The Same People Always want To meddle In People's Lives

Column on Nudging Illusion
The Nudging Illusion by Tibor R. Machan

No sooner does one line of defense of statism fall into disrepute, anotheris invented by people who insist that they and others with special virtues and qualities have the moral and should have the legal authority to meddle with other people’s lives. Socialism and fascism have pretty much been discredited, so outright top down management of people’s lives, whethereconomic or spiritual, is now out of fashion. Except for some dyed in the wool enthusiast for running people’s lives by means of coercive force, most meddlers are now urging the deployment of less Draconian measures bywhich to carry out their interventions. (Such folks like to point toChina's communist rulers who are far from Stalinist thugs.) Richard H. Thaler, who is a Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics,and Cass R. Sunstein, a Professor of Law--both of them at the Universityof Chicago--are two indefatigable academic champions of meddling. But theyknow that this is not a goal that too many people find attractive aspublic policy. (Of course there are innumerable measures of interventionin play in this and most other societies but the intellectual support forthem is not coming off as very credible these days.) So instead ofpromoting even the less harsh versions of the command system--e. g.,market socialism--these authors are pushing libertarian paternalism orwhat they call nudging in their book Nudge: Improving Decisions AboutWealth, Health, and Happiness (Yale UP, 2008). The idea is prettyelementary: don’t try to make people act better by threats of--oractual--physical force; nudge them by subtle mandatory adjustments intheir environment. An example they use to illustrate the method involvesplacing an image of a fly in an airport urinal which tends to incline mento aim at it and thus prevents spillage by 80 per cent. How clever andgentle! So why not have governments follow this approach as they try tomake men and women behave better?One simple answer is that it is insidious to have governments manipulatethe citizenry with various tricks. Airport urinal designers operatewithout a captive clientele. One need not go there but could have gone ata gas station or back home before getting on the road. And, in any case,the urinals belong to the airport, so they have the authority to design itany way they want to.But more importantly, there is that famous saying from the ancient Greekphilosopher, Aristotle, that one swallow does not a springtime make! Justbecause there is one example of useful manipulation of people--and we usesuch nudging techniques all the time in our personal lives, of course, inour voluntary associations with people--it doesn’t follow that they areall clever and wise. It is sad that Thaler and Sunstein do not fully appreciate the work ofpublic choice theorists who have taught some very useful lessons aboutentrusting government bureaucrats with the task of guiding the rest of usin how we should live our lives. While now and then thesebureaucrats--lead by legislatures and consultants--may hit upon afruitful, sensible measure that we all ought to adopt in our lives, thereis absolutely no reason to think that they will do this routinely. Publicchoice theorists note, very helpfully, that people in power have their ownagendas and while now and then they may act as bona fide publicservants--though not even then as necessarily skillful ones--in time mostof them become simple promoters of their own goals. And they will alwaysbe subject to the very same foibles that the rest of us are subject to andwhich Thaler and Sunstein believe justifies their intruding upon us intypical Nanny-like fashion. In short, who will nudge those doing thenudging to nudge the right way?This fantasy that there are among us some few folks who just know so muchbetter how we ought to live--how we ought to care for our wealth, healthand happiness--is a grave threat to us all. Thaler and Sunstein complainthat we need the nudging because “there are limits on the number of itemsto which we can pay attention at one time.” Yet that very same thing istrue about all those who would do the nudging, so their propensity to messthings up is just as great as ours. Moreover, because they are powerful,able to impose their will on others, the probability of their going astrayis greater than that of us doing so--in the spirit of Lord Acton’s famoussaying, “Power tends to corrupt, absolutely power corrupts absolutely.”Nudging has its uses but not as public policy, not by a long shot.