New paternalism roundup

Here's Glen Whitman's closing in Cato Unbound's excellent discussion of the "New Paternalism".

I, too, see nothing wrong with telling my friends which dishes at a restaurant I’ve enjoyed the most. And if they requested my help in losing weight, I’d be happy to help out however I could. And if I ever start a business, I might well offer my employees a “Save More Tomorrow” option. Nobody I know, libertarian or otherwise, opposes any of these things.

But if that’s all new paternalism is about, then I’ve been snookered by a series of articles that have advocated much, much more. New paternalists want the state to get involved, and therein lies the danger. First come the genial recommendations; then come the rising hurdles to opting out; then come the taxes and legal penalties for disregarding the state’s friendly advice; and if all else fails, why not ban some choices altogether? That’s a serious slope, and new paternalism is the toboggan.

Let's just hope that Obamacare doesn't turn the toboggan into a Ski Doo...

More Whitman on paternalism and slippery slopes

Another nice installment is out.

As the secondhand smoke and obesity examples [just presented] suggest, rent-seekers with an interest in distorting and simplifying information come in at least two varieties. The first variety is old-style paternalists who believe they know best and do not necessarily care about the underlying preferences of the targets. Traditional temperance and health advocates fall within this category. They sacrifice the preferences of the targets to their own moralistic goals. The second variety is people who stand to benefit economically from the promotion or cessation of some activity. Examples include mutual fund companies that provide savings instruments, weight-loss clinics and programs, and manufacturers of smoking-cessation drugs. Public officials and agencies with an interest in preserving and expanding their domains also fall within this category, as do some individuals in their role as consumers and workers (e.g., non-smoking bar customers who would prefer to have more establishments cater to their tastes).

Slippery slopes: theory and practice

Glen Whitman continues blogging on paternalism and slippery slopes, this time focusing on hyperbolic discounting. Money quote

Quasi-hyperbolic discounting makes it deceptively simple to choose the “correct” rate of discount, since there appear to be only two options. If real people actually engage in hyperbolic discounting, this implies a gradient or continuum of discount rates over time. If we assume, notwithstanding our earlier objections, that the immediate discount rate is impulsive or ill-considered, which of the longer-term rates is normatively preferable? There is nothing in the logic of new paternalism or behavioral economics that can provide an answer. We are faced with a continuum of normative possibilities. These arguments impel us to the conclusion that among the discount rates revealed in choice or planning behavior, none has a clear claim to normative superiority. Thus, the new paternalist is in a conceptual fog because his underlying standard of evaluation is unspecified. The notion of “excessive impatience” is both theoretically and empirically vague, and that means we have a gradient of possibilities. There is no clear line to resist the gradual creep of higher savings requirements, higher fat taxes, and the like.

In the set of posts so far, Whitman has nicely laid out some of the theory on slippery slopes. Chris Snowdon at Velvet Glove, Iron Fist provides the empirical counterpart, highlighting the shifting positions of the anti-tobacco folks over time. The post is beautiful, do read the whole thing. It opens with Stanton Glantz's assertion that slippery slope arguments are fallacious, then looks at the shifting goals of Action on Smoking and Health over the last forty years.

Back in 1968, ASH ostensibly existed as a pressure group to resist cigarette advertising on television to protect children. When the Los Angeles Times interviewed him in that year, he was insistent that he was anti-smoking, not anti-smoker, as their reporter explained:

"Banzhaf doesn't smoke but he denies his crusade is based on an antipathy for smokers and smoking. "You can smoke," he said. "That's all right. I just don't want children brainwashed into it."

Fast forward to 2009 and Banzhaf has a very different attitude. He now describes ASH as "a national organization leading the fight to protect nonsmokers from thirdhand smoke." ('Thirdhand smoke' being an ill-defined chimera based on a telephone survey which has no credibilty amongst serious scientists). For several years, he has been a leading voice in the campaign for smokers to be discriminated against in custody battles. Not only has he called for the children of divorced couples to be given to the nonsmoking parent, but he now believes that the smoking parent should be compelled by law to "change clothing and use a mouthwash before the child visits." Last year, he appeared on television to explain why it was "legal and profitable" for companies to "fire smokers and employ only nonsmokers."

It is safe to say that Banzhaf would have never been taken seriously had he proposed even one of these policies in the 1970s. Instead he has taken baby steps to win a long series of small victories, all the while calling for compromise and reasonable accommodation. This article documents a few examples of how he has achieved this.

Note that much of the above quote, at the original source, comes with nice links to the relevant sources.

Snowdon then gives the nice set of quotes over time from Banzhaf (all my paraphrasings unless in quotes)

• 1977: Banning smoking on the streets would cause problems, but having laws mandating separate smoking sections, with the restrictions not too onerous, that should be reasonable.


• 1979: "We have no objection whatsoever if you ...want to go into smokeasies and smoke all day long. We just object that you do it around us."


• 1986: Anti-smoking organisations don't want to ban smoking, we just want separate sections for non-smokers.


• 1993: "A non-smoking section? There ain't no such thing. Tobacco smoke drifts, it is recirculated."


• 2006: "The ultimate goal is to have a smoke-free society...we will not be tolerating it on public places, streets, outdoors, or anywhere else."

Lots more great stuff at the original post, showing the slippery slopes on smoking in bars, planes, smoking and non-smoking sections... do read the whole thing.

Alcohol's already part way down the slope. The New Zealand Law Commission has an open ear for suggestions of reasonable accommodations between the prohibitionists and the status quo; when the whole thing is revisited again in ten years' time, the status-quo's goalposts will again have shifted, and we'll find a new midpoint between tomorrow's status quo and complete prohibition. The asymptotic result is pretty obvious. Next up is fatty foods.

Wouldn't it be nice if the folks on the chopping block would pull together against paternalism, full stop, rather than seeing the piecemeal regulatory changes as ways of getting temporary advantage against competitors.

Paternalism and slopes

Glen Whitman continues blogging on paternalism and slippery slopes.

At the far end of the continuum lies an outright ban on certain activities. Sunstein and Thaler embrace this conclusion: “Almost all of the time, even the non-libertarian paternalist will allow choosers, at some cost, to reject the proposed course of action. Those who are required to wear motorcycle helmets can decide to risk the relevant penalty, and to pay it if need be.”

Notice that the same argument would place outright prohibition of alcohol, drugs, or anything else on the same spectrum. You are free to use any drug you want, says the argument, if you are willing to incur the cost of potential imprisonment. At this end of the continuum, we find, lies genuine hard paternalism. In Sunstein and Thaler’s words:

A libertarian paternalist who is especially enthusiastic about free choice would be inclined to make it relatively costless for people to obtain their preferred outcomes. (Call this a libertarian paternalist.) By contrast, a libertarian paternalist who is especially confident of his welfare judgments would be willing to impose real costs on workers and consumers who seek to do what, in the paternalist’s view, would not be in their best interests. (Call this a libertarian paternalist.)
Movement along a paternalist continuum should come as no surprise when the two ends of the continuum depend on which word is italicized, as well as on the subjective confidence of the policymaker in his welfare judgments.

It bears emphasis that the sequence of steps we have outlined—from nudging (changing the order of cafeteria items) to pushing (imposing costs on those who deviate from the state’s preferred terms of contract) to shoving (ruling out some terms entirely) to controlling (banning some activities altogether)—is not our creation. Sunstein and Thaler present the same proposals in approximately the same order, to demonstrate the existence of a continuum.

I continue to worry that the gradient isn't made less slippery with moves toward socialization of the costs of personal decisions under Obamacare proposals. As Jeff Miron notes

Consider, for example, the question of weight. Existing evidence seems to suggest that being overweight is bad for one's health and causes higher than average health care expenditure. So, government might want the health insurance plans it subsidizes to include incentives for exercise and weight loss.

Yet that approach runs headlong into a ban on pre-existing conditions, a crucial feature of Obamacare. This ban implies that overweight people get the same insurance, at the same price, as everyone else. This defeats an attempt to improve health by discouraging obesity and generates resentment from the non-obese who believe, accurately or not, that they are being forced to subsidize unhealthy behavior by others.

The very likely result is solution by regulation: private decisions that are both socially disapproved and that are likely to impose fiscal externalities will be subject to regulation. The odds of "fat taxes" go up considerably if policy has the effect Miron predicts. Miron continues:

In a private, unregulated insurance market, competition between insurers would determine whether obesity actually predicts higher than average health expenditure. (Even if the obese are less healthy, their lifetime health expenditures might be near or below average because of shorter life expectancy.) Competition would determine whether provisions like required exercise regimes actually improve health. People who are overweight might face higher premiums, but they would bear the burden.

The same issue arises for an enormous range of behaviors: smoking, excessive drinking, downhill skiing, and so on. Government takeover of health insurance, implicitly or explicitly, takes a stand on all these issues. Government will not always get it right, no matter how well-intentioned, and competitive forces will not be allowed to correct the mistakes. In addition, imposition of a particular approach, with the implied cross-subsidies from the healthy to the unhealthy, constistutes one more way in which government intervention promotes an embittered, polarized society.

My prediction: regulation or taxes to mitigate the fiscal externality, regardless of the current sign of the externality, on behaviours subject to public disapprobation. So increased tobacco and alcohol taxes but no tax on skiing, mountain climbing, failing to get your kid vaccinated, travelling to countries where polio and TB are present, or risky sexual behaviour.

Whitman and Rizzo on paternalism

Glen Whitman and Mario Rizzo have published a nice piece, "Little Brother is Watching You: New Paternalism and Slippery Slopes". Whitman will be blogging the article in the days to come; worth watching for. Money quote

Our thesis is that the new paternalism’s claim to moderation is not sustainable. A recent body of literature, to which we have contributed, has rehabilitated slippery-slope reasoning by examining the specific processes by which slippery slopes occur, as well as the circumstances under which slippage is most likely. The insights of the slippery-slope literature suggest that new paternalist policies are particularly subject to expansion. We argue that this is true even if policymakers are rational. But perhaps more importantly, we argue that the slippery-slope threat is especially great if policymakers are not fully rational, but instead share the behavioral and cognitive biases attributed to the people their policies are supposed to help. Consequently, accepting new paternalist policies creates a risk of accepting, in the long run, greater restrictions on individual autonomy than have heretofore been acknowledged. Inasmuch as new paternalists claim to be interested in preserving autonomy, this surely must be taken into account as an unrecognized or unacknowledged cost to be balanced against any possible gains from their policies.