What's needed is a 'nudge' in the Gulf

This year, there's an unwanted record in the Gulf of Mexico: The so-called "dead zone," a largely human-caused phenomenon where there's too little oxygen to support marine life, is the biggest ever measured. Could a nudge in the right place provide a long-term remedy?
​I am inspired by Nathan Hodson's recent great post combining that favourite of behavioural economists 'nudging' - epitomised by David Cameron's shady team of advisors - with the topic of 'ethics', published in last month's British Medical Journal. As he says:
"The term “nudge” is perhaps a misnomer. To fill out the concept a bit, it commonly denotes the use of behavioural economics and behavioural psychology to the construction of choice architecture through carefully designed trials. But every choice we face, in any context, already comes with a choice architecture: there are endless contextual factors that impact the decisions we make."  

​A link to the full BMJ article can be found below, but meanwhile, it's worth remembering that nudging with the addition of a budget, or the power of the law, usually wins out over the use of a gentle nudge by itself. A cynic might refer to 'nudging' as an attempt to create behavioural change on the cheap. But it undoubtedly does have its uses and does not always necessitate a financial investment.

Before 'nudging', there was 'lateral thinking'

Edward de Bono first used the term 'lateral thinking' in 1967. As opposed to Critical thinking (primarily concerned with judging the truth value of statements and seeking errors), lateral thinking is more concerned with the movement from one known idea to the creation of new ideas. In this famous example, Professor de Bono showed how to correct the behaviour of a polluting factory beside a river, and the 'nudge' took the form of a change in the law.

It's worth remembering that such examples of lateral thinking pre-dated the world of behavioural economics by decades. Yet in that context, I am reminded of a current story about terrible pollution in the gulf of Mexico. Is there some potential to combine a big nudge with a little legal enforcement I wonder? 

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A 'nudge' in the Gulf?

A low-oxygen, or hypoxic, dead-zone covering 22,720 square kilometers) - about the size of New Jersey - exists in the Gulf of Mexico.
Not surprisingly, in the Southern States, they're still looking for traditional solutions to this pollution:
"A national action plan calls for reducing such runoff so that the dead zone shrinks by two-thirds, to 1,950 square miles (5,000 square kilometers) by 2035."

​But just imagine what would happen if all the farmers and industries upstream of the Gulf were given no choice but to source their irrigation water from a new pipeline which gave them direct access to water coming straight from the polluted Gulf of Mexico! Imagine the effect. Admittedly, constructing the pipeline would need a fair degree of capital investment but there again, it would be a lot cheaper than building a border wall (OK, cheap attempt at humour). But it would also make Edward de Bono, who is now 84 years of age, very proud.

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More on the UK nudge team at: ​https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2015/jul/23/rise-nudge-unit-politicians-human-behaviour
On nudging and ethics: http://blogs.bmj.com/medical-ethics/2017/07/19/re-nudges-in-a-post-truth-world/
More on the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe at: http://time.com/4885249/gulf-mexico-dead-zone-pollution/