Light Bondage

The cover story from this weekend's Economist is on "the new paternalism," which turns out to be "soft paternalism," or what Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have called "libertarian paternalism." In principle—especially insofar as it's a substitute for the old fashioned sort of paternalism—I actually don't have much trouble with this particular breed of the beast: The idea is to find ways that government can help people make better or more prudent decisions without actually restricting anyone's freedom of choice.

So for instance, if you think people are imprudently failing to save money for retirement, instead of a national program of retirement insurance, you might just automatically sign everyone up for a savings program that takes a few percentage points of wages by default, allowing everyone to easily opt-out. Studies apparently show that people are much more likely to stay in the program if it's opt-in by default than they are to take the extra step to opt into such a program. The article also mentions Missouri's Voluntary Exclusion Program, which lets problem gamblers put themselves on a list of people who'll be subject to penalties if they're caught gambling. Casinos are supposed to check the list before handing out large jackpots, since putting yourself on the list also means voluntarily disclaiming any right to your winnings. In a lot of ways, it sounds like philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's idea of a "self-management card" that might limit how much fatty food or intoxicants you allow yourself to consume in a given week, which I wrote about in a piece on the different phenomenon of "parentalism." Speaking of which… both that piece and the Economist article cite my old friend Glen Whitman, whose Cato Institute paper on various kinds of cognitive bias over time throws a bit of a wrench into some of the tempting logic behind such programs. Here's how I summed up the objection in that other piece:

Imagine an aging man in ill-health lamenting his sybaritic youth. We are tempted to say that his younger self, seeing the pleasures immediately available to him and giving short shrift to their long term consequences, exhibited a foolish bias toward the present. But surely it's also possible that his older self, faced with the proximate pains and inconveniences of poor health, discounts the pleasures past he'd have forsaken had he been more health-conscious. If we're prone to the first form of cognitive bias, why not the second?

So, consider that Voluntary Exclusion Program. Once you're on the list, there's no getting off, ever—apparently on the grounds that "those who treat problem gamblers are nearly unanimous in their belief that it is a lifetime condition and that a person is never cured but continuously recovering." Without getting into the plausibility of that claim—though it does seem implausible that the world should be cleanly divided into those who manage to gamble or drink in moderation their whole lives and those who, having had a problem once, are never again capable of moderation—it seems to assume that only people who're actually in that latter group will end up on the list, that nobody will rashly or impulsively put himself on the list. It may not sound like a huge risk—you've got to show up in person and fill out a form in the presence of an official who's checking that you seem sober and of sound mind—but it might be a reason to scale it down a bit, maybe let people renew their inclusion on the list in five-year increments. The more serious problem would come when states decide which direction they ought to "nudge" us when they seek to frame our choices in ways that encourage more prudent decisions. The temptation, as above, is to always presume the "long term" self is the one whose will we ought to be promoting—but as Glen notes, the miser and the workaholic prove that you can err too much in that direction, forgetting to smell the roses and all that.

The real problem, of course, is that there is no objective "right answer" as to whose preferences we ought to promote, no vantage point outside the multiplicity of perspectives contesting in our own heads, from which to determine which should take precedence. Critics of utilitarianism like to talk about the problem of aggregating utilities between persons; I'm not even sure there's much hope of aggregating them within persons.