In the comments below, Berger writes of my Nudge review:
this seems pretty caustic…especially when you seem to grant their central premise: there is no such thing as neutral choice architecture.
But who contests it? Constitutional design, law and economics, policy analysis, etc. all rest solidly on the idea that choices are responsive to features of the contexts of choice. Nothing interesting happens if you reclassify policy analysis as “choice architecture.” If you raise the expected cost of driving without a seatbelt, other things equal, you get less driving without a seatbelt. This is not groundbreaking, or even especially interesting. I could say with that the “choice architecture” of the U.S. mortgage and finance system led to the wreckage that is now piling up. But what would you learn by that?
Nor is it especially interesting –not to non-economists at least — that models of the behavior of fictional agents do not predict human behavior. It is interesting to use empirical psychology to refine the economist’s slogan that “people respond to incentives,” which of course is true, but underspecified. Nothing about the slogan tells you how people manage to define the set of options live to them at any given moment, or how they come to rank them. Simply learning more about mind and motivation can do a lot in helping us understand how people will tend to act in various kinds of contexts. Also, human beings are physical systems with bodies, so features of situations that seem irrelevant to “purely rational” evaluation will affect our choices. If you vary only how hungry, fatigued, or warm people are in otherwise identical situations, you will probably get differences in their choices. But we knew that.
If you gave a perfect, slambang sales presentation but didn’t clinch the deal because you forgot to provide a room with chairs for the fine folks from BizCorp to sit in, would you be perplexed? “But sitting down has nothing to do with whether Widgets 3.0 is the only way for BizCorp to save millions!” And people find it boring and taxing to fill out paperwork. Yes! So take that into account when thinking of how to help people do things that ordinarily require some paperwork on their part. But don’t call thoughtfulness or helpfulness paternalism, because it isn’t. It is thoughtfulness or helpfulness.
Not taking away people’s choices is “libertarian” in an attenuated sense. But not taking away people’s choices is also what it is to not be a paternalist. Insofar as you’re not taking away choices, you’re no paternalist. That’s just the way the words work!
Now, this can seem a lot trickier than it is if you are determined to look at things a certain way, and Sunstein and Thaler seem to be determined in precisely this way. They want to point out that there is a way you can subtly reshape people’s choices without ever coercively taking any choices away. But if this subtle reshaping can get the same effect the paternalist seeks by coercively lopping off choices, then why not just see this reshaping as a kinder, gentler brand of paternalism?
You see how that works? Start with a paternalist doing what he was always trying to do by taking away choices. Then show him a way of doing it without taking away choices. And then simply deny that the paternalist, qua paternalist, has thereby disappeared. A choice-preserving paternalist! Likewise, take a Catholic doing what she was always trying to do by means of the Pope, then show her a way of doing it without the Pope. Voila: an non-Papist Catholic!
You and I are speaking fondly under the stars. The warm breeze and my kind eyes make you think you might want to kiss me. Right as you lean in I mention that I bathe in goat’s blood. Insome sense I have just taken away one of your options. Kissing me has vanished from your feasible set, as far as you’re concerned. Suppose I have chosen to disgust you only because I care for you, but know in the end you’ll end up hurt and it will be better for you this way. That makes me weird for sure, nice maybe, and a paternalist in the same way it makes me a humanitarian: not at all.
My complaint about Nudge is that what is most provocative about it is the way the authors misuse words, and what is most genuinely useful about it — suggestions for policy based on better empirical psychology — is pointlessly burdened with their linguistic shenanigans and silly “beyond left and right” framing. Indeed, I agree that “choice architecture” — i.e., the idea that everything that affects choice affects choice — matters to choice, and that policy ideas reflecting more realistic behavioral assumptions are desirable. You’d have to be an idiot to deny it. But beyond availing ourselves of better psychology, there no notable methodological or ideological advance there.
My first thought upon reading your review was to run for the dictionary, where i came up with:
Paternalism (American Heritage)
A policy or practice of treating or governing people in a fatherly manner, especially by providing for their needs without giving them rights or responsibilities.
Thaler and Sunstein seem to be embracing a vision of the state that takes an active part in ensuring the well-being of its citizens (fatherly), without giving them particular rights or responsibilities in setting up those choices (only to opt out of them once they are set up). It is one of the key incites of the book that many people would not CHOOSE to have their choice architecture set up the way it should be set up, but that having it done for them results positively, by the their own judgement.
Second, I think T+S get some wiggle room in defining paternalism, given that at heart it simply refers to being fatherly, which doesn't have to imply coercion. I guess I would ask, what political ideology do you think these insights of behavior economics DO fit under? Insofar as they offer something new (though surely not revolutionary), why not given them a catchy, easy-to-use title?
Third, Nudge does argue for regulation and coercion of businesses, though in ways many libertarians might accept. Certainly the idea that the federal government should be paying money to inform citizens about their energy usage does not fit smoothly into Libertarian ideology (nor does forcing companies to offer RECAP to their customers).
Finally, for someone well versed in behavioral economics, Nudge seems like nothing new. But as a powerful reflection on what behavioral econ can do to better our public policy choices, Nudge is the best of the bunch (and yes, there are a bunch of similar books. But why is that a criticism of Nudge?). And you don't have too look much farther than the presidential debates to see that simple, nonpartisan steps to solving entrenched public policy problems need more publicity, not less.
nitpick (American Heritage): to be excessively concerned with or critical of inconsequential details.
Your critique is very well-thought out, but it seems that you are not addressing, what seems to me, the other commenter's central critique: sometimes there must be a “default”: In those few cases, “choice architecture” is unavoidable, because it isn't a matter of something or nothing but always something or something else. Might Sunstein's and Thaler's arguments are convincing for those few cases?
Sunstein suffers from language problems perennially. His problem is that he wants to seem more provocative and interesting than he actually is. So, in The Cost of Rights, we get a terribly confused argument that all rights are positive because enforcing them requires a positive right of assistance. What he should have said was that many rights are negative (i.e., what it takes to respect the right is for people to refrain from certain behaviors), but in order for negative rights to have much worth, be enjoyed, and be enforced, you need government to supply the rule of law. But Sunstein doesn't want to say that, because it doesn't sound nearly as cool as saying all rights are positive.
Sunstein is a pretty good legal theorist, I guess, but whenever he has the choice between (philosophical rigor + clarity) and provocativeness, he takes the latter.
Excellent review. But if Sunstein-Thaler advocate opt-ins and -outs where ex ante there was only mandatory acceptance of the operant “choice architecture,” it's hard to see how that wouldn't be an “ideological advance”: It at least opens up the possibility of increasing our options (libertarians: “Yay!”) while preserving the action-guiding goals informed by a common conception of the good (liberals and conservatives: “Yay!”).
I've taken a similar line on other work by Sunstein. More than once, I've been met with the shocked faces of University of Chicago law students, who can't understand why I just don't get that Sunstein is the very embodiment of Scholarship. (I once made the grave, and apparently gauche, error of truthfully declaring that a well-known philosopher was much more famous academically and, by my lights, more imporessive.)
Don't get me wrong. I don't have anything against Sunstein. He's clearly very, very smart and his academic work is very good. *Someone* has to examine the effects that the composition of a panel of appellate court judges (3 Republican appointees? 2? 1? None?) has on the appellate court's decisionmaking. And the academic who does that research has made a far more valuable contribution to the stock of common knowledge than most (the vast majority?). It's just that it's not really interesting. And it doesn't require or demonstrate genius. So, too, with choice architecture.
That this sort of work — which is ground-level empirical stuff that should have been done decades ago — counts as cutting-edge in the legal academy speaks volumes about that “academy.”
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First of all, I really like the blog's new look (and the blog generally of course). Secondly, I agree that S&T are engaging in the sort of “beyond left and right” (ugh) rhetoric that is worthy of a politician. Yet I don't quite understand why “libertarian paternalism” is such innate conceptual contradiction and the ideas of “choice” (liberty) and “architecture” can be so easily reconciled. If choice can be designed/administrated, then what's the problem with paternalism? The problem, it seems, is less whether or not choice is curtailed (it obviously is, and in a pretty profound manner) but rather the role of government. So: why is government administered choice so much worse than any other form (whether it evolves from culture or the contingencies of life)? S&T obviously want a _democratic_ government – built on transparency and accountability – to be promoting some choices and discouraging others, so we are quite a ways away from any kind of totalitarianism here (the importance they place on individual choice, as a value, is clear enough evidence of this). What's the problem with this form of paternalism then? Is it really the intentions behind it? (What do those matter?) Some slippery slope argument? (Once we've admitted choice is always hindered, aren't we already on that slope?)
“Simply learning more about mind and motivation can do a lot in helping us understand how people will tend to act in various kinds of contexts.”
Some of “us” already “understand how people will tend to act in various kinds of contexts.”
But it's the hegemony of the non-vaginally endowed that are all atwitter about nudge in their discussions amongst themselves within the siloed walls of academia.
With every day that passes, I am reminded of why so many French aristocrats lost their collective heads so quickly.
When will we acknowledge the pure avarice and greed that marks anything that comes from Washington, or Wall Street for that matter? When will we realize just how close we are to becoming a failed state; the respect, imagination that were once our greatest asset falling faster than the gloaming sun?
When will the average American, stirred by the arroganct chant of “USA, USA, USA” be so damaged and used up as to demand better?
It is unquestionable that the pathetic panic that we find ourselves in, along with one we onced called hero, has gotten us to this point precisely because no one, not the politicians nor this country's citizens, takes anything seriously enough to search for the reasons behind our troubles and demand change.
It will be fascinating to see if we, by default, elect wisdom, or belly up to the trough and say, “More please.”
So please, when defending this newcomer whose actions reek of something even more frightening than what we have endured, perhaps permanently, in the past eight years, acknowledge her ignorance, and that albeit personable, her golden tone, her non-answers, her ignorance-is-bliss rhetoric the sees a better future with more of the same, is like the golden bell of truth, it rings oh so hollow and has degraded into the thinness of tin.
With every day that passes, I am reminded of why so many French aristocrats lost their collective heads so quickly.
When will we acknowledge the pure avarice and greed that marks anything that comes from Washington, or Wall Street for that matter? When will we realize just how close we are to becoming a failed state; the respect, imagination that were once our greatest asset falling faster than the gloaming sun?
When will the average American, stirred by the arroganct chant of “USA, USA, USA” be so damaged and used up as to demand better?
It is unquestionable that the pathetic panic that we find ourselves in, along with one we onced called hero, has gotten us to this point precisely because no one, not the politicians nor this country's citizens, takes anything seriously enough to search for the reasons behind our troubles and demand change.
It will be fascinating to see if we, by default, elect wisdom, or belly up to the trough and say, “More please.”
So please, when defending this newcomer whose actions reek of something even more frightening than what we have endured, perhaps permanently, in the past eight years, acknowledge her ignorance, and that albeit personable, her golden tone, her non-answers, her ignorance-is-bliss rhetoric the sees a better future with more of the same, is like the golden bell of truth, it rings oh so hollow and has degraded into the thinness of tin.