 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Joining us today is Bill Glod, program officer of philosophy at the Institute for Humane Studies. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Tulane University. Today we're going to be talking about libertarian paternalism, let me start maybe a little bit broader than that and just within the context of what we're going to talk about today, what do we mean by paternalism? Great. So paternalism, as I understand it, typically involves some kind of mechanism, either coercion or manipulation, that the aim of paternalism is to usually prevent somebody from harming themselves, perhaps in ways that they're not aware of, perhaps in ways that they are aware of. So the traditional sort of notions of paternalism, typically like laws about, you know, mandatory seatbelt laws or mandatory helmet laws, maybe drug laws, at least the paternalistic intent is to keep people from acting in ways that will be harmful to themselves. So that's sort of the broader notion. Usually what people understand by paternalism is a coercive aspect. Sometimes people talk about paternalism in an even broader sense, where they mean like if you're just trying to persuade somebody, you're trying to, you know, talk them into doing something that they otherwise wouldn't do. But it usually involves something like coercion. And in the case of libertarian paternalism, I'm going to argue, in many cases, involves manipulation, if not coercion. So the libertarian factor, though, you have obviously this sort of seemingly oxymoronic thing, libertarian paternalism, you're trying to keep someone from hurting themselves, but through libertarian means. Yeah, right. So the promise of libertarian paternalism is that you can sort of influence the, you can arrange the choice architecture, sort of the frame in which people make choices and make decisions and act on those without taking away, without forbidding any options, without taking away their freedom of choice. So one understanding, sort of the main plank of understanding coercion is that you're restricting freedom of choice. But with libertarian paternalism, the idea is that while people have the right to opt out of the particular, say, nudge or intervention into the choice architecture, but the idea is that usually you're looking to exploit one of their heuristics to get them to maybe act in a particular way. So a common example of libertarian paternalistic intervention would be, say, the default enrollment into a retirement account. So usually there's studies been done with people. Basically, if you don't, if the default situation is that you are not, you have to opt into a retirement account, people don't do it, at least not initially. They just sort of go with the flow. They have status quo biases or just inertia. So if you switch the default, if you have them already sort of enrolled and they have the option to opt out, most people don't. They just remain enrolled. You mentioned the word nudge, which is I think an important part of this. Where does that come from? So nudge, I don't know exactly where it originated, but it's been popularized by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. They had this best-selling book nudge back in 2008. And the way they define nudge is very broad. It's any aspect of the choice architecture that can influence people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding their options or significantly altering their economic incentives. But that's like a really broad sort of notion. So there's lots of different things that can be nudges. It can be self-imposed or imposed by somebody else. It doesn't even have to be imposed by a person. It can be sort of just a feature of the environment in which you're making decisions. So, and this may come up in our discussion, but nudges can mean sort of just a wide variety of different kinds of things. Some of them which I think are innocuous, other things which I think might be more problematic when it comes from concerns about either autonomy or sort of respect for people's preferences. Your retirement account example of, you know, we just start by the person contributing to your retirement account and then they can opt out. If they want to, that's something that's happening at the level of the employee-employer relationship. But is this paternalism a theory about government? Because libertarianism is generally seen as political philosophy about the proper role of the state. So these things that would happen, the state is going to set up this choice architecture? Yeah. So the way Sunstein and Thaler defend it, it depends. A lot of times there seems to be some kind of, perhaps a government requirement in the background, so maybe governments require employers to nudge people in this way, make enrollment the default option. But nudging can just refer to purely private institutional mechanisms as well. It doesn't necessarily have to involve some kind of government role. When you talk about the choice architecture, a lot of things that I think about when I think about nudge and Thaler and Sunstein talk about this stuff, just designing a supermarket shelf, for example, right? So you want people to buy more healthy food, so you put the healthy food at eye level. And on the other side, the business was putting maybe junk food there, but something has to be at eye level. So why not be healthy food? And that's better for everyone. That's a large part of the idea, right? Right. So the main defenses that Sunstein and Thaler often give is they say, well, look, it's unavoidable that we're going to have to put food somewhere, right? You're going to have to arrange the choice architecture in some way, so you might as well do it in a way that is more welfare conducive for the target agent. So that's oftentimes a defense that they will give for doing so, yeah. Are they slipping in? I mean, so they're calling it libertarian paternalism because they say all we're doing is influencing the choice architecture, but we're leaving people's choices open. But what you're describing doesn't sound like that. It sounds like instead they just have pushed the coercion back a step because presumably say the guy organizing the supermarket shelves, if he was putting junk food up top as opposed to on the bottom, had a reason for doing that. I mean, people don't tend to organize their supermarkets just totally randomly. They did it because maybe that sells better or whatever other reason. So we are restricting someone's choice and we are using coercion to do it. We're restricting the grocer's choice to organize his store the way he'd like to. Yeah, that's definitely something that could be a possibility in terms of where is the level of coercion going on here. I think what Sunstein and Thaler are coming from though, they're focusing more upon what is happening to the consumer, the target agent. So what you're doing to maybe either require or entice the vendor to act in a certain way, I think it just sort of falls by the wayside in their discussion. They focus more upon the interaction between the say the vendor and the customer. It seems like the possible results of this could be incredibly beneficial though, right? It might be marginal, right? It might just be 5% more purchasing of vegetables, but that could save us millions of dollars a year in healthcare costs. It might be 10% more savings for retirement funds, but that could save us another million dollars to make people happier in the future. With a bunch of little nudges, you could really make the world a happier place. Well, from the standpoint of what saves costs, perhaps, I think the jury is still out on that empirical element of it. So on the other hand, there's the concern about, well, what if people, in fact, this is not what actually reflects their preferences. So if we're talking about – let me backtrack a little bit. So a lot of times defenders of libertarian paternalism will say, all we're trying to do is to nudge people in accordance with what their own preferences are. We're not trying to impose some kind of particular value on them. But at the same time, using these insights from behavioral economics, a lot of the defenders of libertarian paternalism will say, well, people have indeterminate preferences. So what we're going to try to do is then intervene in a way that will be in accordance with what we presume their preferences would truly be if they weren't sort of be set by some of these irrational biases or these heuristics that lead them astray. But the concern here is that we're actually perhaps overlooking what it is that people prefer as opposed to using these sort of proxies like health or wealth as stand-ins. So to say that people might benefit from it, well, maybe from a cost-saving standpoint perhaps, if nudges cause people to act in healthier manners, I think that's an empirical matter. There's nothing I can really answer there from the armchair. But the question is if we're really respecting people's preferences, we can't just assume that people want to act in the so-called healthier way or in the way that saves them more money if, in fact, the choice architecture is leading them to just sort of go with the flow and react in ways that they're not even aware of. So there's the well-being aspect, but on the other hand there's also the concern whether we're respecting their autonomy at the same time. It sounds almost like a quantum mechanics theory of preferences. It's like they're indeterminate until they're observed or looked at in some way and then they coalesce around something. So all we're trying to do is to make them coalesce around different things. Yeah, and I think that's a really interesting way of putting it. I kind of think that's how we are, though, a lot of times. And if the behavioral economics literature is correct, that seems to be the case. We're not homo-economicists. We're not these beings with this well-ordered set of stable, ex-ante preferences that sustain across time. We have to have some set of stable preferences to have a coherent self on some minimal level. And I say that I know precisely, or I should know precisely what my preferences are with regard to what I'm having for dessert tonight. It just doesn't seem like that's how we are. I mean, we are boundedly rational for a good reason. Our heuristics are time savers and resource savers because we don't have the capacity to... We don't have infinite processing ability. So the concern with maybe arranging choice architecture to steer people in certain ways is that we're, in fact, it's somebody else's will or intention that's being imposed upon people without them even being aware of it. But we can ask people about their preferences, right? And we'll find a fair amount of agreement on a lot of these things. So you look at the New Year's resolutions that people make. And it's always, I want to lose weight. I want to exercise more. I want to all these aspirational things. And so if you were to ask people, I think, would you like to eat healthier than you do right now? Most people, nearly all people would probably say yes and they would mean it. And so what I'm wondering is can we decouple... Because it seems to me like, if I'm understanding correctly, you're saying, well, sure they can say that, but their preferences in the moment when they're actually going to pick from the top shelf or the bottom shelf, the junk food or the vegetables may change. We can't know their preferences until they actually express them in this quantum mechanics thing that Trevor did. But it seems like is it possible to say, well, they can have a preference, but they don't have the capacity to say act on it. So the Greeks had this wonderful word, acracia, which was you act against your own. You want something, but you lack the willpower to act the way that you actually want to act, which is something that all of us have experienced. And so we could say we do know their preferences. They actually do want the vegetables, but when they go to the store, they're weak-willed and their urge for chocolate takes over. So therefore, we're not really stepping on their preferences. We're in fact helping them realize their actual preferences. Well, that certainly can be the case. I don't want to deny the existence of acracia. But what can be ambiguous in that regard is whether at some point, so with regard to hyperbolic discounting, for instance, people can have sort of intertemporal changes to how they discount the future. So, yeah, acracia is certainly a possibility. But in some cases, it may be that somebody rationally changes their mind. They say, I'm not going to have dessert tonight. And then when they see the tiramisu, they decide I'm going to have it after all. So it may be ambiguous even to them whether, in fact, this is an acracic moment or a cratic moment or a moment where they are rationally changing their mind about their short-term preferences and the trade-offs maybe with regard to the future. But then there's an added layer of complication because if somebody does that often enough, you say, okay, well, let's say this guy, he's always saying, like, I need to lose weight. I need to exercise. I'm going to not have dessert tonight. But always does otherwise. Then there's some question about whether the stated preferences are actually his genuine preferences or his actions are revealing his preferences. So there's all of these informational constraints that I think complicate matters to the point where it's unclear in many instances whether, in fact, some given, say, intervention is really tracking a significant number of people's preferences if, in fact, their actions speak louder than what they're stating. And, of course, economics has its own theory about how to discover people's preferences, namely what you do is a revelation of a revealed preference. One of my favorite economic jokes is the two economists who see a portion. One of them says, I want that and the other one says, obviously not. Just wanting something is not a preference. You need to be able to act on it and that it reveals your preferences. Now, is that problematic as a theory of preferences? Well, I mean, I don't want to say that just whatever it is that you do reveals what you must want to do in that moment because, like, okay, well, I just decide randomly I want to jump off a ledge. It must be what I wanted to do in that moment. I mean, that's sort of just then making rationality tautological is just whatever you do is whatever you do. So I don't really want to go down that rabbit hole, but at the same time, I think it makes sense to have conceptual space to say, well, maybe sometimes somebody is being weak-willed, being ecratic, maybe sometimes they're rationally changing their mind, and maybe sometimes their actions are revealing what they really prefer as opposed to what they say they want. Cheap talk is a thing. So I think all of those things, you can have space for all of those things saying that, okay, well, you know, it's just your actions just reveal what it is you really want moment to moment. So, you know, I know that maybe sounds like a cop-out, but I think that the fact that all of those possibilities make sense reveal the fact that there may be informational constraints on our ability to recognize our own, let alone other people's preferences understood subjectively, their well-being understood subjectively. And so I think it complicates the question as to whether, in fact, say libertarian paternalism is really paternalistic in terms of serving their well-being. You can't just assume that making somebody, or influencing somebody to make healthier choices or more wealth conducive choices is, in fact, all things considered in alignment with what they understand their well-being to be in some reasonable way. Wouldn't the person who is choosing, say, rationally to have the extra dessert or to buy the junk food at the grocery store, I mean, in this libertarian paternalism set up that you've given us where we are just kind of deciding the order, the choices that are presented to them and how they're presented to them, but we're not cutting off any particular choices, then that person who rationally wants dessert and means to have it, all they have to do is bend down to the bottom shelf and pick it up. So we haven't really, what problem have we caused and we haven't cut off their autonomy in any meaningful sense, but it does seem like we've helped the person who, just through weakness of the will, because that bending down is an extra step and maybe it offsets the weakness of the will a little bit and they're better off. So I guess I'm not seeing exactly, in this example we're talking about here, how this causes problems, how this limits the autonomy of the people who are choosing rationally. So one way of thinking about it is that people may often wish, one of the main concerns that I raise with regard to arranging choice architecture is the fact that if the effectiveness of the nudge relies upon its covertness, the fact that it's maybe going on behind the person's back, I think that is a potential worry in terms of compromising their autonomy, if not undermining it, because what you're really doing in this situation is saying, okay, well, the person can't be trusted as a decision maker. They can't be trusted to decide whether or not they're going to make this maybe by their own light's rational or irrational decision. So if I am, you know, if I go to a, you know, if I'm in a cafeteria and unbeknownst to me, the choice architect is sort of hiding the desserts and maybe I really don't, you know, I'm weak-willed, I don't want to have to be tempted and make the decision myself whether or not I'm going to have the dessert. I think that what raises a worry here is that if it's going on behind my back, I'm not really being treated as an autonomous decision maker. I'm being treated more as somebody who hopefully can be steered one way or the other. And maybe that's beneficial to me, but there's still cost in terms of respecting me as an autonomous decision maker. That's interesting because in situations with actual children, people who aren't full-fledged adult citizens, there will be situations you say, you know, well, don't let her see it because if she sees it, she's going to want it. So we're going to sort of officialously hide the thing, whatever it is, a toy or a candy or something like that because if she sees it, she's going to yell and scream about it and that seems treating them like a child and if the government's doing that, if they don't even tell you that they're doing this, they'll know. This is now where the Tiramisu's now on the bottom. We haven't done anything that seems to treat you like a child. It could be that maybe I'm overstating this. Maybe my worries would go away if they were just like a sign or a placard that said here's why we're hiding the Tiramisu here. But I think that making the nudge over it in that way in many situations would actually undermine its effectiveness. And so I think the defender of particular nudge is sort of counting on people not to notice what's happening. There seems something screwy about that, I think at least. It's interesting though because it makes me think about businesses who are nudging us to all the time and we kind of expect for it to be happening. The best example I think is Netflix. Netflix is constantly tracking so much data about what we actually do and then putting something up next, right next to it because they have some correlation the shows there and is it better or worse that Netflix does that? Do we know that they're doing that so it's not as big of a problem if government's doing it? You're right. It's a complicated question. As long as there's somebody intentionally trying to steer you in a way where they're counting upon your inattentiveness, I think there's at least a morally problematic thing going on there. Maybe it's ultimately justifiable. As far as your awareness that something is going on and then you're willing to still engage in the practice. It is a complicated matter. I don't want to say it's bad if governments do it but it's okay if private institutions do it because the Netflix example there's some evidence that certain colors in certain brand logos encourage people to purchase more. Well, if you kind of know this is going on, maybe it's okay then because you're just willing to take the risk that you're going to be nudged in particular ways but I imagine that a lot of situations like Netflix maybe doesn't necessarily want you to know what they're doing and I think that sort of points to the worry that's going on as far as what may be compromising your autonomy. Now, what to do about it? I'm a philosopher. Maybe just wag your finger and say that's wrong. Don't stop doing that or boycott it if you don't like it or whatever. I don't really know where to go from there other than I'll be satisfied if I can sort of point out some wrong making features of why that's going on but I don't want to just say okay well since private institutions are doing it anyway it's always okay if people don't know what they're going on and what's going on and they're not necessarily making an informed decision to assume that risk. So what Netflix is doing is when we're talking about in the context of Netflix online internet things we call it filtering. It's filtering what we're seeing based on some set of criteria and it occurs to me that even within the context of private filtering there are certain kinds of filtering that we seem to think are perfectly fine. People don't tend to get upset at Netflix for showing you a certain set of movies except for when it obviously screws up and shows you totally weird things and then we just laugh at it. We're not mad at it but there are other instances of filtering where we do get mad. Facebook stuff. People are always hiding things that I want to see and instead people are the advertisers they're showing me things that they think advertisers are paying them for and you can pay to boost your exposure on Facebook and that makes us really mad and I'm wondering it seems like one thing that might distinguish these and might play into a problem with government doing this too is if we so let's go back to the grocery store example real quick it seems less problematic if what we did with the grocery store example or other types of nudging was we asked you at a certain time what are your preferences like do you want to lose weight and then we set up filters in the grocery store to kind of help you along with that so yes you want to eat more vegetables so we're going to put the vegetables in a more accessible spot that would be less troubling or those crazy websites where you write a check to some sort of organization that you hate like the NRA and if you don't lose 50 pounds then they send that check to the NRA what's going on there is that it's personalized filtering like it's your preferences being kind of re-expressed to you in a new way which is kind of what goes on with the Netflix thing like it's based on what you've watched and it's personalized to you whereas what makes us mad at Facebook is it's non-personalized it's representing the interests of another person and it feels like a lot of the problem with a government based paternalism is it's not really going to be representing our own interests right it's either because it's just experts who think they can choose for us and for kind of epistemic humility reasons like they just they're not going to do a good job of it or government is so beholden to special interests that want to promote their own interests at the expense of us that it may actually really be promoting their interests yes no I think I think that's right I think that a lot of times what happens is that even if the intention of the of the choice architect is to influence people in a way that the choice architect thinks people really prefer what ends up happening is that you have proxies like well make the nudge in alignment with what will influence people to make objectively healthier choices or objectively more wealth promoting choices and that sort of papers over I think the complexity of the different tradeoff rates of people's schedule of values in their conception of the good because there's like a lot of different things that maybe I'm willing to trade off some level of health maybe helps me going out to the bar with my friends is a companionship or autonomy or just pleasure things like that that sort of there's not really a way that you can you know have a sort of a a default setting with regard to that just become health or wealth becomes the proxy setting that you know the anchors on which the choice architects can use their own particular motivation for saying well this is really what people probably want so it seems pretty disingenuous than well have we kind of got to the point that it's disingenuous to call it libertarian paternalism in that sense because it does involve some sort of co-origin as Aaron pointed out and some sort of other problems of government just constraining your choices like it's done before but making it less clear yeah I mean I try to be as charitable as I can and say well I mean well I'll put it this way I have a working paper right now that's rather cheekily titled libertarian paternalism is neither libertarian nor paternalistic so that's the unsheritable I just sort of that's in your face unsheritable title and then I immediately backtrack a little bit and say well you know the intention here I think is genuinely I think Sunstein and Thaler genuinely think that they're trying to they're preserving people's choices with regard to nudges but the worry here is that well is it really do you really have the freedom to opt out of a nudge if you don't know that it's happening right if it's if you're counting on sort of somebody's inattentiveness in order to influence them to act in a healthier way then if they're not even aware of the opportunity to opt out it doesn't really seem like strictly speaking there is the freedom to opt out but as a matter of practical rationality are they aware of that do they have that freedom to opt out if they're not aware of it so it depends upon what I guess what angle you take like maybe metaphysically speaking it is libertarian because you're not actually removing their freedom of choice as you would be through say a directly coercive mechanism but if they're not being if they're not aware of the of what's going on then it's not clear to me that it really is a matter of preserving their freedom because if it's not coercive it's at least manipulative it also seems like you'd have to almost assert what you wouldn't have to almost assert but you'd have to play with the idea of whether or not it could ever be rational to be fat or to smoke right or to skydive things that could create social cost and if you don't leave that up to a person an individual person then you say well this actually that person got so much pleasure out of food that they got way more pleasure than the cost of them being fat so it doesn't seem too far away to say okay there could be really liking food becoming obese somebody can say obesity is the cost I'm willing to pay for my indulgence people may really like smoking as an ex-smoker I used to really like smoking and I quit smoking for various reasons but I think it wasn't insane of me to make those decisions it wasn't irrational maybe I'm rationalizing what I did but it didn't seem clearly to be something that I really didn't want to do at the time so I think it's easy to say well of course the healthier choice is what people should prefer if they had these unlimited processing abilities and unlimited information and things like that but that's making normative assumptions in the place of assuming that we should be rational in some kind of idealized really idealized sense but what about cost to others because a lot of the choices that we make have cost to others and so we cut them off so we drunk driving right you might say well I happen to get a lot of pleasure drunk driving and you say well so what the damages that you would potentially do and so a lot of these things we're talking about like healthy eating or retirement accounts part of the argument for them is not like well you're going to hurt yourself we're going to have to bear the costs for you making these poor decisions so we should have some say right and actually that's sort of I think a lot of that is going on in the background either with Sunsy and Thaler or with other defenders or Mayor Bloomberg during his tenure it was often a pecuniary externality argument that's a mouthful to say but sort of the notion that you know people's unhealthy decisions either is going to raise other people's insurance rates or if it's you know if there's some kind of public safety net then that's going to raise cost for other people so that's you know that's a whole angle I actually don't I that's an interesting angle I'm not going into that in this paper that I'm working on right now but I think that's an important question you know sort of the easy maybe the easy way the too easy way out the hand wavy approach is to say well ultimately that sort of safety net is itself a paternalistic motivation so somebody who says well we're not really making a paternalistic argument when we say we should nudge people or coerce them in order to save taxpayer money or what have you I think ultimately well why is there that safety net beyond just maybe what's a matter of you know person's own you know if you know say there's there can be safety nets for to help people for reasons that they didn't have control over you know beyond it's not a matter of their own culpability but if the safety nets extended to include people's culpable choices then that's ultimately I think maybe a question begging argument on the part of the paternalist because the argument is well we have to save people from themselves and so we should restrict their liberties in order to keep them from making us pay for them in the long run I don't know if that came out clearly what I think you're making a point about about culpability in general because this the conversation we've been having both politically and then psychist in the psychology community everything for for hundreds of years now but especially the 20th century in the early part of the 21st century this question of what are you culpable for and a lot of a lot of words a lot of studies have been put into claims that obesity is an addiction that you know getting beating your wife is an addiction you know criminal making these defenses in criminal matters and and all these they seem very tied to having a safety net because as soon as there's a safety net people are could be predating off of it and so one way you say well you know yeah he's obese and he could be predating off the health care system but obesity is a condition not a choice and then all of a sudden it's just paternalism all over again but you're not making choices so we're not actually taking away choices because your obesity wasn't a choice in the first place and I mean I you know I'm from the armchair I can't really speak to that I mean I'm willing to bite the bullet if it turns out that our best theory of addiction is that it's not your choice in any meaningful sense then I'm willing to say that okay then that's sort of a realm that's not a matter of autonomy it's a matter of something that maybe is like a disease or something along those lines I know personally I'm not ready to like buy into that that view just yet just I think it's easy to just say the devil made me do it but that's that's me from the armchair so again like I'll say you know if the best theory of addiction says people can't help the way they act then I'll have to go yeah I have to go with it yeah but do we have to define autonomy now is the is the burden on us to define what an autonomous choice is with all the pressures to say that there isn't such things as an autonomous choice so what complicates matters as well is that I've been talking about autonomy sort of in terms of free choice which I think is one view of autonomy or one aspect of it but I don't necessarily think that exhausts the conception of autonomy one can have I mean another view of autonomy not inconsistent with one that has to do with freedom of choice is that well maybe it's somewhat inconsistent but it can say well even if you know free choice is somehow a myth or what have you there's a distinction between being say necessitated by one's own internal preferences or psychological elements and being controlled by an external sort of for someone else's will so even if my own choices are necessitated by my own sort of inner psychology that could still be a matter of authenticity a matter of autonomy in this sort of restricted maybe compatible a sense if you will that people may prefer to have as opposed to being controlled either overtly or unwittingly by somebody else's exercise of will so even if free choice is a myth I think that we can there's still a notion of autonomy out there that can can be used as a potential defeater of a lot of these arguments for why we should have a wide array of intentional choice architecture so is if this is if the voters choose the libertarian paternalist route and so they're choosing it in advance is that an exercise of autonomy because so they're binding themselves in the same way that so like Odysseus having his sellers tie him to the mast you know like that it would we wouldn't say that then once he was tied to the mast he and wanted to be free he had lost autonomy because he actually had said in advance like I really am going to be you know I'm going to want to get away but I really shouldn't and you need to tie me up so the voters doing the same thing the voters read the the Sunstein book and say yeah that sounds pretty good I want to vote for people who are going to urge me to eat healthily no matter what my future self happens to say well if it's a unanimous vote then yeah that's perfectly fine but that there's the whole problem with democracy right it's the it's those people who you know the majority of people who don't vote at all or you know even if there is a hundred percent turnout the minority on that side of the issue then isn't necessarily autonomous in any meaningful sense at least so I think well there you could vote you could say I'm just voting to impose this on myself yeah I said going back in that that kind of self-choiced architecture has autonomy to it like writing a check to a political organization you hate it if you don't lose weight that's that's tying yourself to the mast in some way right yeah but in the process you're tying other people to the mast as well without them without them signing on to it yeah and so voting is also and that's of course because about the cost thing well these health care costs are becoming a problem retirement account costs the poor old people whatever people don't say for retirement they're becoming a problem and and that's the other argument that comes to play if you think about what Social Security was argued for when it was first passed it was unwise older people who weren't saving for their retirement now we argue for empowering people like we at the Kato Institute and libertarians arguing to empower people to save for their own retirement but there still will be someone who doesn't do it so in terms of trying to catch that person who falls through the cracks is libertarian paternalism preferable to the straight social security exact yeah I mean that's a tough question as far as what like what maybe is empirically the best policy approach I mean I'm kind of a I'm a I'm kind of a diet libertarian when it comes to this I'm somewhat sympathetic to like a universal basic income unconditional basic income that I think you know at least at the very you know at the very least you can I'm not opposed to that in principle maybe it doesn't work maybe there's all kinds of reasons to think it doesn't work but I think that if it comes down to a trade off between like any erosion of personal liberties versus a safety net I kind of you know I inclined toward the liberties you know if if the safety net requires us to have all these conditions on what people do like you know you need to get permission to order a pizza even it gets to that point if it already isn't in some degree to that point then I think that's what raises all kinds of worries so yeah I mean and what's empirically the best way to go about that I'm not sure but as far as far as you know libertarian paternalism versus social security I don't like either of those options to be honest we didn't even bring up the slippery slope because that's what you just brought and the slippery slope here is huge the slippery slope for social security is I guess more people having it and the check being bigger the slippery slope for endorsing libertarian paternalism is brave new world or demolition man what in principle would not be a potential pecuniary externality like you don't exercise enough get up and maybe that's facile to say but there's nothing in principle that would prevent there being all kinds of added restrictions to what people can do in the name of giving them a protection that maybe they would rather opt out of talking about opting out and that slippery slope seems particularly slippery right that the libertarian paternalists aren't really thinking about the restrictions on the providers but instead just the consumers because we don't tend to think of a lack of like if choices don't exist it's not a restriction on my autonomy right so we don't like it's you know I would love it if you could fly if I could fly or if there were some company out there that was providing me with this imaginary product that I think would be totally awesome but the fact that there isn't that company isn't like a restriction on my autonomy the iPhone 7 the lack of the iPhone 7 is not a restriction if we aren't considering a coercion we're not considering it a problem to restrict what the providers can provide right so we by saying you have to order your shelf in this way or you can't do the huge sodas as a libertarian paternalist thing because then people won't buy them then that seems to open us up to pretty much restricting everything because everything we get comes from providers to some degree yeah I agree and of course the slippery sub problem is particularly pronounced when there is no limiting principle if the principle they're articulating can be applied to anything going forward and at no point will they be like well no stop this is too far now you're meddling too much in people's lives in people's choices and there's nothing about libertarian paternalism exactly that would have that happen yeah yeah and I mean so there's some really good articles on this by Mario Rizzo and Glenn Whitman about sort of the institutional sort of public choicey kinds of arguments about well you know even if Sunstein and Thaler we take them at their word that hey we're just trying to have this fairly moderate gentle set of nudges that's not they're not the ones necessarily they're not the policy makers they're not the voters they're not the bureaucrats who are enforcing these mechanisms and so once you have that those people in control of making these kinds of decisions there's possibly a lack of accountability there's and there's no necessarily there's not necessarily a concern on the part of those people that what they're doing is still respectful of respectful enough of people's freedom of choice and there's lack of the possibility of abusing it a specific way that government abuses things particularly in the big soda instance in New York City you know everyone was always saying well why didn't you attack Starbucks drinks Starbucks drinks that are five times the calories and it seemed like the answer to that question was because poor people drink soda and soda is on the outs right now for people who are more well to do and more well to do people make laws and they're more likely to go to Starbucks and get a caramel double macchiato whatever and less likely to get a big gulp and now you just have pure self-interest becoming part of the choice architecture system and that's the exact kind of danger we should be concerned with as a pretentious Yeah and I agree as well and I don't necessarily go into these arguments in what I'm working on because I think other people have made them better than I really have anything to add to but yeah I think that as far as just a practical policy matter that's definitely a concern my focus is upstream of that even if somehow we can magically implement these in ways that would not be befall a potential for abuse I still think there's worries upstream about what is it that we're doing now these so-called moderate gentle nudges in terms of in fact are they actually respecting people's autonomy are they genuinely tracking people's well-being and it's the verdict the verdict's far from clear in those regards so So you've defined paternalism and libertarian paternalism and said it's bad and you've talked about it as this we're organizing the choice architecture we're saying which choices are on the table or what order you can approach them and we can make some choices easier to access than others and that that's cutting off people's autonomy but isn't that what libertarianism itself is like we're saying you know there are certain things like you might want to choose a state that can do these things but you can't and you might want to wander around gathering up this property but you can't because we've coordinated off as private property in these certain ways and we've set up all these rules and you can't choose these things and on top of that trust us you'll be better off with these things than if you didn't have them Yeah, no so yeah so that's a good question and this is going to maybe sound like hand-waving here but I don't think that there's anything wrong per se with coercion I don't think there's anything wrong per se with manipulation I sort of take a what's so-called justificatory liberal approach that are liberal polity that employs coercion which I think inevitably we do and perhaps employs manipulation these things are not per se bad some people I think view coercion or manipulation is inherently pejorative it's like okay well that's coercive therefore it's wrong not if it's justified now what does that mean to be justified whole big debate about what that can involve and then there's nothing that I'm going to be able to say here that will be satisfactory other than something having to do with the coercion and its rationale or the manipulation and its rationale being in alignment with the sort of the values and preferences of the people who would stand to that stand to be coerced or stand to be manipulated that's a very broad way of approaching it but you know if a libertarian polity we can tell a story about why that's just why it you know some particular say property right restriction is justified because it's better off for all of us to act that way we can sort of help get along with each other better than some nearby alternative then we can if we can tell a story about why that's justified to everybody even if somebody doesn't actually assent to it but we can point out to say well given your values and your preferences and your beliefs you should endorse this particular restriction even if it's not your favorite restriction it's better than say some you know no agreement point then I think we can tell a story about why ultimately it's justified so I don't want to say libertarian paternalism if I've come across as saying that libertarian paternalism is wrong full stop I want to say no it's wrong if it's not justified to this or that particular person who is maybe unwittingly influenced by it so some people will be perfectly will find libertarian paternalism perfectly justified there's a way to sort of interact with them without imposing it on those to whom it's not justified then that's fine if there's some story we can tell about how a given scheme of property rights is justifiable to everybody who would be under that course of scheme then we can tell the story then there it seems that we can run with it easier said than done that's where all the devil in the details is it seems that in that in the way you describe it there we could almost be saying if we're trying to minimize some of these paternalism negative aspects or negative coercion that if we want to say the property rights are paternalistic I guess I'll grant that for some purposes but the libertarians society should not be government should not be something where people are just competing about who can best paternalize the other group as long as they're in power it should be something where there's more areas where you can create your own paternalism for your own interest such as you can run your household in your way that you want to in your town in your way you want to especially if you need some kind of a property right in order to realize your autonomy better than some alternative like a Hobbesian anarchy or what have you then yeah I mean this is we're not talking about idealization here we are inherently social beings and so property rights are demands that we make on one another to give each other space so that we can act however we choose live our lives as we see fit that to me I think is a precondition for autonomy rather than sort of this ex ante paternalistic imposition I think it's a precondition for being free from paternalism you know as much as possible since we aren't these you know brains in the vat or these Cartesian sort of inherently atomistic beings that have no sort of can just go about ourselves independently of one another we wouldn't need property rights I think if we were perfectly atomistic and could just like be protected from one another so so in conclusion it seems that we've gone a lot of different directions in this conversation but libertarian paternalism is not very libertarian it sometimes isn't even paternalistic and in general not a good idea yes so I think that libertarian paternalism is is not typically libertarian in so far as even if it's strictly speaking preserves a person's freedom of choice doesn't forbid them options in so far as it counts on people not not being aware of the particular intervention going on it doesn't really reflect a respect for them as autonomous decision makers instead it sort of relies upon exploiting people's cognitive biases or heuristics to steer them to act in particular ways that maybe don't reflect either their own preferences or how they would wish to be treated with regard to going about correcting their own actions in light of perhaps acracia or other sorts of complications with regard to their preferences it's not really paternalistic in a lot of cases in so far as we understand paternalism as a success term and so far as we understand paternalism as actually helping people to act in alignment with their own well-being broadly construed because I think in lots of cases people having indeterminate preferences it's not necessarily clear whether a particular choice architecture scheme is in alignment with what people really value a variety of different preferences that they can have so given the informational constraints we have with regard to whether somebody is as weak-willed or whether in fact they're changing their mind or whether in fact they're just paying lip service to some particular wealth conducive activity or in fact whether they value something else there's a lot of complications there that make it I think it's too easy just to assume that some particular intervention is in fact genuinely conducive to a person's well-being Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts If you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find us on twitter at Free Thoughts pod that's Free Thoughts P-O-D Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and is produced by Evan Banks To learn more about Libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org