This smacks of totalitarianism dressed up in good intentions.

From It’s All for Your Own Good by Jeremy Waldron.

Waldron is reviewing a couple of books that address the issues raised by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their book Nudge.

In their book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein considered the choices made by ordinary people about their retirement.1 Many employees have the opportunity to enroll in a 401(k) plan, in which their contributions will be sheltered from taxes and to which their employer will also contribute. But a considerable number of people do not choose to enroll in a 401(k) plan and of those who do, many select levels of contribution that are far below what would be most advantageous to them. Why? Probably because of inertia. It is easier not to make a decision than go to the trouble of calculating an optimal contribution.

Employers sometimes try to educate people to make better choices, offering them retirement-planning seminars, for example. But the lessons of these seminars are soon forgotten: “Employees often leave educational seminars excited about saving more but then fail to follow through on their plans.” And so Sunstein and Thaler suggested a different strategy. Instead of teaching people to overcome their inertia, we might take advantage of their inertia to solve the problem. Suppose we arrange things so that enrollment at some appropriate level of contribution is the default position—the position that obtains if the employee does nothing. Something has to be the default position; why not make it the position that accrues most to the employee’s benefit, “using inertia to increase savings rather than prevent savings”?

Resetting the default position this way is what Thaler and Sunstein call a “nudge.” It exploits the structure of the choice to encourage a more desirable option. The decision is not taken entirely out of the employee’s hands. She can still change it and revert to a strategy of no contributions or diminished contributions to her retirement funds. But in that case she has to make an effort; this is where she has to overcome her inertia.

I have Nudge and pick it up and read a few paragraphs every few months. The problem I have encountered is a profound and visceral foreboding of the topic. The psychology of nudging and decision-making is an interesting issue and I am sure Sunstein and Thaler are well intended people but you don't have to be particularly paranoid to sense the Orwellian nature of their suggestions. You don't have to be paranoid, merely well-read and historically literate.

Decision framing is a real issue and cannot be avoided, repulsive as it might be. It is in the nature of the decision-making beast.

Now, every decision we face presents its own “choice architecture,” in which the possibilities we have to choose from are arrayed in a certain order. Some make themselves clamorously known; others have to be unearthed. There may be limited time to make a choice and then some possibilities expire. Or if nothing is done, something may still come to pass: there are default options (as opposed to possibilities a person has to positively choose). There is no getting away from this: choices are always going to be structured in some manner, whether it’s deliberately designed or happens at random.

My discomfort with the idea of nudging is probably most rooted in the fact that it is a profoundly moral choice and yet the morality behind the conscious manipulation of other's choices has, it seems to me, to have been profoundly discounted.

Waldron raises some of these issues which I have never seen adequately acknowledged before and he does it well. Here are some of the passages.

Let’s think about the dramatis personae of Sunstein’s account. There are, first of all, people, ordinary individuals with their heuristics, their intuitions, and their rules of thumb, with their laziness, their impulses, and their myopia. They have choices to make for themselves and their loved ones, and they make some of them well and many of them badly.

Then there are those whom Sunstein refers to as “we.” We know this, we know that, and we know better about the way ordinary people make their choices. We are the law professors and the behavioral economists who (a) understand human choosing and its foibles much better than members of the first group and (b) are in a position to design and manipulate the architecture of the choices that face ordinary folk. In other words, the members of this second group are endowed with a happy combination of power and expertise.

Of course regulators are people too. And like the rest of us, they are fallible. In the original Nudge, Sunstein engagingly confessed to many of the decisional foibles that Thaler exposed. Worse, though, is the fact that regulators are apt to make mistakes in their regulatory behavior: “For every bias identified for individuals, there is an accompanying bias in the public sphere.” Sometimes governments blunder because they feel compelled to defer to the irrationalities of ordinary people. But we all know they are perfectly capable of screwing things up on their own, whether it’s the invasion of Iraq or the rollout of Obamacare. There is a new book by two British political scientists called The Blunders of Our Governments that might serve as a useful companion to Why Nudge?

[snip]

Sunstein is happy to acknowledge that public officials have their own defective heuristics. But he cautions critics against using this point as an “all-purpose bludgeon against initiatives that promise to do more good than harm.” And he offers little more than reassurance that there actually are good-hearted and competent folks like himself in government:

Government has in its employ many people whose business it is to calculate the consequences of alternative courses of action…. A large virtue of technocrats in government—specialists in science, economics, and law—is that they can help overcome some of the errors that might otherwise influence public as well as private judgments.

More reassuring, I think, would be a candid assessment of what might go wrong with nudging. One of Sunstein’s many books (from before his time in the White House) is entitled Worst-Case Scenarios. Could we please have something like that as a companion to Nudge?

I am afraid there is very little awareness in these books about the problem of trust. Every day we are bombarded with offers whose choice architecture is manipulated, not necessarily in our favor. The latest deal from the phone company is designed to bamboozle us, and we may well want such blandishments regulated. But it is not clear whether the regulators themselves are trustworthy. Governments don’t just make mistakes; they sometimes set out deliberately to mislead us. The mendacity of elected officials is legendary and claims on our trust and credulity have often been squandered. It is against this background that we have to consider how nudging might be abused.

There are deeper questions, too, than these issues of trust and competence. As befits someone who was “regulation czar” in the Obama White House, Sunstein’s point of view is a rather lofty one and at times it has an uncomfortable affinity with what Bernard Williams once called “Government House utilitarianism.”4 Government House utilitarianism was a moral philosophy that envisaged an elite who knew the moral truth and could put out simple rules for the natives (or ordinary people) to use, even though in the commissioner’s bungalow it was known that the use of these rules would not always be justified. We (the governors) know that lying, for example, is sometimes justified, but we don’t want to let on to the natives, who may not have the wit to figure out when this is so; we don’t trust them to make the calculations that we make about when the ordinary rules should not be followed. Williams saw the element of insult in this sort of approach to morality, and I think it is discernable in Sunstein’s nudging as well.

[snip]

Deeper even than this is a prickly concern about dignity. What becomes of the self-respect we invest in our own willed actions, flawed and misguided though they often are, when so many of our choices are manipulated to promote what someone else sees (perhaps rightly) as our best interest? Sunstein is well aware that many will see the rigging of choice through nudges as an affront to human dignity: I mean dignity in the sense of self-respect, an individual’s awareness of her own worth as a chooser. The term “dignity” did not appear in the book he wrote with Thaler, but in Why Nudge? Sunstein concedes that this objection is “intensely felt.” Practically everything he says about it, however, is an attempt to brush dignity aside.

The fundamental issue is that Sunstein wishes to disempower individuals, to protect them from their own foibles. It is nice of him to care, but I wish he would care more about the bigger picture where the cultivation of a world view that is predicated on informed elites making decisions on behalf of the naive Eloi is a real and constant danger.

We have to be aware of the psychology behind nudging but we don't have to exploit it and we don't have to accept the proposition that there is any way to reconcile a commitment to human dignity and human rights with a desire to do good by fostering an elite who manipulate the masses. These are different world views which are exclusive of one another. This smacks of totalitarianism dressed up in good intentions. We know how that dance ends.