16 comments

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  pushmedia1

  1 year ago

  I wonder if even on their terms, libertarian paternalism can be shown to be not so rosy
  
  Everyone is a choice architect, mostly for themselves. Each of us is always making plans, eliminating options, etc so our future selves will do the "right" thing. This is an internal libertarian paternalism... nudging the self.
  
  What if a rise in external libertarian paternalism makes the average choice architect (external and internal) worse at his job? For example, if people don't have to think about various 401k options because the default has been architected to be the "right" one, then people don't have to teach themselves about finance, they just go with the flow. Of course, they're probably better off with regard to that particular 401k plan (i.e. less likely to make a mistake), but because they don't have to know as much about finance, they're worse off in the rest of their financial decisions (err, that is: internal choice architectures relating to finance).
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  Will Wilkinson

  1 year ago

  push,
  
  Excellent. I read a piece the other day that said that "financial literacy" is dangerous because people might decide they know something but then make a mistake. So they should NOT learn about markets and leave it to the experts to make investment decisions for them. It occurred to me this was basically the classical priestly Catholic argument against people being able to read the Bible in their own languages.
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  KipEsquire

  1 year ago

  Those underwhelmed by Sunstein & Thaler should also check out Mario Rizzo's latest anti-Nudged paper on SSRN, regarding the problem of soft paternalism and "slippery slopes."
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  Christopher Monnier

  1 year ago

  I agree that "paternalism" isn't the right word, but I don't necessarily agree that paying greater attention to the design of forms/situations/experiences will lead to mental lethargy. Isn't this just an example of specialization? Paying less attention to a 401k form will allow the worker in pushmedia1's example to focus more on whatever the thing they do that adds the greatest value to their employer and/or society. Who cares if they knows the ins and outs of their 401k...leave that to the experts!
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  pushmedia1

  1 year ago

  Mr. Monnier, I think you're right. My point, though, was there's a trade-off between the quantity of external choice architectures and the quality of internal choice architectures. That is: the optimal level of libertarian paternalism isn't zero, but its probably not as high as S&T are making it out to be.
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  Robin Hanson

  1 year ago

  An excellent analysis.
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  Phil

  1 year ago

  For someone so intent on accusing Thaler and Sunstein of not knowing how to use words, you completely elide an mention of the modifying adjective "libertarian" in Thaler and Sunstein's lexicon. The whole point is that "libertarian paternalism," as defined by them, is qualitatively different from paternalism's already extant "little box of meaning." And their point is that as choice architects, we cannot help constructing a choice that favors a particular outcome. Just because we are not conscious of it, does not mean we are not doing it. To that extent, we are unwitting practitioners of "libertarian paternalism," as were all the MP3 designers who made interfaces that weren't as usable as the iPod's; they just didn't know that they weren't that usable. And just because the term "choice architect" is broad, does not mean it isn't helpful. Yes, we are all at one time or another choice architects (as much for ourselves as for others), but we are also all consumers at one point or another, and that doesn't stop us from thinking about consumers and producers differently (and helpfully). Realizing that how we structure the choice may help us achieve what we wan't (we don't have to be libertarian paternalists here...we could be libertarian rent-seekers, in a perverse combination of T&S's vocabulary). You're not grinding a particularly useful axe here...and it is partly the behavioral economists' fault for appropriating the term "paternalist" and couching it in their modifiers, but just beware the knee-jerk opposition.
  
  Also, pushmedia1, I agree with you that there are dynamic implications to making decisions for people, but it's already being done and right know what people think the "right" decision is really isn't (that is, the authors are pushing more for a change in the quality, not the quantity, of external choice architectures, since these architectures, whether we like them or not, are already there). Furthermore, recent psychological research points toward limited quantities of willpower and cognitive ability in a given day, suggesting that if people are currently subject to this willpower constraint, then an increase in the quantity of external choice architectures may actually increase the quality of internal choice architectures.
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  GilM

  1 year ago

  Ok, so they're not only abusing the term "paternalism."
  
  They're abusing "libertarian," too.
  
  They combine them and apply the combination to something that's neither.
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  Will Wilkinson

  1 year ago

  What S&T; mean by "libertarian paternalism" is, in normal English, "choice-preserving helpfulness". Normally we don't think of choice-eliminating helpfulness as a kind of helpfulness, so really they just mean helpfulness, taking into account new results in psychology. It's pretty vacuous.
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  GilM

  1 year ago

  It's merely vacuous if limited to the fairly benign examples like changing defaults with low opt-in/opt-out costs.
  
  But, it seems naive to think that the "choice architects" will limit their activity to things that will benefit all of the targets of their actions.
  
  Their incentives are aligned with the wishes of people who will add to their power, not with people they affect. They will certainly end up "helping" in ways that are not actually helpful, low-cost, or even choice-preserving.
  
  It requires ignoring mountains of evidence to think that this dynamic will change if we add adjectives like "soft" or "libertarian" to the activity.
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  Phil

  1 year ago

  "Normally we don’t think of choice-eliminating helpfulness as a kind of helpfulness."
  
  Who is "we" in this sentence? If it is libertarians, then obviously. If it is anyone in politics, then I heartily disagree: motorcycle helmet laws, seatbelt laws, social security, etc. are all policies the creators/supporters of which deem helpful, and yet are choice-eliminating. And it is to exactly those in politics that T&S are appealing - those who would try to use paternalism in the well-worn sense that you've outlined above. And hey, combining an adjective with a noun to create something that means neither strictly the adjective nor the noun is called language (see "ant lion" or "compassionate conservative").
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  mike in new zealand

  8 months ago

  This is an excellent critique, and goes to the heart of something I have struggled with in my role as a mental health nurse. Working with floridly unwell people requires a paternalistic approach, yet the growing call in mental healthcare is for minimising coercion. Not that paternalism has to be coercive, but in acute MH settings it often is, or at least is perceived that way. But I persist in thinking that S&T might have a point by reinventing the meaning of 'paternalism' as it applies to my work. I think that by using the word in this new way - so that the subject feels better off by his own estimate rather than mine - has the potential for honoring a nurse's or doctor's duty of care while minimising the likelihood of coercion which often ends up in aggressive confrontation in which the patient is the ultimate loser, restrained or secluded. I'll keep mulling it over, maybe Ill be more coherent in a later comment, but in the meantime thank you for your careful criticism of this new 'buzz'.
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  PDFoxy

  2 months ago

  I agree that "paternalism" isn't the right word
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  sharoncfejes

  2 months ago

  The tone in Nudge is chummy and agreeable and sunnily ameliorist. Which makes you feel a bit like an axe-grinding fidelity 401k killjoy bent on hair-splitting “semantics” when you insist on pointing out that they spend the entire book more or less inverting the normal meaning of certain politically-loaded words.
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  Blown away

  2 months ago

  Will all choice architects understand their ethical responsibilities? In this day and age, this is a scary propostition, especially due to people's inability to think for themselves.
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  LanguageSmanguage

  1 month ago

  "But it isn’t, so they are using words wrong." - consider revision as "using words wrongly".
  And "ameliorist" - the word doesn't exist in my book; try amelioratory or ameliorative...
  I think dwelling on semantic choices shouldn't be your tack, just as my examples have absolutely no bearing on the meaning you've conveyed in your work.
  
  So what of language; if the author is establishing a meaning from the outset, then you know whenever you see X it has an applied technical implication, both consistent and clearly delineated. In fact, the whole purpose of the book is to define common sense for the consumption of the senseless. That's almost the prerequisite of a business books best seller - jargon replacing the thought that that must be absent in the reader, making them ill suited to executing any contained ideas in the first place.
  
  Perhaps you are suggesting that 'paternalism' was an exceedingly poor choice of word to serve as their technical term for the 'Nudge' treatise. True dat.
  Perhaps you're suggesting that their absolutes are lacking in defence and that moving directly to the application of an unsubstantiated and logically flawed postulation is an act without intellectual rigour. Hard to argue.
  Perhaps you're lamenting that the text simply replaces concepts with terms, leaving the same challenge of execution as when one sets to tackle a problem in the first place.
  
  Example: I propose that all choices are Xs, and all agents of choice are Y, and all choosers are Z. My amazing discovery is that Y has a position of power in presenting Xs in such a way as to steer Z's decision. So maybe Y should think about how they're presenting choices, and manage the expectations of Zs in the process. And maybe Y should also think about creative Xs related to where Z's heads are at.
  I call it the XYZ Nudge Theorem. Patent pending.
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