Scarier than a Hitchcock movie (and just as fascinating) is this Andrew Ferguson article in the Weekly Standard about how Barack Obama is following left-wing behavioral theories (particularly in economics) to "nudge" citizens into his Nanny State. "Soft paternalism" some like to call it, but it's end result is still to separate citizens from their freedom.And all with the zestful help of soft-headed social scientists...and the media.
It's an important article, one which will help you understand the motives and the methods of Barack Obama.
..Just as Obama is a liberal Democrat who, his admirers insist, isn’t really a liberal Democrat, behavioral economics proposes government regulation that, behavioral economists insist, isn’t really regulation. Under the influence of libertarian paternalism, regulators abandon their old roles as mini-commissars and become “choice architects,” arranging the everyday choices that members of the public face in such a way that they’ll naturally do the right thing—eat well, conserve energy, save more, drive safely, floss...
Some with high hopes have found these small-bore results unexpectedly disappointing. Only a year after heralding the invention of the “nudge state,” the Wall Street Journal’s economics writer followed up this March with a story headlined “Economic Policy ‘Nudge’ Gives Way to ‘Shove.’”...
In the grander areas of public policy, in the environment, financial reform, and health care, the administration’s hoped-for libertarian paternalism is nowhere to be found. In place of gentle pokes and prods and nudges, the administration is hoping to levy taxes and bans, impose mandates and caps, set prices and restrain trade to make people behave properly—all the command-and-control methods from the Old Kind of Democrats’ handbook. Removed from the nurturing environment of the university, soft paternalism stiffens up considerably...
The behavioralists are often caught smuggling in a normative and political judgment under the cloak of disinterested science. A hidden assumption is easy to conceal because the science that the behavioral economists draw upon is highly elastic, not to say flimsy. One cognitive bias that the behavioralists don’t mention, though its lure seems irresistible, is the bias that makes human beings swallow uncritically the declarations of social science. The bias deters the layman from snooping around to see if the science makes sense. This is the well-established “chump effect,” a name I just made up. It accounts for the breathless reception given to the books by Gladwell and the other popularizers of sociological and psychological research. “Findings reveal ...” “Scientists have uncovered...” “Research has shown that ...” And we swoon.
But what does “research show”? What do “findings reveal”? Usually much less than the behavioral economists want to believe. And they do want to believe. They burrow through stacks of boring journals and come upon an article describing a new experiment with a deliciously provocative conclusion and looking up from the page they can hear the cry: “Generalize me, big boy! Make me relevant!” Skepticism flies off, and the economists never stop to consider the fishy process by which those provocative conclusions were reached.
The vast majority come from behavioral experiments that are completely artificial in their construction. Most take place in labs at elite universities, where graduate students and professors pay undergraduates a pittance to sit for varying periods of time and fill out questionnaires of varying length. Sometimes the subjects are asked to interact while the grad students watch them, other times the questionnaires alone suffice to produce the data. “Behavioral economics,” Thaler likes to say, “is the study of humans in markets.” Actually, it’s the study of college kids in psych labs...
You can see how useful the notion of irrational man is to a would-be regulator. It is less helpful to the rest of us, because it runs counter to every intuition a person has about himself. Nobody sees himself always as a boob, constantly misunderstanding his place in the world and the effect he has upon it. Surely the behavioral economists don’t see themselves that way. Only rational people can police the irrationality of others according to the principles of an advanced scientific discipline. If the behavioralists were boobs too, their entire edifice would collapse from its own contradictions. Somebody’s got to be smart enough to see how silly the rest of us are...
