 Welcome to the Cato Institute. My name is David Bose. I'm the executive vice president of the Institute. Let me just note for anybody who is just arriving at this point that there are seats down front and there are seats against the wall. You just have to ask the people on the aisle to let you get past, but we do still have seats in the auditorium. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have been writing about what they call Libertarian paternalism for some time now. It looks to me like their first major article was titled Libertarian paternalism is not an oxymoron, which certainly anticipated much of the response that they got to the concept. In their new book, Nudge, copies available outside, Professor Sunstein and Thaler argue that people often make bad choices on such personal matters as diet, retirement savings, and health insurance, as well as on public issues such as contributing to climate change. Because we are human, we are fallible. Sunstein and Thaler argue that by knowing how people think, we can design choice environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves, their families, and their society. Now I should note that that language comes from the book's promotional material and that for Libertarians, that little word we, as in we can design is intimately implicated in the question of whether Libertarian paternalism is actually Libertarian or merely paternalism. But we'll talk about that for the next hour or so. I am sorry that Richard Thaler, one of the co-authors of the book, couldn't be with us today. He is of course one of the pioneers in the field of behavioral economics and a professor at the University of Chicago Business School. But we're very pleased to have the other co-author, Cass Sunstein, of the University of Chicago Law School. This is the second time he has generously presented one of his books here at Cato, sort of walking into the Lion's Den. Cass is one of the most prolific authors in academia today. I count 16 single-authored books and monographs in about as many years and that's not counting edited and co-authored volumes. One of those co-authored volumes is The Cost of Rights, which I quote frequently for its lament that Libertarian ideas are, quote, astonishingly widespread in American culture, unquote. I use that to reassure myself when things don't look so good to me. Cass Sunstein clerked for Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Before that he graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School and he will be returning to Harvard Law School this fall, although he tells me he's going to maintain a connection with the University of Chicago Law School as well. We're also pleased to have with us two excellent commentators today. Terence Corvatt teaches law at George Mason University. He writes widely on taxation and also on neuroeconomics, sometimes with Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith. He's a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School. And Will Wilkinson is a research fellow at the Cato Institute where he has written about such topics as social security, happiness research, and income inequality. He's also become a master of new media. He is managing editor of Cato's online magazine Cato Unbound, a regular commentator on Marketplace Radio, a widely read blogger, and the host of a show on Blogging Heads TV. We'll hear from all three of our speakers after which we'll open the floor to questions and eventually we'll adjourn upstairs for lunch and book signing. For now, please welcome the author of Nudge, Cass Sunstein. Well, thank you. It's fabulous to be here and fabulous to see so many of you have come to hear about this project, which Thaler and I think of as ongoing. Let me tell you a little bit about the origins, if I may, of the project. Thaler, who got the Nobel Prize one of these days, is the inventor of behavioral economics. And the behavioral economics types think that human beings have not only some Mr. Spock of Star Trek in our heads, but also some Homer Simpson in us. There's an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer wants to buy a gun and there's a three-day waiting period. Homer says, can I have the gun? And the store owner says, you have to wait three days. And Homer says, what? I'm angry now. With years of discussion, what Thaler and I have been thinking about is how to strengthen the Mr. Spock in us as against the Homer in us. Homer is a behavioral type in the sense that he has self-control problems. He is overly optimistic about things. He uses mental shortcuts that get him in a lot of trouble. He really likes buying extra insurance when he gets a television set or a radio. And we think that this is the sort of person who needs a nudge. The idea, our little philosophy, which is greatly influenced by libertarian thought, and increasingly, actually, if you see the arc of our work since the original articles, libertarianism has played a more significant role even than in our early writings under the pressure and part of work that came out of this building. What we think with our libertarian paternalism program is that it's good to give people freedom of choice, and Milton Friedman's words, human beings should be free to choose, that's central to our project. But we also think that sometimes it's useful to steer people in directions that make their lives go better through what we call choice architecture. We tried to call the book libertarian paternalism, but the publishers hated that and refused to publish our book when we tried to call it that. Then we thought we had a terrific idea. We'd call it libertarian paternalism is not an oxymoron, which is the name of one of the articles. They thought that made it worse. There were three incomprehensible words. So nudge prevailed as the title. There are two poster children for libertarian paternalism and one kind of ugly poster child that we really don't like. The two poster children are the Save More Tomorrow Plan devised by Thaler and a colleague named Benartzi. Under the Save More Tomorrow Plan, workers are asked. They aren't forced to do anything. They're asked, would you like to sign up for a program by which a certain percentage of your future wage increases go into savings? Do you like that? Workers all over the United States have said that sounds like a good deal. I don't want to lose any of my current take home pay, but a future wage increase, a certain percentage of that going to savings, that is appealing to me. Workers are now enrolling in Save More Tomorrow increasing numbers. It's dramatically increasing savings rates for workers who will now have a pretty secure retirement. The other poster child is also in the domain of retirement, and that's the automatic enrollment plan by which employers, public or private, incidentally, government too, can say to workers, if you don't opt out of the program, you are going to be automatically enrolled in a retirement plan, a 401k plan. If you want to opt out, tell us and you'll be able to do that. These two programs are libertarian in the sense that they fully maintain freedom of choice. They can be organized by private or public institutions. We're not saying that the government should require employers to have Save More Tomorrow or automatic enrollment. We're suggesting that this is a useful nudge. We thought, having failed with our two incomprehensible titles, of a third title called One-Click Paternalism, and for two somewhat insane days, we were really excited about that title, and that was going to be the title of our book, One-Click Paternalism. But no one thought that was informative, so we abandoned that. But the words are useful. By one-click paternalism, we really mean extremely low-cost opt-out for people who don't like the plan. Our bad poster child, what we don't like, is at least an important aspect of the current prescription drug plan. We're not taking on the question whether there should be a prescription drug plan. We're assuming that there's going to be one. What we don't like about the prescription drug plan is that it is overwhelmingly confusing, not just to patients, but to doctors. We ourselves went on the website, which is supposed to make it possible to choose your prescription drug plan. And it turns out, if you misspell one of the drugs, there isn't this Google, did you mean? There's instead a, huh, question mark. And after a few minutes on the website, we decided we needed some Xanax, but we don't know how to spell Xanax. So we couldn't get that. We don't like the prescription drug plan because it is bad choice architecture. That is an item I'm going to explain in a moment. Let's just notice that the context for choice is so befuddling in the prescription drug program that many seniors are not enrolling. And many who are enrolling are making choices that ill suit their needs. Okay, the case for libertarian paternalism, which if it's starting to emerge, what it is, I hope, will be plain. That is, steering in directions that make people's lives go better while also making freedom of choice fully available and costless to exercise. The argument for libertarian paternalism rests really on two foundations. The first, as a first approximation of what life is like, with respect to choice, everything matters. That the design of a cafeteria has a great influence on people's food selection. That the listing of candidates in a ballot has a nontrivial impact on who people vote for. That the framing of a problem by a doctor or a health care official in the Medicaid or Medicare program. Can greatly affect choice that the default rule in particular has a massive impact on what people ultimately do. Would you forgive a somewhat off color, slightly off color illustration of this? Well, I'm going to, some of you are nodding at least. It's not terribly off color. This isn't about the former governor of New York or anything like that. There is a problem in the Netherlands in the airport urinals. The guys don't always aim as well as they might. And this is not unique to the Netherlands. This is a pervasive problem, though not the number one problem the world is facing today. A clever economist in the Netherlands decided, I think there are various ways to try to get the problem under control. We could use incentives, we could use moral suasion, we could warn people, we could caution them, we could appeal to their consciences. But I have another idea, which is we're going to paint a little black fly in the urinal at a certain point, which if it's hit, everything will be okay. The painting of the little black fly reduced spillage by 80%. Cafeteria design, default rules, and flies in urinals are examples of choice architecture. That is the design of the context of choice. Rental car companies, the Department of Education, the mayor's office, those who are giving out driver's license and getting you to pay parking tickets, doctors and lawyers and parents. All of these are choice architects. A core suggestion of the Nudge program is that just like there's no building without an architecture, so there's no choice without an architecture too. That is neutrality in the strong sense of architecture-free organization, that's not part of the set. That is a conceptual point about what we know about the background for choices and how it influences people. The second point, in addition to the everything matters slash choice architecture point, is that we've now compiled about 30 years of careful work on human behavior. All of it, I think, implicit in Hayek, none of this would come as a stunning surprise to him, but not implicit in another University of Chicago Nobel Prize winner, Gary Becker. And this work has to do with the extent to which human beings are boundedly rational. That is, they deviate from the textbook conception of homo sapiens in a way that gets them into trouble, not by the lights of the government bureaucrat, but by their own lights. And I'm just going to list four ways that people get themselves into trouble. First, when assessing risk, people often ask whether an event has come to fruition in the recent past. And for both private and public decision makers, the emphasis on the cognitive availability of an event can both bias people towards undue fear and toward excessive fear. An example of excessive fear is the Allar Scare. I don't know if you remember that from a while ago. 60 Minutes had a story about Allar, a chemical which was supposedly carcinogenic. Actually, the statistical danger associated with Allar was very low. The fear level that people had on the basis of the 60 Minutes story was very high. On September 10, 2001, the lack of an available incident made people far more secure than the experts judged. The use of the availability heuristic, the recent evidence as a determinant of precaution levels, can lead individuals and governments into big trouble. A corollary, in a way, to the availability heuristic, something that accompanies it, is a probability neglect. Frequently, private actors, and let's emphasize them, each of us, think is something safe or is it unsafe without thinking very much about the probability that the risk will come to fruition. If there's an affectively gripping outcome, either good or bad, the probability that it will happen has a much less important effect on behavior than it should. Terrorists exploit probability neglect with the claim to their potential victims, you cannot be safe anywhere. That can bias judgment, make people much more afraid than they should be. It's also the case that unless the availability heuristic kicks in or unless someone triggers probability neglect, human beings much of the time are excessively optimistic, unrealistically optimistic, in a way that suggests they can need a nudge in an unfamiliar circumstance. 90% of drivers believe that they are safer than the average driver and less likely to be involved in a fatal accident. That can't be correct, can it, the 90% of drivers. In my profession, 94 of us, that is, university teachers, believe that we're better than the average university teacher. If you get a couple, a married couple or two people living together, and ask each what percentage of the household work do you do, and then add up the two numbers, if it's not more than 100%, you have a very unusual couple. In fact, the only group of people who don't show unrealistic optimism and an excessive sense of their own capacities and what other people think of them, the only group that gets it right is the clinically depressed. Okay, the final point about bounded rationality is self-control problems. And as I look around the room, this looks like a trim and well-exercised group, but for America generally, there are self-control problems with respect to savings, diet and exercise, sexual behavior, drug use, and much more that can get people into a lot of trouble. Okay, what is the nudger going to do, given the fact that choice architecture matters so much, and given the fact that sometimes people can benefit from a nudge? Well, the first thought is that people in ordinary life often follow what we call the yeah-whatever heuristic, confronted with a situation or a form or a status quo, if we're busy, we often say, yeah, whatever. Okay, that can be exploited by private and public institutions. With respect to the power of default rules, the yeah-whatever heuristic kicks in, and that's why automatic enrollment is so powerful with respect to retirement and savings. We think well-spirited private institutions, which are paternalistic in the sense that they're trying to steer people in directions that will make people's lives go better, should be much more self-conscious about sensible default rules that will help, especially in the long term. We think that the government should think about this, too. The Age Discrimination Act, notably, is not a mandate or a ban. At the time of retirement, you can opt out, but you have to do it after some sort of knowing and voluntary waiver. We like the model of opt-out rights with respect to government regulation in a way that creates a not-senseless default rule and lets people go their own way. Okay, I want to conclude by just saying a few words about extensions and objections. With respect to extensions, this has been about libertarian paternalism, but there is an overlap between libertarian paternalism on the one hand and libertarian benevolence on the other. I recently did my taxes. I bet I'm not the only one in the room, no matter what building this is. We did our taxes, yes. And I noticed to my dismay that I'd given a pretty low amount of money to charity, not nothing, but less than I would like. I would be very enthusiastic if either my employer or some public private better, much some private actor, came up with either an automatic enrollment plan for me, which I could opt out of, or better still, a give-more-tomorrow plan. If employers, private employers, let's emphasize, devised a non-coercive, non-pressured, utterly free program by which you can give some percentage of your future wage increases to charities of your choice. That would knock up charitable giving for many of us who, because of bounded rationality and inertia, give less than on reflection we would like. An automatic enrollment plan I would be enthusiastic for, for me at least, and I bet millions of American workers would like that too, so long as opt-outs and adjustments are easy. With respect to environmental protection and energy use, a big problem is that energy use and environmental harm just aren't salient to consumers. So if you run your air conditioner or heater day after day after day, you don't have a vivid sense of what exactly you're doing until the bill comes at the end of the month, and often you forget about it or think about it insufficiently once you are running two weeks late, running the air conditioning or the heater two weeks later. A company alert to this in California had a bright idea, which was, we want to make energy use salient to people, so we'll send them something called the ambient orb. The ambient orb is basically a little device which lights up red if you're using a lot of energy and lights up green if you're not. It doesn't impose any economic burden on those whose orb is totally red beyond the ordinary one. The mere existence of the ambient orb in the households that got it reduced energy consumption by 40% in the first weeks of the program, and that was a nudge. It was a nudge that took advantage of salience, salience that is ordinarily missing. Okay, my hunch is that a number of you are mistrustful of choice architects, and we share that lack of trust. So we have two things to say to those who fear libertarian paternalism because of the second word, the paternalism. The first is that the fact that this kind of libertarian paternalism maintains freedom of choice is a big safeguard against the self-interest or incompetence or power grabbing of the choice architect. So long as one-click paternalism really means it, then we have a powerful safeguard or protection against what's most worrisome about government planning. The second and more fundamental point is not about the insistence on freedom of choice. It's the choice architecture is inevitable, not just from private actors but from governments too. A ballot box has to be designed. There have to be rules for contract and property law if only default rules in the case of silence or ambiguity on the part of parties. Where government does have a program in place, maybe the first best is to get rid of it, but if that's not feasible, then maybe the second best is to have choice architecture that is freedom-respecting and sensible rather than, as in the case of the prediction drug program, basically a mess. The larger agenda here is that the United States has been caught for the past 40 years or so between Democrats in love with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his program pervaded by mandates and bans and Republicans having a similar, the more recent shadow in the form of Ronald Reagan and his enthusiasm for markets and freedom of choice. We think that the Reaganite criticism of mandates and bans is often correct and that freedom of choice ought to prevail. At the same time, we believe that we know enough to know that too much of the time human beings blunder and they can use not a shove but a little assistance. Libertarian paternalism, we think, or a nudge is a way to get the best motivations behind the Roosevelt files implemented while also recognizing both the best motivations and the pragmatic sense of the Reaganites. I'm done. My suggestion is that Libertarian paternalism is not merely no oxymoron. It is a conceptual possibility and provides a basis for constructive, cooperative proposals in countless domains of public and private law. Thanks. Thank you, Cass. I must say I'm shocked that your publisher thought Libertarian paternalism and oxymoron were not good words for a title, because after all, your publisher is Yale University Press. It's not like the Disney books or something. Please welcome Professor Terry Chorbat. Corbat, go up here. Thanks. Thanks for inviting me here. First, I'd like to say this book, some general comments on the book. It's extraordinarily well written. I mean, it's a really, really easy read. It gets its ideas across very, very well. And I think actually the title is good. And I'm actually, if I have time, that's the last thing I'll talk about is a little bit about the title and about some other things with that. So first, I want to talk about some more substantive things. The book, there are good and bad behavioral economics. And the book is clearly about behavioral economics. And I think the book partakes a little bit in both of them. Okay, so let's talk about what are good behavioral economics. And it's really just sort of good economics that, so all right, then what is what is good economics? Well, economics, the sort of standard economics, when it is good, what it does is it says there was this vast amount of behavior in the world or a vast amount of things going on in the world. And what we're going to try and do is we're going to try to distill that down into something relatively simple where we can start to predict behavior based on a relatively simple or a parsimonious model. And this has been the standard way of thinking about economics going back, at least to Milton Friedman's essays on positive economics in the early 50s and earlier than that even. It's the standard model taken really from physics. But concomitant with that is the understanding that it is not, we are not actually telling you what people are or are not. We're just trying to predict behavior. It's a very positive way of looking at what economics is or is not. And what good behavioral economics says is, you know, there were these assumptions you made and you knew they weren't realistic to begin with. And it turns out that there is some behavior that you can't predict because of the assumptions you made. You made some incorrect assumptions, you knew they were incorrect, and it turns out that the fact that they were incorrect really does matter. And that's when you have good behavioral economics is to say, you know, standard economics, you're good on some things, but you're just not good on some other things. And here, when it's at its best, is to present, here's another model which actually does predict that. So a really, really good example of it, and that is actually used quite a bit in the book, is the notion of non-exponential discounting or the, you don't actually talk about, I don't think about the beta delta model directly. But the idea is that we think differently about choices between, let's say, a year from now and a year and a day from now, as opposed to now and tomorrow. So just think about pieces of cake. There's a piece of cake you could have today and a slightly better piece of cake tomorrow, and then think about, then take that choice and then take that choice a year from now, and you make a different decision. You want the better cake a year from now, but you may say, no, I want the cake today. And so that's a really great model, that's really good behavioral economics, and it predicts lots of behavior. There's actually now some neurological evidence that this is really there, which is actually what's convincing people that it's a good model in some ways. And in fact, the Save More Tomorrow stuff and a lot of the other sort of dietary stuff that's in the book is based on that. And I think that's where, that's good behavioral economics, it's based on that, it's great, and I think that that part of it is something that is where the book is the most successful. And there was another part of it that's sort of in between sort of good and bad behavioral economics, which is where it doesn't actually really disagree with standard economic models. In other words, there's a little bit of saying, geez, standard economics would say, let's give people who are, the random people, let's say, in the Boston school stuff that he talks about, or in the Plan D, let's give people 5,000 choices, and they have no idea what they're doing, but somebody does actually have ways to rank things. So for example, in the Boston schools, the Boston school plan, they were all these different schools they could choose from, and they had no real way to rank them because nobody talked about. Average SAT scores, or average anything else, but when people found out about the average SAT scores, then all of a sudden that informed their choices. Well, standard economics would say that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that, because these people have information to, for other people, random people in society to find this important information would be very costly and difficult, so they should have to provide that information. Indeed, that's exactly what U.S. news ranking systems do, that it would be very difficult for people to find out all the SAT scores, the random SAT scores at Harvard or Princeton or wherever else you might want to go, and so the standard economics says, no, that's exactly what should happen, is that people who have information should be forced to disclose it to people for whom it would be very, very costly to have it. Now, so that in that sense, that particular chapter in those ideas, there's no conflict between you and Gary Becker, so I don't, you know, that doesn't seem like it's a, that's going to be a big difference there. Now, when I talk about bad behavioral economics, okay, so what would be the bad behavioral economics that are there? This is less of the book, fortunately, and I'm going to start out with a quibble, or what seems to be a quibble, but actually it's somewhat important. In the first part of the book, they set out discussing sort of the behavioral decision-making problems that was sort of more towards the end of his talk, sitting forth where people actually have this sort of availability heuristic, and they have things like, and I'm going to talk more about prospect theory, where you have loss aversion and the endowment effect come from that. And in fact, that's what Dick Thaler was probably the, where he got famous for behavioral economics was the famous Cornell mug study, where people are, in fact, want to, once you get a mug that you're willing to pay, you're going to require more to sell it than you would to buy to begin with. And so the idea is, once you have something, you think it's more valuable than it is if you didn't have it, and that ties into things like status quo bias, and a lot of the different biases come from that. And he sets, they set forth this a little bit, but one of the things in there is that all of these biases have been the subject to a great deal of literature in the last 30, 40, even 50 years, depending on which particular bias that's being discussed. And that the biases and the way that people think about these things are far more complicated than are put forth in the book. Now, the book is not intended as some academic book. It's much more sort of in the attempting to move public policy. So it's not a surprise that they don't have incredibly deep footnotes with every sentence having, you know, with more in the footnotes than in the text, which would essentially have to happen if they did that. But each one of these is subject to a deep literature that makes these things far more complicated than one might initially think or is often used. Now, that's kind of a quibble. You would think it's a quibble. And certainly the way that I've set it forth is saying, all right, fine, you know, it's not an academic book. So here's where that actually matters. It matters because if we are going to start thinking about applying this notion of libertarian paternalism, whatever that means, and we'll talk about that in a minute, or choice architecture to something writ large, not just to things like choices of a cafeteria where the Twinkies come in front of the fruit or vice versa or some of the other sort of, I mean, that's trivializing it, I understand. Or if it's just something that applies to things like pension plans, which I think, again, with the Save More Tomorrow and some of the things like that, probably good ideas, if it's going to apply to something more than that. In other words, this isn't just, here are five separate ideas that we should do. And maybe there are some other ones, maybe not, but here are five ideas, and that's as far as it goes for right now, maybe they go further. The book's ambitions are clearly to do more than that. It's to say this applies to lots of things, things we haven't enumerated yet. Well, we have to, I think there needs to be another caveat to this other than what's already been talked about, which is rushing headlong into this sort of, into making lots and lots of changes. So this is where sort of the bad behavioral economics come in. People sort of say, ah, prospect theory. Therefore, people have lost a version. Therefore, the cost theorem is totally bad. Therefore, this is all these other sorts of things we can just throw away and we can just start doing whatever we want. And there's sort of this sort of free play that is introduced by behavioral economics because it doesn't have a totalizing theory the way that standard economics does. It's much more like psychology with sort of patchwork things. So, to the extent that we are going to try and move on to beyond these sort of few suggestions and move on to something else, what we really have to have is we have to have a very, very deep understanding of what it is we're doing. That in some of these ideas, I mean, again, the sort of cafeteria management thing, I mean, you know, fine, I'm not worried about that. The Save More Tomorrow, there does seem to be indeed, in the pension plans, there does seem to be a fairly good bit of evidence that people sort of neglect this, and they really shouldn't, right? Now you can make arguments about that, but there does seem to be some pretty good arguments that people really should be saving more for retirement. Okay, fine. But in any sort of choice situation that you want to start to nudge in one way or another, you have to be really sure that what you're doing actually is helping people or is what you're trying to achieve. And to be honest with you, in other than the situations that are the sort of the first five or so, the ones I talked about, I don't know that we actually have deep, deep information about what this really means or what the real effects of this are. So, for an example of them, which, you know, many of these people here will probably agree, many people will disagree, but one of the chapters is talking about saying we should change the way we think of marriage from having marriage to having only civil unions. Well, that's not a nudge. That's a huge change in the way that we think about society. You may agree, you may disagree. It's worth far more than a 10 or 15 page chapter. It's a huge change, and that's not just some small thing. It may or may not drastically alter society or not. But the thing is that saying that, oh, we're just trying to change whether people have an opt-in or an opt-in opt-out on organ transplants or something like that, that's one thing. But when you start to go into other things, like, or even, for example, there's another suggestion in the book about changing the way that medical malpractice is done, that you should have an ability to contract around the inability to wave negligence. Okay, that maybe that's something, but that's not really a nudge anymore. That's not changing the choice architecture. That's changing actual choices that are possible. And that then leads to another sort of thing that I want to talk about with the book, which is that the whole notion of libertarian paternalism actually doesn't live up to the standards of the book. And that's a good reason why they rejected it. Because libertarian paternalism, when you think about it, the initial reaction from people, first of all, paternalism doesn't have sort of a good ring to almost anybody. And libertarianism maybe makes people in this room excited and maybe a couple other people. But it's about maybe one percent of the population, something like that, right? So libertarian paternalism, when people hear it, they're going to go, what? Most people, I couldn't care less, and that's the reason why is because I assume that Yale Press wanted to sell something beyond libraries, is why they didn't want libertarian paternalism in there. And you think about it, what is libertarian paternalism or the choice architecture all about? It's about saying that we are trying to guide people in the right direction, sort of not exactly subconsciously, but we're trying to guide them in the right direction and so that the initial reaction is to do the right thing. Well, if the initial reaction to libertarian paternalism from just about everybody is to say, no, I don't like this, that's not a particularly good choice architecture for it. And in fact, actually the term nudge turns out to be a far better one. I mean, it's not a perfect one. We don't live in a perfect world. Nudge is sort of like, well, what does that mean? And so that when you're talking about this, I think that you were sort of forced, you were sort of part of this, seeing that nudge is in fact a better way of describing it. But when you talk then about nudges, you have to be then very, very careful that what you're in fact doing is a nudge and not something more than that, that it is not something where you are really trying to change the total structure of what is occurring in society. And that is in fact where the whole slippery slope argument comes in. I mean, other people have said this, so I'm not going to go over it. Other people probably will talk about that. But when you do things like saying we need to change marriage or we need to change medical malpractice and the way that that's structured and then say, well, you know, there really isn't a slippery slope argument. What you're doing is you're already going beyond nudges. You sort of give arguments to the other side in talking about that. So in any case, therefore, the nudges and the slippery slope argument I think really, really kind of fits together. And then finally, on the notion of, on the term libertarian paternalism, I'm not sure that really even describes what you're trying to get at. First of all, when you're just talking about nudges, it's a theory of what the optimal rule of defaults should be in some sense. Because you're saying either save more tomorrow or on the opt-in, on organs or other things that there's this notion that really what we're trying to do is just the first choice that you could possibly make and we're trying to make that easy for you. You know, actually, I don't think that there is a libertarian theory of defaults except in the sense that defaults shouldn't be made too strong so that you can't go around them. In my mind, libertarianism, and, you know, again, people can argue about this, in my mind libertarianism isn't a sort of an overall narrative of what the world should be like. It's merely a narrative between the government and the citizens in that society, maybe the institutions in that society, possibly between people who are outside of the society, that's, you know, you can argue about that. But it's just a theory of the interactions between government and the society. It's not a theory of how employers should treat their employees. I don't think it has anything particularly to say about that and a fair bit about the book is about, and the suggestions are about that. And it doesn't say much about defaults and really then libertarian paternalism, to the extent that it's about that, is not really libertarian because libertarianism doesn't have anything to say about it. It may be paternalistic or not, that you can argue about. And so therefore it's, well, it may be consistent with libertarianism. It's not actually libertarian in any direct way. And so I think that libertarian paternalism as a term is, I think, inaccurate for describing it. So not only is it sort of guide people to hate it, to begin with, it also is inaccurate. And so therefore I don't think it's a particularly good term. Although I think that, I don't know whether you or Dick were the first one to come up with it, you can tell when you read this, that somebody was proud of this. And there's this sort of, you can see, I like this term. And I think that you were forced to do the right thing by calling the book nudges. Anyway, so there was some kind of choice architecture in there, I suppose. Anyway, and the last thing to talk about here is that when you talk about, for example, the Plan D stuff, just the last thing, the idea of making the government's interaction, that is a real governmental interaction with people. That's where you can start to talk about it. And there indeed what you have is people having lots and lots of different possible choices. But I don't think, again, I don't believe you're really arguing anything different than standard economics would argue. Because first of all, standard economics would say, yes, these people should have information available to them in a way that they can understand it. I think that's certainly everyone would agree with. And the second thing is there was a little bit in the book where you talk about saying that, gee, every time everybody, really smart people, tried to figure out what was the best of the plans possible for them. They came up with a different answer because there were some arguments about plans change every day. And gee, even the best of people can't come up and understand what's going on. Well, the thing, and with a lot of this, is how much actual utility do people lose by choosing a slightly suboptimal plan? If there are, say, 500 plans, and let's say there is one that is the optimal for you, and instead of choosing the optimal one, you choose the 490th optimal. You choose the 10th best one for you. Well, I don't know that you're really losing that much if that's what happens. And so in order for us to, when you really think about any sort of restructuring of that, is how much loss are people actually having? Now, to the extent that people aren't enrolling in the plan, that's something. I think that there is a real problem there. But when we're simplifying things and restricting choices, because we say people are making the wrong choices, how much is it really costing them to make the wrong choice? And that, I think we really need to know before you can make any of these. And I think that we rarely know that. And so therefore, while I agree with many of the particular suggestions in the book, the idea that this should be something that's carried forward into the future and all different grounds is something that we just need to be incredibly careful about and we don't know that much about lots and lots of things. And that's fine. Thank you, Terry. And now we'll have a final comment from Will Wilkinson. Thank you, David. Good afternoon. I am honored to share a platform with Professors Sunstein and Corvatt. Let me start by saying that I'm completely delighted by how far Professors Sunstein and Taylor have come in giving some credibility to their claim that they're libertarians of some stripe. In Nudge, they come out in favor of increased school choice. They offer extremely helpful advice based on the Swedish experience about how to set up the defaults in a personal retirement account system. As Terry mentioned, they're in favor of moving to a system of civil unions and getting the state out of the business of deciding who may or may not be legally married. And I'm grateful for their arguments in these cases and a number of others, and I really hope that they have some influence. Moreover, I think they do a really excellent job in one of their concluding chapters in facing up to a number of the main objections to their earlier papers. Their emphasis on low-cost, one-click opt-out for many of their proposals takes seriously the worry that they put us on a slippery slope to battled fashion paternalism. And further, they endorse a core liberal principle that's dear to my heart, which is John Rawls' Principle of Publicity, which says that a policy and the policy-making process must be transparent and publicly justifiable to all citizens. That means sort of a lot of technocratic engineering can't be going on in the back room behind people's backs. Relatedly, they acknowledge the temptation that nudges will be deployed for sectarian ends and that real politicians and policymakers are at least as in need of helpful nudges as the rest of us. Though they are skeptical of the idea of perfect neutrality, they have the good sense to rule out, say, a pray more to Jesus' tomorrow plan as clearly out of bounds. Now, nudges chock full of ideas. Some of them are really good, like the savings plans they mention. I have no objection to them, and some are quite bad, according to me. Now, I'm not going to go through all of the policies in the book one by one. That would take hours. What I want to do is talk at a more general level about the big idea of nudge, which is the application of behavioral economics to policy through a philosophy they call libertarian paternalism, and I think my comments should mesh quite well with Professor Corvettes. Now, I want to explain to you why I still think the whole idea is fundamentally confused, is really based on a conceptual error, and why libertarian libertarians ought to keep the libertarian paternalists at arm's length. Despite Sunstein and Taylor's very welcome attempts to ply us with good advice about school choice and personal retirement accounts. Now, I think to grasp why the original papers, libertarian paternalism is not an oxymoron and the shorter summary of the argument, cause a bit of a sensation among economists and wonk types like me and why nudge has been a highly anticipated book. In order to grasp the buzz, I think you have to understand the imagined promise and the imagined threat of so-called behavioral economics. I think the place to begin is in Professor Sunstein's hometown in Chicago with the Chicago School of Free Market Economics and Nobel Prize winning Notables like Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. Now, suppose you've been exposed all your life to those kinds of ideas, that style of doing economics, and suppose you assume that the best or the only argument for something approaching social and economic laissez-faire is a Chicago school style argument, an argument that rests on the traditional homo-economicist model of rationality. Now, suppose you subsequently discover that homo-economicists is little more than a character in a math nerd's fairy tale. Well, you might well conclude that homo-economicists and that the case for laissez-faire is dead as homo-economicists. And that is indeed what I think a lot of behavioral economists have concluded and they have now spent almost three decades enthusiastically enumerating the foibles of the hapless human mind in the service of the idea that we are, as Sunstein and Taylor put it, more Homer Simpson than Mr. Spock. And they're done with Gary Becker. Now, I think the great hope among a good number of left-leaning behavioral economists is that wider recognition of our earthbound limitations and self-defeating tendencies will loosen the grip of Chicago style laissez-faire dogma in social and economic policy, clearing a little bit of intellectual and political space for well-meaning, benign, welfare-promoting government regulation. The fear shared by libertarians, liberals, and many behavioral economists alike is that exposing flesh and blood, humans as irrational and perpetrators of cognitive anomalies, that invites invasive control by nannying elites. Sunstein and Taylor's libertarian paternalism, I think, can be understood as an attempt to hasten the hope, the death of laissez-faire, while assuaging fears that our would-be rulers have not been handed a dangerous new intellectual weapon. They write, quote, emerging developments should strengthen at once the principled commitment to freedom of choice and the case for the gentle nudge. The gentle nudge they share us is to be welcomed, not feared. Now, clearly naming their doctrine what they have, Sunstein and Taylor do not deny that behavioral economics implies some kind of paternalism. Instead, they try to defang the sting of paternalism by arguing that it's just completely unavoidable. Its inevitability allegedly follows from a core finding of behavioral psychology, which is that context matters. The way people represent their choices determines, partly determines what they end up choosing. If you modify the context of choice, if the lights go down, the berry white music goes up, you can subtly bias the subsequent choice for good or ill. Now, to refuse to intervene in the context of choice is simply to acquiesce to the accidental biases of the status quo, and that's no way to conduct a successful seduction, and that's no way to increase personal savings rates either. Sunstein and Taylor introduce us to the notion of choice architecture, which is the practice of manipulating the context of choice in order to manipulate or nudge choosers. Choice architecture, it turns out, includes absolutely anything you might do to alter someone's environment in a way that affects their choices. Quote, a good rule of thumb is that everything matters. Quote, which is to say that nothing doesn't. So if you have ever made a shopping list, adjusted a thermometer, pointed someone to the nearest restroom, or arranged your living room furniture, then you're something of a choice architect yourself. You may even be a bit of a paternalist, since paternalism is nothing more or less, and they're telling, then the idea that it's okay to do something that we cannot avoid, choice architecture. They write, quote, the paternalistic aspect of libertarian paternalism lies in the claim that it's legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better. End quote. And so, and these are some examples they give, putting fruit at eye level might make you a little bit of a paternalist. The designers who made the iPod especially user-friendly, they're a little bit paternalistic. They've kind of guided how you're going to make your choices on the interface. The trouble is, I think, and I think this is a big trouble, influencing people's behavior to make their lives go better isn't called paternalism. Usually it's called helping. If you happen to be some kind of actual designer, be it of urinals or graphic user interfaces or of public policy, then influencing people's choices to make them better off is called your job. But it doesn't make you a professional paternalist. Paternalism in plain English is interference. It may be coercive, it may be not, with the exercise of another's freedom for their good as judged by the one doing the interfering or his principle. But Sunstein and Thaler say, quote, a policy is paternalistic if it tries to influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off as judged by themselves. And that's a really perplexing inversion of the normal meaning of the word. In the centuries-old debate over the justification of paternalism, the whole issue has centered on whether it's permissible to help someone by overriding their judgment. Since the authors show an otherwise very fine feeling for English, the reader is left suspecting an unstated motive for their audacious redefinition. One is left wondering, perhaps these eager choice architects think we will be made better off if the meaning of paternalism is gutted and renovated. As for libertarian, what they mean by it is choice-preserving. This is at least a sense of the word, and when applied specifically to government, it's close to the main sense. However, Sunstein and Thaler intend it to apply generally to the policies of governments and human resource directors and mothers. But a mom who keeps cookies in a high cupboard rather than not buying them at all is libertarian in about the same sense that a bossy roommate who hogs the TV remote is fascist. Since this casual use of libertarian forces a confusing distinction between libertarian libertarians like me and non-libertarian libertarians like Sunstein and Thaler, I wonder if it might be useful just to leave it out of serious social thought. I think what comes right down to it, libertarian paternalism translated into ordinary language is just something like choice-preserving helpfulness or more naturally helping people without taking away their options. And you know what? I'm for it. But who isn't for that? Well paternalists, right? That's who. They're not in favor of helping people by not taking away their choices. Indeed, Sunstein and Thaler's philosophy, when spelled out in non-tendentious terms, sounds a lot like plain old benevolent liberal anti-paternalism. The crucial schematic difference is that libertarian paternalism pictures all manner of helpful guidance, whether it's a meddlesome or imperceptible, whether it's persuasive or compelled, as falling along a common gradient of paternalism. Sunstein and Thaler argue powerfully for the desirability of staying on the choice-preserving end of that gradient, and this may succeed in making some of us somewhat less nervous about standing on the gradient at all. But the deeper point seems to me to be that we are on it. There is no non-paternalism. And once that is accepted, we are left, as the old joke goes, some of you might know it, haggling over the price. I would be reassured if Sunstein and Thaler had done rather more to recommend choice-preserving alternatives to currently existing hard paternalist measures. My friend Brian Kaplan has suggested that maybe you could legally purchase cocaine if you wrote a letter to the DEA explaining why you want it so much. Or maybe we could get out of seatbelt laws if we had to watch an hour's worth of films of bloody car crashes. And surely there is a good way to preserve dying patients' ability to choose non-FDA approved drugs and treatments. And that's just a step away from their plan to make healthcare more affordable by allowing patients to waive some rights to sue for malpractice. I'd think a really genuinely liberty-minded libertarian paternalist would be thinking more about hopefully reinstating choices that the state has already taken away. And I have to say that some of their proposals do make this libertarian a little bit uneasy. They suggest that we could increase the supply of transplant organs in the United States if we presumed that people want to donate instead of treating non-donation as the default. As they point out again and again, you've got to have some default. But default rules can carry a great deal of normative and symbolic content in their own right. And presumed consent about organ donation seems to me to be at odds with libertarian intuitions about self-ownership. To me, it seems to say, your body presumptively belongs to the Commonwealth and you must take special action to use it as you and your family wish. And this sort of thing makes me wonder if the very existence of such default rules biases subsequent political deliberation against alternative and more thoroughly libertarian policies like legalizing markets in organs and tissue. Individual choices made again and again create habits and coordinated patterns of individual action create norms. Focused concerted choice architecture can not only nudge us to do what we already want to do, but over time it can shape what we want, shape the social context and meaning of our choices. By modifying the local context of choices, the architect can systematically affect the global context of future choices. So I would object if quite heartily if President John McCain, for example, implemented a libertarian paternalist policy of opt-out national service. And the reason I would I would I would be so annoyed by it is that the default rule again seems to contain a kind of meaningful content that cuts against liberty. If allowed to stand, such a policy could help shape norms and individual preferences in a direction antagonistic to the value of autonomy. Soon enough we might find ourselves asking why one should be able to opt out at all. The paternalist nudge may leave the choices open, but accepting the legitimacy of certain nudges may imperil liberty. Now I think most of this is just a problem with what I see as the strategic reframing of the terms libertarian and paternalist, but suppose we reject that reframing and what it seems to imply. Suppose we just think of their philosophy as what it seems to me to be if put in plain language, choice preserving helpfulness. What's left? Well, the idea that we should try to design policy so that it will make people better off merits a nod and also a yawn. The idea that we should use what we know about people in order to make our policy better also cannot be wisely contested. And to the extent that policy makers really are misled by unrealistic economic models of rationality then they should cut it out and bone up on psychology. Behavioral economics is a truly weighty intellectual contribution. It tells us a lot about human nature. It tells us a lot about what policies will and won't work. Everybody has always said that we should try to determine policies by looking to how people will respond to incentives and this gives us new information about how people do represent and respond to incentives. But it's really hard for me to see in all of this a game changing paradigm shift. It's very hard for me to see what they call in their concluding chapter a real third way. So I give my hearty endorsement to choice preserving helpfulness but I don't see how it's really changed things much at all. Thank you. Thank you Will. Now let's open this up for questions. We will bring microphones around so please wait for the microphone to get there and we'll start right down here in front. We can take questions from both these people. Hi, I guess a question for Professor Sunstein maybe has sort of a theoretical component and empirical component to it. The sorts of nudges you describe seem to at least in the talk seem to fall roughly into two piles. One you're sort of lowering information costs for people sort of better, clearer, shorter information on the CMS FAC page for Medicare Part D and some of the others seem to fall into a pile where there's an assumption that there's some fixed small number of possible default assumptions and there's some substantial social benefit which accrues to making A rather than be or see the default. And so one question is sort of if that's right what's the maximum magnitude of a nudge rather than a shove and then I suppose the empirical question is how much of say the CFR could you rewrite or would you rewrite as one of those two types of interventions as opposed to sort of more traditional regulatory restrictions on behavior? Okay that's great and I'm going to address that rather than the comments but I want to thank the commentators for really splendid and very helpful reactions. So thinking about them I'm going to answer you. Okay so what you said is that some of the nudges consist of lowering informational burdens for people who are trying to choose a mortgage or a prescription drug plan. Some are for people some of the nudges are default rules switching them so well-being let's call it gets the benefit of the doubt and the third is which you didn't mention is about making things salient where they haven't here to for been salient think of the ambient orb or many imaginable things private public actors could do more helpfully than in the airport with the it's orange now but in a way that draws attention your attention to something and the fourth I'd add by the way to underline the libertarian credentials of the project is to free up private actors where they're now cabined. So a chapter of the book that I'm particularly pleased with though I've gotten much attention in the excessive attention the books gotten so far is our medical malpractice proposal which is let doctors and patients contract around negligence liability we think that would be in the interest of both sides so that's very much a tool for the libertarian paternalist with the libertarian part underlined let freedom reign. Okay in terms of your point I've just added two things in the toolbox that sometimes CFR go to federal regulations you mean, yeah? To make that simple, good luck probably be a nice thing for the McCain or Obama or Clinton administration to do but we can maybe start small which is in the mortgage crisis I guess as it's become one way to solve it is not to freeze the Hillary Clinton just did that because I'm criticizing her proposal and then she got embarrassed and the light came on so one way to respond to the mortgage crisis is not by freezing rates even temporarily one way to do it is to and this is I would say libertarian paternalist approach and if we want to call it choice preserving helpfulness fine by me is have a requirement that the and this is a requirement that the mortgage disclosures be intelligible rather than endless so that people can take advantage of the market pressures that will undoubtedly click in once we have a 2008 version of the old and now hopelessly anachronistic truth and lending act so the simple point is where things are really really complicated in a way that causes exploitation of people's cognitive imperfection rather than correction as sometimes markets do then we have a case for transparency so the idea is the lowering information costs you can do that and if the market isn't doing it already then that's a nice libertarian paternalist tool no mandates thank you the co-authors I wanted to ask you what was the motivation overall for the book did you expect that there would be professional behavior modification specialists such as psychologists or people working in the penal system or working in homeless shelters might benefit from this as well and who do you feel the major market is out there because there are so many academic books that deal with this topic what did you see as your niche okay thank you I don't see any book like this which means that it's the worst of its kind and I'll tell you why I don't see any book like this there now is a book called predictably irrational by a guy named Ariely who's a quite good psychologist he's kind of a successor of Thaler he's a second or third generation Thaler and that is a little like us in the sense that it talks about bounded rationality and human imperfection but as we went around to the non-university press publishers as we did on a day I much enjoyed in New York though my co-author didn't we went around to the non-university press publishers saying do you want this book on libertarian paternalism and they said well we kind of want one on predictably irrational or human foibles or how people deviate from Homo economicus they didn't use that word they just grew up Thaler and I of course agreed thought I don't want to write that book that book is a distillation of 30 years of academic articles what we want to do is make a contribution to private and public organizations and maybe a little self-help so that people can be have better lives so the nudge title is the subtitle is improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness the I guess the more grandiose way to put it is when we say the real third way maybe that doesn't work but we truly do mean that so the suggestion is that we've had Rooseveltism and it's done some good and some harm we've had Reaganism and the same as done some good some harm there are tremendous opportunities we think for avoiding command and mandate and for making people's lives go better and to say that help is kind of a yawn word is undoubtedly true but we now know a lot about how to help I invite the commenters to jump in when they want to although what was your motivation for writing the book might not be the best question for them to contribute okay one over here and then the next question in the back there Roger Pila and Kato Institute Cass I want perhaps you discuss this in the book but I wonder if you would address how you would apply your choice architecture to a matter of some contemporary interest namely labor law the choice to opt in or opt out of membership or the dues context which as you know is being litigated right now okay my general view of labor law is that what we want to do is maximize individual liberty while handling also three problems collective action problems lack of information and bounded rationality of the sort that Terry referred to so the orientation is freedom except when you have one of those three things if you have a collective action problem might need to mandate information or bounded rationality probably need to nudge so I would want to restructure both labor and employment law with an eye towards those ideas in terms of mandatory dues by unions and such the presumption is in favor of no mandatory anything if the state is behind it and we need to know whether there's a genuine collective action problem which the state is solving with some law so I have a presumption I have a theory of when the presumption would be overridden and we need to know more about the context so I am ducking the particular case just because I don't know about the details but the burden would be heavy on a state that this is not talking about constitutional law it's talking about principle the burden would be heavy on any state that wants to stop individuals from saying I don't like this organization I don't want to have to pay for it and the way to overcome that heavy burden would be to point to a very serious collective action problem which the mandate is necessary to solve this is addressed to all three speakers I want to try and get at what I think is an underlying problem with the whole approach Herbert Spencer said the ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools now it does seem to me that design choice architecture may create more fools may create less wisdom in the population who's then responsible for selecting the designers of choice architecture this would create a downward spiral rather than the positive spiral envisioned by the authors in which to comment well there's truth in it and there's important truth that you might worry that extremely effective choice architecture will stop people from learning and taking care of themselves but that argument has a very bad slippery slope argument warning signs let's call them private warning signs at the workplace or on the streets aren't to be impeached on the ground that they prevent salutary self-help so disclosure a swimming pool that it's going to be deep on this end even if no kid swim there let the adults know you wouldn't worry that this will prevent self-help so I guess I think that there would be a very aggressive program of libertarian paternalism with the word paternalism metallisized whose applications might run into your problem but I can't think of a domain of the book where learning is undermined in such a way as to be a legitimate objection so our basic idea for complicated situations is make it easy for people who don't want to bother to get something decent but also make it easy for people who are interested in being sophisticated and knowing stuff to do better than baseline let's call it so that's how we want to deal with complicated financial things but we don't think it's great for the world to be unleashed on it say a social security program that's like Sweden's which was just cognitively overwhelming my guess is the Swedes now don't know a whole lot more about their various plans than they did when it first came into effect people are busy there's so many domains where if you want to learn and become expert with respect to food or safety or one other a free society enables you to do that so I'm going over in my head the various domains we talk about in the book, various imaginable applications and the only thing I could foresee is a science fiction story that takes your concern very seriously and vindicates it but on the planet maybe I'm just missing but offhand it's too abstract to worry the Economist magazine had a cover story on libertarian paternalism it called it soft paternalism better term maybe which expressed your worry about learning and in the abstract it is a worry but so long as freedom is ultimately preserved people are certainly entitled to make their own mistakes if opt out is costless one click there are going to be a lot of mistakes there and people learn from that I can say one of the things actually also to defend this one of the suggestions they have in a lot of situations is to give more information so for example one of the things that they talked about in the Boston school choice situation and I think also in the Swedish situation is that you give better information to people for whom it might be costly for them to get it and those sorts of suggestions clearly I mean it's sort of hard to argue that G if you don't have a PhD in economics you're not going to be able to make this decision correctly so won't this dump people down because they're not going to get that so I mean I think that there's a long way we can go in a lot of things you can do without getting to that but nobody says that for example right now that their tax forms are too simple and there are lots of places where we can make it a lot easier than it is and yeah maybe that's a real concern at some point but I think you actually pointed out there's some dystopian novels that are basically have that same thing if you make the world famous ones yeah that's a concern but you know there's a lot of simplicity we can go before we're anywhere near that yeah I mean I get worried about the idea that that people will come to demand that the world be failure proofed and I do get a whiff of that in the idea of libertarian paternalism that if we just padded everything then people would be left better off and the thing that worries me is that people start demanding that they cannot fail and that's actually the threat to liberty it's not the people who are giving them what they want more generally thinking about what does and doesn't promote freedom I guess my sort of old fashioned classical liberal sense is that freedom is enhanced by rules that strain policy makers and constrain the state and but they seem to be adding a little bit of extra technology that encourages one more range of freedom for policy makers and there's very little in it that actually creates a constraint what they're depending on is people sort of accepting the choice preserving norm that they endorse but I think part of the point of history is that you do need some sort of structural barriers and you can't just have you can't be depending on mustering everybody's sympathy in the direction of preserving choice the very general choice architecture the constitution so on and so forth has to be designed in a way that it makes it difficult for authorities to okay right here on the corner right and then we'll take the microphone over to the two people by the door and let's try to get all those questions in there could be a non-trivial loss of freedom in being moved to the circumstance where you actually have to opt out instead of opting in and in fact what I would love and I don't know Professor Sunstein would be interested in this I would love my employer to say we have this series of circumstances that you can opt out of but in order to get into that world to begin with you have to make one opt in which is when you're hired you have to check the box that says you want to enter the opt out world in a way that preserves I think what classical liberals would conceive of as the starting freedom which is the freedom not to have to make the choice to say no well I guess I can start you're right that when you talk about sort of classical liberalism and all that that the idea there are certain presumptions about what government should or shouldn't do although some of the stuff here is say for example the opting into the pension plan or not opting into the pension plan you know that sort of you're going to get paid how do you want to allocate the payment it's sort of not clear to me how that should work but I do think that there is a real concern that you're talking about here and that is a concern that I've expressed and will actually express better than I did that by having sort of lots and lots of these different opt out opt in you do make it more difficult for people and you do actually start to change the way people think about the relationship with government and the government's relationship back and that does start to cause some problems at some point where if it's just sort of a simple you know are you going to put the twinkies in front of the fruit or something like that I mean you know that's not so much but where you're starting to talk about say organ transplantation people that is something that people actually care about and even in the book they show that there are a significant number of people who don't want their organs to be available and you know for them it's probably a bigger thing that their organs are used than if for someone whose organs aren't used when they wished them to be used so there actually maybe is some argument for having the opt in opt out for one way or the other and it does change the relationship between that it's just not necessarily a libertarian theory but I do think you're right that it does have some effect on the way that the government interacts with individual or their employers because some of this stuff is employers employees and which the way that setup does have something and it may also make you like or dislike your employer more for example you know when you get there and there are all these things in order to get something reasonable you have to file five pieces of paper or ten pieces of paper you're gonna like your employer a whole lot less and that maybe has something to do with why you know people don't like the IRS too so that ultimately these things do have some real effects it's just I don't know that they're libertarian per se