Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. My guest today is Mike Munger, Professor of Economics and Political

Science at Duke University. Mike, welcome back to Econ Talk.

This is great to be here. Our topic today is recycling, which is an important piece of

the environmental puzzle, and economics has a lot to say about it. Mike, you claim that recycling

may have crossed over from an economically wise act to more of a religious impulse. What

are you worried about? One of the things that worries me is that when we perform religious

rituals, part of what's important is that we spend time on it. In fact, it's the very

fact that we spend time that means that we're religiously devout. So, for example, many

people don't work on the Sabbath, and the point is not that they're wasting time, but

that the time has an even higher purpose. What bothers me about recycling is that I actually

had a conversation with a woman in Massachusetts. I won't say what city, because I think it

would, well, I think the woman in Massachusetts, who was a woman.

It could be Michigan. It could be Wisconsin. All sorts of states. It just happened to

be that this was in Massachusetts. And she told me that recycling is cheaper regardless

of the cost. It's quite a climb. I found myself silent at that point. I wasn't sure how

to respond. Yeah, what do you think she meant? Well, I think that she meant that it's a moral

imperative, and it's religious in that sense. It's something that you have to do, and it

doesn't really matter how much it costs, again, like religion. What I had tried to propose

...