Michael Kavnath: Ben, I know your book well enough now to know that you're not going to end with some happy talk about how this is an easily solved problem. But just point me towards an exit from the prosperity trap. Even if you were not going to walk me out the door at least tell me where to look for the way out. He says social norms are a way to direct our expectations about what other people might do and what good and bad behaviors are. And so they have an incentive to make people happy in the short run. In a way it's a magical political outcome that net zero as an agenda has got as far as it has because it's all
What can the global response to climate change tell us about the health of modern democratic states?
• Ben Ansell is professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford and author of “Why Politics Fail”
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