Duncan O'Leary
Duncan works on projects looking at public services, skills and work.
Aside from all the pessimism in Prospect this month there is also a really interesting article on what Jim Holt, it’s author calls ‘soft paternalism’.
Remember how Ulysses ordered his men to tie him to the mast of his ship so that he could hear the song of the Sirens without being lured to his destruction? That’s soft paternalism. You know it’s the right thing to do – you just need a bit of help. Ban yourself from a casino. Tell the barman not to serve you when you’re drunk. Get your flatmate to hide your cigarettes.
All sounds quite sensible, but is it something for government? It may sound practical (and helpful) but what about the ethics of it? Why privelege the decision i make not to go get served at the bar later ahead of the decision i make to get served at the bar later? Which one carries more worth if they are both conscious and deliberate decisons? Are we in danger of government picking the bits of our personalities that it likes ahead of the bits that it doesn’t?
Difficult stuff but very interesting. If you’re not registered with Prospect read the original article in the New York Times here.
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1) I’m struggling to think of a situation other than personal addictions when this soft paternalism would be implementable.
2) The term ‘soft’ paternalism seems a misnomer; being put on probation for carrying out a legal activity doesn’t strike me as soft at all.
3) Why should the state bear the cost of an individual’s inability to self-discipline? The state should spend its resources and focus on protecting people from forces outside of their control, not from themselves.
4) Surely changing one’s mind is an inherent right – what happens if an individual decides that he doesn’t care about the consequences any longer and decides he does now want to gamble his life into oblivion? Should the state be able to bind you from pursuing a legal activity? (Though in contradiction to my earlier point however, maybe the costs of the state preventing a person from doing this may be cheaper than the costs of rehabilitating them after. Malcolm Gladwell has something interesting to say along these lines.)
5) Self discipline is a crucial factor in individual success: the state should, if anything, be teaching people how to self discipline maybe, not doing it for them, as David Brooks writes.
Perhaps Duncan didn't explain it properly - but most of these schemes are voluntary. You choose to go on them and you can choose to come off them, although it usually takes a little while for the latter decision to take effect.
In other words, if I opt into a liberal paternalism scheme, then I can't just decide spontaneously to gamble without incurring some kind of penalty. I can change my mind, but I have to register my desire to cancel the arrangment I'm in and then wait, say, 24 hours before I can gamble again.
No the state shouldn't be able to bind you from a legal activity - but you should be able to bind yourself.
I also think the critique Duncan makes about the state picking and choosing bits of our characters is something of a red herring. If I choose to be barred from something, then surely I've chosen the part of my personality I should privilege and the state is simply helping me to do that?
The food labeling point is nothing to do with paternalism either – there is no imperative forcing a consumer to behave in a certain way, merely the provision of information to enable you to make a decision about your behavior.
So again, I’ll have to return to my first point; when would ‘soft’ paternalism be applicable?
Secondly, if you can opt out of the arrangement you’ve made with the state, then it becomes redundant in changing outcomes, other than the minimal return of a short delay in an individual returning to their bad habit. I fail to see why the state should get involved at all if this is the case: using the gambling example, why not instead impose a duty on casinos to have a voluntary blacklist with a statutory period before your change of mind comes into effect.
Thirdly, no-one has yet put forward a convincing argument about why the state should spend resources on regulating an individual’s legal behaviour that detriments only themselves. In certain circumstances, the state should support people to change, but if an individual recognizes they are acting against their own self interest but can’t regulate their behavior, well then that’s because either they’re not trying enough, they don’t really want to change enough or they’re not strong enough. Either way the individual should pay the price of that decision not the state.
- But unless you count any government policy as paternalistic, this seems a pretty unhelpful way of thinking about it. As Simon says, this is about degrees, with the "hard" paternalistic options being to ban something completely or to regulate something so heavily that it is effectively banned (the government did this a few years ago with boilers - fascinating, I know - where energy efficiency standards were set so high that in practice older types of boiler were no longer viable), and the "soft" options being to continue to offer individuals the choice but take actions to influence that choice.
"if you can opt out of the arrangement you’ve made with the state, then it becomes redundant in changing outcomes"- empirically this just isn't true. three examples: 1) organ donation. countries (like the UK) that require individuals to opt-in to organ donation schemes have participation rates of about 10-20%. countries where the default is that you are part of the scheme unless you opt-out have participation rates of about 85-95%. 2) Employee pensions saving. Studies have compared schemes where employees have to opt-in to a company saving scheme, versus schemes where they are automatically enrolled but can choose to opt out, and found that enrollment rates jump from 49% to 86%. 3) Insurance. "New Jersey created a system in which the default insurance program for motorists included a relatively low premium and no right to sue; purchasers were allowed to deviate from the default program and to purchase the right to sue by choosing a program with that right and also a higher premium. By contrast,
"No-one has yet put forward a convincing argument about why the state should spend resources on regulating an individual’s legal behaviour that detriments only themselves."Pennsylvania offered a default program containing a full right to sue and a relatively high premium; purchasers could elect to switch to a new plan by “selling” the more ample right to sue and paying a lower premium. In both cases, the default rule tended to stick. A strong majority accepted the default rule in both states, with only about 20% of New Jersey drivers acquiring the full right to sue, and 75% of Pennsylvanians retaining that right"
- How's this as a starter for 10? The annual cost to the NHS of treating Type-II diabetes is £2 billion. Alcohol related crime costs £7.3 billion a year. Smoking costs the NHS £1.5 billion. Switching to energy-saving lightbulbs would save 2 MtC a year.
"Either way the individual should pay the price of that decision not the state"Basically, self-employed workers who find it hard to discipline themselves would tell 'yourmother.com' what they hoped to achieve and by what date, and if they failed, the company would punish them through distributing a bad reputation about them to all of the key movers and shakers in their city, thereby ruining their career. You'd effectively be out-sourcing your moral superego.
Sounds like we've been gazumped by 'soft paternalism'. Just shows. If you're one step ahead of the game everyone thinks you're a genius. If you're two steps ahead, everyone thinks you're weird and tells you to get back to work.
‘Soft’ paternalism as I understood it from this article is voluntarily submitting to the coercive power of the state to prevent you (as an individual) from carrying out an otherwise legal behaviour.
Once again, a tax on fatty foods/ boilers is not voluntary: I cannot choose to be adversely affected by this tax - I am whether I like it or not. Therefore I fail to see how a behaviour changing tax falls within the definition of a ‘soft’ paternalism. Agreed, that there are different degrees of paternalism but if a behaviour changing tax counts as soft paternalism then we’re not talking about anything new here.
Secondly, I can’t see the relevance of the opt-in examples you’ve cited, and this comes down to defining when ‘soft’ paternalism would be used. As far as I can determine ‘soft’ paternalism would only really apply to tackling an individual’s personal behaviours e.g. alcoholics, gamblers etc. The opt-in examples you have quoted are to do with models of mass participation and not relevant to an individual voluntarily joining a scheme to restrict their behaviour. Within the latter context, an opt-out will limit the effectiveness of the scheme, because as soon as a person has the compulsion to return to their ‘bad habit’ they will leave the scheme.
Thirdly, I wasn’t questioning the cost-benefits of general preventative public policy, I was questioning the cost-benefits of intervening at an individual level; would the administrative costs (police time, court costs of confiscating finances, prison) outweigh the costs of dealing with the individual once they are at the final stage of their destructive behaviour? Ultimately, this is dependent whether the intervention works.
I would argue that it is extremely unlikely that this kind of intervention would really have a distinct benefit on an individual suffering from a compulsive addiction/ behaviour problem; you may keep them away from their ‘vice’ temporarily but if the underlying causes aren’t dealt with, then they will simply return to their old ways. Fair enough, you are adding an extra hurdle to the path, but if you’re sufficiently addicted/troubled enough to submit to state coercion then you’ll find a way round this hurdle pretty easily, leaving state agencies to play a foolish game of cat and mouse.
Drug addicts aren’t cured of their addictions by prison (admittedly the fact that prisons are full of drugs slightly undermines this point!) and celebs fall out of rehab all the time. By the state getting involved, all that happens is that we add an extra layer of cost and wasted manpower before we reach the real end point (which I’m not convinced that this process will get us to any quicker). Ultimately, the only way to treat these behaviours effectively requires the individual to submit to, and actively co-operate with, a process of treatment. The state already provides this, I don’t see why it should do more.