paragraph. The writer spends a couple sentences undermining his point with an objection he thinks absurd and then dismisses said objection, thus both degrading the authority of his argument and wasting the reader's time. Weird. That said, Sperling has a point. People do change their behavior on the margins, but gas consumption is a whole lot less elastic than we once thought. It would be easy to Nexis our way through articles predicting doom when oil hit $40 a barrel, destruction at $60, armageddon at $80, hell-on-earth at $100, and the complete collapse of time and space at $120. Now we're at $140, and freeway traffic is down something like four percent. Now, change is slow, and requires the construction of infrastructure, and so it may be wiser to check things out in five years rather than try and judge the situation after two. But if someone gets a pretty decent plug-in hybrid to market before a national transit infrastructure is built, I think the odds that behavior stays mostly the same are pretty good. High gas prices have made people want cheaper gas, and all sorts of politicians are working to ineffectually pander to that. But we've not seen quite the same political agitation around building an infrastructure that foretells a serious change in transportation habits, even though that's the sort of thing government is actually suited to do.
