Imagine you are trying to change someone's mind. How would you go about it? What techniques would be effective?
Imagine now you are trying to change a group of people's minds. The difficulty multiplies.
Now imagine you are trying to get a group of people to change their behavior or worse yet to get them to make active changes in their own status quo implementing changes that put them at high risk or involve great hardship.
For instance, suppose you are strongly opposed to abortion. You believe it is morally wrong--it is the taking of a human life. Suppose you took political power and while you could not yet overturn the legalization of abortion, you could impose sanctions on those who engage or enable it. To bring about change you would like to cut off access to credit for those who have been a customer of or worked for an abortion clinic. This can't be done, though, because you cannot identify those individuals nor can you legally target them. But you do find a technicality in the law allowing you to target an area that has an abortion clinic. All those who live and work in that area suddenly cannot access credit or the banking system. This is crippling.*
Do you think this would be constructive to your ultimate cause? Think of those marginal or median voters. While they don't have a strongly-held position on abortion, they are not just caught in this crossfire--they are the target. You are aiming to harm them so as to bring about change. At the very least you are willingly harming them because the shotgun approach you are limited to forces the collateral damage.
If that is too politically charged for you, consider this. You are the mayor of Shelbyville. One of the things that really irks you is how many of your citizens root for the nearby town of Springfield's baseball team, the Isotopes. This isn't just a minor annoyance. Your administration is trying to support the local team and economy by building a huge new stadium complex for the home team. The lack of hometown support, though, is making this quite difficult. So what to do? You institute a blackout zone through an indirect tax. All broadcasters are subject to the onerous tax, $10,000/minute of broadcasting, for any broadcast of a sporting event of a team located more than 20 miles from the Shelbyville town center. Viola, problem solved, right?
The desire to have people change what sports team they root for is not going to be solved by force. Many people who never watched a single game before are likely to take up the cause against you.
Want to increase vaccine acceptance and injection rates? Well, you could . . . oh, we've been doing that experiment. I don't think it moved many needles [pun intended].
We can extend this hypothetical to all kinds of causes: disuse of fossil fuels, antipornography, zipper merging, etc.
The result is consistently and predictably emboldened and extended resistance. It is not human nature to succumb to external pressure. Any parent knows reverse psychology and distraction are the keys to getting a young child to change course. Tell them they can't, and the deviant battle begins.
This thought experiment alludes to why economic sanctions applied by governments so often fail to achieve their desired ends.
Setting aside all of the very important concerns about moral authority and moral culpability given who is actually harmed by sanctions, consider just if they should work to begin with. Stated differently, why do they so often completely fail? The do so because that's not how people change or how they are made to change.
So why do we do it? Partially it is action bias, the fallacy of . . . something must be done . . . this is something . . . therefore, do it!
Perhaps more importantly it relies on social desirability bias. It seems like a strategy that is more humane than active warfare. However, it is arguably much less noble and less morally defensible as it targets noncombatants attempting to turn them into double agents. In an age of high-precision bombs, economic sanctions are carpet bombing combined with landmines.
*Arguably the linked (trucker convoy and Canada's emergency response to it) is an example of sanctions that worked! But only in the narrow sense of getting the result of disbanding the convoy. I am not sure it won any hearts and minds on net. Rather I think it turned a lot of people against the government of Canada. It also was an arguably more harmful action than simple police action would have been. The greater harm is in the threat and concern of it being used going forward as a regular tool. In this way the actions of the Canadian government are not analogous to economic sanctions but rather analogous to escalating hot-war conflict.
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