coons_c_weber_m_eds_paternalism_theory_and_practice

172 daniel m. haybron and anna alexandrova

the preferences people express in surveys are not always reliable. But one doesn’t always need to run a formal study to know something about people’s values; anyone with a modicum of sense knows that people often have profound attachments to their homes and communities, which is frequently why the question of eminent domain arises in the first place. Measures or no, there is no excuse for policy-makers to disregard obvious facts about human life.

Even where direct indicators of preference are lacking, policy-makers can employ measures of other sorts, for instance seeking information about outcomes that people are independently known to value very highly, such as happiness. Here we think happiness research can be among the means for policy-makers to avoid paternalism. You don’t need to ask your constituents, every time you decide a policy question, whether they want to be happy. You can usually take that one pretty much for granted, and indeed put a pretty heavy weight on it: When your decisions undermine the happiness of your constituents, you have a pretty good start on knowing that you did something wrong. Similarly, we don’t fret about governments fighting the spread of malaria, since that’s something people obviously want to avoid. If it is true, for instance, that economic growth often yields poor happiness dividends, and that economic growth is valued substantially as a means to happiness, this could be evidence that some growth-oriented policies stand in conflict with people’s priorities: People might prefer policies that advance happiness (such as unemployment reduction) to those that promote growth but not happiness. Knowingly to promote pecuniary goals for the public over goods that citizens are known to care more about is, surely, paternalistic. In short, when asking people directly for their opinions on the measure you’re proposing isn’t practical – as is the case for most policies – then considering information about its likely impact on things they care very much about, like happiness, may be essential to taking their priorities seriously and treating them with respect. In the case of happiness, some sources – e.g., shorter commutes – often require collective action to promote, and people’s choices often fail quite obviously to match their priorities – e.g., obesity. So consideration of the happiness impacts of policy options may be necessary for taking individuals’ values seriously. Not to consider happiness impacts in policy, where reliable enough information exists, can be paternalistic.

This may seem a peculiar thing to say, since policy applications of happiness research are very often the target of complaints about paternalism.24

24E.g., Mitchell, “Libertarian Paternalism Is an Oxymoron”; Glaeser, “Paternalism and Psychology”; White, “Behavioral Law and Economics”; Barrotta, “Why Economists Should Be Unhappy with the Economics of Happiness”; Hausman and Welch, “Debate.”

In some cases, the critics have a point. In thinking about paternalism, we can usefully distinguish three basic varieties of HDE. First, Benthamites argue that the promotion of mental states such as happiness or subjective wellbeing should be the sole aim and normative criterion of policy. Normative economics in turn should center on such mental states rather than preference satisfaction. This classical utilitarian position is advocated most visibly by Richard Layard25 and less visibly by Daniel Kahneman.26

Insofar as HDE is Benthamite, then paternalism is indeed a serious problem: Benthamite utilitarianism notoriously o ers no fundamental protections against paternalistic interference, restraining the state only insofar as restraint is thought to maximize happiness. If you are allowed to do what you want, get what you want, or have any say at all in how you are to lead your life, this is mere coincidence, an indulgence granted by the utilitarian despot on the grounds that you happen to live in a beneficent world where the sum of utilities is best served by permitting you to choose. You are, in this scheme, merely the steward of your life, not the sovereign master.27 That you are given a long leash does not make you any less bound.

We don’t expect many utilitarians to be impressed by this argument. And of course there are important ways in which many Benthamites reject overt forms of paternalism; some indeed deem themselves libertarians. Layard’s own proposals do not, by and large, seem overtly paternalistic, the paternalism in question merely being implicit or inattentive. The main point is to concede that at least one form of HDE may indeed be deeply paternalistic.

At the opposite end of the spectrum stand what we’ll call the happiness-aware traditionalists (HATs), who don’t think that happiness or well-being should be the sole or perhaps even a central concern of policy-making, but nevertheless treat it as an important concern. Normative economics likewise needs to trade in such notions, but without major revision to the standard framework, which might still be seen as fundamentally concerned with preference satisfaction. Arguably, most advocates of HDE and happiness policy are closer to this end of the spectrum than to the Benthamite view, and a perusal of their policy recommendations raises few red flags about paternalism – with one major family of exceptions to be noted momentarily.28

27This is a slight exaggeration: A steward would have a special responsibility for her life, whereas the utilitarian scheme has no fundamental place for such responsibilities.

28For a few likely examples, see Diener et al., Well-Being for Public Policy; Bok, The Politics of Happiness; Frey, Happiness; Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi, Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress; Dolan and White, “How Can Measures

174 daniel m. haybron and anna alexandrova

HATs illustrate just how modest HDE can be. A particularly weak form would claim only that information about happiness or well-being sometimes merits consideration when evaluating policies, allowing that stringent moral principles protecting liberty might sharply limit what governments can do to promote such values. No controversial stand need be taken on the right theory of well-being, and indeed we might restrict our concern entirely to such ino ensive goals as the reduction of su ering. In fact we need not make the promotion of happiness, or even the mitigation of unhappiness, a goal of policy that new policies might be developed to pursue, taking happiness merely to be a consideration to be weighed when assessing policies initiated for other reasons. By this point, the happiness police are nowhere in sight, and it is hard to see what must be paternalistic about this sort of policy.

In short, simply counting information about happiness as a signifi- cant consideration when evaluating policies, which is all that weak forms of HDE require, need not be paternalistic, and may be an indispensable means to avoiding it. But a third variety of HDE is, for the most part, self-consciously paternalistic; we will call its proponents choice architects. According to choice architects, policy-makers should sometimes attempt to influence, by non-rational means, people’s choices to correct for common mistakes. Thus we have proposals such as “libertarian paternalism,” “light paternalism,” and “asymmetric paternalism,” which urge policy-makers to act as choice architects aiming at promoting well-being in those domains where the minimalist focus on revealed preference leads to undesirable results.29 Where we are liable to fall victim to our own cognitive biases, policy-makers may sometimes intervene and “nudge” us towards making choices that better serve our well-being, or at least our own ends. (Choice architects can of course be more aggressive than this, but most advocates press this relatively conservative line.) Everybody agrees that we would be better o if, at very little cost to our present well-being, we saved more for retirement or ate more healthily or drove a little slower. The “nudges” that push us towards behaving more prudently still leave us plenty of room to make irrational choices should we insist on them.

of Subjective Well-Being Be Used to Inform Public Policy?”; Loewenstein and Ubel, “Hedonic Adaptation and the Role of Decision and Experience Utility in Public Policy”; Forgeard et al., “Doing the Right Thing”; Fleurbaey, “The Importance of What People Care About.”

29E.g., Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge; Camerer et al., “Regulation for Conservatives”; Loewenstein and Haisley, “The Economist as Therapist”; Trout, “Paternalism and Cognitive Bias” and The Empathy Gap.

systematically discounts people’s strongest preferences about their lives. So proceeding might make the equations easier to solve, but it is no way to let people’s priorities be e ective in deciding the course of their lives.

Economics has long been the object of considerable resentment in many corners of the world, particularly among factory workers, farmers, fishermen, small business owners, and others whose cherished commitments are especially vulnerable to the vagaries of policy. For decades, such people have often felt pushed around by governments and hubristic technocrats aiming to bring about a more prosperous future.32 We suspect that much of the resentment has less to do with sore losers than with a distinct sense that no one is listening; that their concerns aren’t being taken seriously, or that they are being railroaded by policies supposedly designed with their interests in mind, not that anyone bothered to ask. It is one thing to lose your livelihood, trade, land, community, and culture to the inevitable forces of change. But it is quite another to lose them to the fiat of tone-deaf administrators whose calculations could assign no price to such a ections, leaving only the market data which suggested you were actually getting a pretty good deal and would surely be happy about your lucrative new job toiling over the tar sands of some distant land.33

When the stakes are high, mindless economics is bully economics.

32On overconfidence in this regard, specifically focusing on the IMF, see Angner, “Economists as Experts.”

33The fate of many idled fishermen from Atlantic Canada, who now find employment in the tar sands of Alberta. See, e.g., Neatby, “Hard Times Sold in Vending Machines.” Thanks to Corey Katz for the example. For an illustrative complaint by a fisherman about a policy initiative in the United States, see Foster, “Here Come Catch Shares.”

when we (1) consider not just what proponents claim to be doing, but what they actually are doing based on examples they give, and (2) realize the difficulties in determining what will make people better off “from their own point of view.”

Turning to the first point, Gregory Mitchell notes that even though proponents of choice architecture “do not choose one particular conception of the good that the planner should try to achieve, most of their illustrative examples involve making people healthier or wealthier.”3 This is in fact true when one canvasses the various areas in which choice architecture strategies have been proposed: organ donation, saving money for retirement, promoting healthy foods, environmental conservation, increasing exercise, increasing medication compliance, smoking cessation, and increasing productivity.4 Indeed, there is a sense of an underlying perfectionist standard of good, namely health and wealth, to which the various nudges direct the masses. A perfectionist standard of the good holds that what is good for a person is fixed independently of her attitudes towards it; it promotes an ideal way of living that people can achieve to a greater or lesser extent, and allows for comparisons regarding the quantity of the good that people have.5 But it is important to realize that this sort of perfectionism is not what proponents of choice architecture have in mind. Their concerns lie not with choices in favor of goods other than health and wealth per se, but instead with choices that people would not have made had they paid full attention, possessed, understood, and unbiasedly weighed all of the relevant information, and exhibited self-control.6 Designing choice environments that promote health and wealth is justified not because health and wealth are goods independently of anyone’s attitude towards them, but because (1) the vast majority of people do prioritize them,7 and (2) health and wealth are instrumental for the achievement of most other goods, regardless of what goods people aim to achieve.

This brings us to the second complication to the choice architect’s claim to promote people’s own conceptions of “better off.” It is difficult to conclude what will make people better off, even from their own point of view. As it turns out, individuals are horribly poor assessors and predictors of what will make them better off.8 Moreover, there is often a tension

3Mitchell, “Libertarian Paternalism Is an Oxymoron,” 1261.

4For a thorough litany of examples see Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge and the blog, nudges.org.

7Note the difference between this premise and the premise that health and wealth are things that any rational person prefers more rather than less of (a Rawlsian primary goods premise).

8Gilbert and Wilson, “Miswanting.”