Hard Choices: Paternalize or Patronize?

For most of political history, governments have pursued institutional arrangements that promoted particular conceptions of well-being. But they did so through powerful imagery, gut hunches, and homey anecdotes. These rhetorical tools are adapted for persuasion, not necessarily for accuracy. And if we combine the Freedom House ratings with the World Bank data on Subjective Well-Being, the move toward democracy appears to have been a relatively healthy one. When compared to alternative political systems, democratic nations – particularly welfare capitalist ones – appear to be among the happiest. And they appear to perform well along objective measures also, like PPP per capita and life expectancy.  Yet, there is glaring evidence that this motley of tools did not craft the most efficient path to well-being. With over 11 million children beneath the poverty level in the US, citizens untreated for diseases typically found in developing nations, 50 million people risking illness without health insurance -- there is still a lot of not-so fine tuning to do.

But in one area of research, the interest in persuasion and accuracy began to converge. Forty years of experiments in judgment and decision-making spoke pretty much with one voice: Experts and laypeople alike make normatively suboptimal, and sometimes practically horrible, decisions that involve uncertain quantities. For the last twenty of those years, ideological differences and even personal acrimony prompted largely unwarranted methodological quibbling about what the experiments actually show. And, this line of criticism delayed important improvements in applied judgment. Once field studies revealed the same biases, untainted by even the appearance of experimental instructions, policy experiments could commence. I want to do two things in this presentation. First, I want to identify a number of policy experiments that might be motivated by some of these judgment and decision-making findings. Second, I want to explain how these policies can be implemented in a nonpaternalistic way. Finally, I want to show the alternative is patronizing. Once regulating institutions know that some policies increase people’s well-being more than others, it is potentially patronizing to advance the less effective policy just because it makes them feel more free.