Advertising freedom

Simon Wren-Lewis argues that tobacco plain-packaging mandates may be freedom-enhancing. He writes:

So we have individual freedom, interference, and crucially motivation. Advertising is usually portrayed as just providing information so that consumers can make informed choices. Sometimes it may do that. But advertising is often about suggesting associations, which provide no information at all. It is a mild form of brainwashing. Most of the time it is simply annoying.

For some, the information provided by some advertising might be useful. For most it is not. We can try and avoid advertising if we do not want its ‘information’, by turning the page, recording the programme and fast-forwarding through the adverts, averting our eyes, but this requires effort. Why should I have to make that effort? So for most people most of the time, it is advertising that mildly interferes with our freedom. (If I wanted to be clever, I could say that companies who advertise believe their product makes consumers better off, and therefore it is advertising that is paternalistic. However companies advertise to increase profits, not to increase consumer utility.)

So a government that prevents advertising can be seen as allowing individuals to make their own unencumbered choices. It is giving us a little more freedom and autonomy, rather than limiting it. The argument for advertising has to be that the benefits to the few in getting useful information outweighs the costs to the many in either avoiding it, or getting information they do not want. It is not paternalistic to ban advertising, just as it is not paternalistic to stop people being stalked.

Wren-Lewis is right about a few things, but I do rather disagree with him about the bigger picture here.

First off, we do indeed have plenty of models where advertising plays both informative and persuasive roles. And it is completely sane to model cigarettes as a Lancaterian good with a bundle of characteristics ranging from physical attributes like taste and burn intensity to more nebulous things like image and affiliation.

Brand affiliation for many goods is less about the physical merits of the product than it is about self-identification and self-expression, as Cass Sunstein nicely laid out a few years ago. Policies like plain packaging, that work to destroy the affiliative value of brand choice, could plausibly affect smoking rates. Similarly, a proponent of enhanced fuel-economy could insist that cars getting less than, say, 30 miles per gallon be subject to "plain car" regulations such that they had to be painted in beige, have horns that shouted "I hate the environment and probably am compensating for something" instead of beeping, and have some minimum designated asymmetry - for example, the left headlight would have to be twice the size of the right headlight. People would then be "nudged" into choosing the "right" car. On plain packaging, it's still not clear to me that the policy doesn't just push smokers to discount brands, but I suppose that the Australian data will tell us in a couple of years.

Tobacco branding and packaging is then akin to a Jaguar's sleek lines and beautiful rich colours. If Wren-Lewis wants to say that I'm brainwashed into thinking that an E-series is more beautiful than a Honda Insight, well, I'm not sure how I'd disprove that. I'm not sure he's offering a testable hypothesis there. If we stuck an Insight's body over a Jaguar's frame and engine and proved people liked it less, that's hardly evidence of Jaguar's brainwashing. We're doing more than just affecting irrelevant cosmetic or advertising details: the style is part of the product.

I disagree rather more substantially with the rest of his post. Wren-Lewis asks why the burden should be on him to avoid advertising in magazines by turning the page. The standard answer that any microeconomist would provide him is that the provision of advertising reduces the price of the magazine. Because most consumers prefer buying the bundle of "content plus advertising" at a lower price rather than content-only at a higher price, that's what's provided. At least for most publications. Switching to a "ban the advertising" equilibrium would have Wren-Lewis, and people like him, imposing costs on people like me, who are happier to have advertising and pay the lower price. How do we know which state of the world is better? Aggregate willingness to pay. Profit-seeking publishers weigh up how much they'll irritate Wren-Lewis and lose his custom against drops in profits where people like me are more sensitive to prices than to advertising. That publishers are profit-seeking rather than consumer-surplus-maximizers doesn't really wreck this result.

I'd thought this was pretty standard micro-theory. I don't get why Wren-Lewis gets to decide that the only permissable function of advertising is information-provision. In that world, we would discount to zero the utility that sports-fans get from seeing the affliative persuasive advertising for their preferred team - ads that focus on the team's logo, its chants, and perhaps some unrepresentative action shots.

Further, Wren-Lewis later argues that "the information content of the 'plain packages' [dominated by graphic ugly images] is clearly much greater than packages that were dominated by a logo. So this is one example where the information content of advertising does dominate any reduction in freedom that the advertising entails."

Suppose that smokers do find the packages dominated by big ugly warning pictures are less attractive. Is this evidence of the information content of the packaging having dominated? Hardly. Imagine that Australia had decided to run a different version of plain packaging in Tasmania. There, cigarette packages would have graphic images of slaughtered and injured animals instead of diseased lungs. There is no informational content in such images, but they are disturbing and work to break the affiliative brand utility. Like putting a Jaguar into an Insight's body.

For true paternalists, none of this matters: they know that less smoking is better for you even if you think you like it, so it doesn't matter what the mechanism is so long as it works. For those who at least still nod in the direction of revealed preference and of de gustibus, consider the uglification experiment I propose. Is it really more plausible that Oz's plain packaging regs work (if they do work) through an informational channel, or that they simply destroy part of the product's real value and thereby discourage consumption? And if you want to say that the value provided by beautiful packaging and brand affiliation is not real, think through the consequences of that position more consistently.

HT: Dick Puddlecote

Bathmophobia

Richard Thaler had a term for people with an irrational fear of slippery slopes: bathmophobes. He counted Glen Whitman among their ranks for warning that Thaler's "nudge" architecture could would up proving rather illiberal in practice. I worried, in my Mont Pelerin address, that by reducing the costs of paternalism, Nudge seemed more likely to expand the range of paternalism rather than transform existing paternalisms into softer alternatives. Paternalism gets cheaper so we get more of it. I suppose I'd have been a bathmophobe as well.

Anyway, here's Thaler on the bathmophobes:

For example, you may not be familiar with bathmophobia, which is an abnormal and persistent fear of stairs or steep slopes, or a fear of falling. Less well known is “nudgephobia,” also known as the Whitman-Rizzo syndrome, which is the fear of being gently nudged down a slope while standing on a completely flat surface. This phobia is sometimes associated with other disorders such as the fear of being given helpful directions when lost; the fear of obtaining reliable medical advice when sick; and, in rare cases, some have even suffered from a fear of having someone recommend a book or movie that you will really like.

...Another basic point that Whitman does not recognize is that paternalism of some sort is inevitable. Consider the following common problem. Most firms have an open enrollment period in November when employees can elect their benefit package for the following year. At my employer, the University of Chicago, you have a few weeks to log on to the appropriate web site and make your selections. The question is, what should the employer do for those employees who forget to log on? (Professors’ reputations for absent-mindedness are well deserved.) For each of the choices the employee has, the employer needs to select a default option for those who do not log on, and normally the default is either “same choice as last year” or “back to zero” (meaning, decline this option). At Chicago the default option for the health insurance plan is the same as last year.

...Presumably, if libertarian paternalism creates a slope risk then real paternalism must generate a “cliff” risk. But have we seen this in history? In America we started as Puritans but moved away from it. When Prohibition was passed into law it did not lead to a slew of other paternalistic interventions. On the contrary, once society got to see prohibition in action, the law was eventually repealed. Is there any evidence of a paternalistic slide? The only example Whitman gives is smoking, where there certainly has been a progression of increasingly intrusive laws passed. But there are several problems with this example. First, most of the anti-smoking laws are based on externalities, not paternalism. People do not want to fly, eat, or work in smoke-filled environments. Indeed, many smokers favor such laws. Note that while smoking bans are not nudges, they are shoves, even these shoves do not seem to have led to a batch of similar crackdowns in other domains. I have not seen any municipality institute a ban on loud talking in restaurants, for example, though come to think of it… .

In short, the risk of the slippery slope appears to be a figment of Professor Whitman’s imagination, and clear evidence of his bathmophobia. 

Remember that old Simpsons episode where Lisa convinces an amnesiac Burns about the merits of recycling? And he goes on to recycle the ocean into Little Lisa Slurry? And Lisa recoils in horror at the evil she helped enable?

I wonder if that's how Richard Thaler's feeling now. Perhaps he should be. Why? This.

I suppose it's all fine. After all, there has to be some default position on whether you wish to have a censored internet package. The choice of default "porn and dangerous thoughts allowed" will have consequences, as will the alternative of "porn and dangerous thoughts not allowed, unless you tell your ISP that you like porn and dangerous thoughts and maybe get put on some list because of it". The government cannot help but to influence outcomes by its choice of the default position. So why not ban dangerous thoughts by default. It's still Libertarian Paternalistic, because you can still opt out. And really, why would anybody need to have access to websites including "violent material", "extremist and terrorist related content", "anorexia and eating disorder websites", "suicide related websites", or websites mentioning alcohol and smoking. We know those are all bad things; the government tells us so. Switching the default is a perfect Thaler-inspired nudge.

And it's not just me calling this a nudge policy.

The Independent notes the filters implemented by the four main private internet providers will be "default-on," meaning users must explicitly choose to turn them off. Users can decide to keep certain filters while turning others off.

Making the filters default means most people will keep them, according to Open Rights Group Executive Director Jim Killock. "We know that people stick with defaults: this is part of the idea behind 'nudge theory' and 'choice architecture' that is popular with Cameron."

According to Cameron, the new parental control settings will be turned on for all new broadband subscribers "by the end of the year."

If anything, I've been inadequately bathmophobic. Here's what I wrote about this exact policy back in 2010 when it first came up:

I'm going to bet that this doesn't wind up being implemented. Here's Hansard of the debate. The Minister seemed pretty lukewarm on pushing through regulatory changes; I'll guess that the latest reports are bargaining position for either getting ISPs to do more to push subsidized Net Nanny variants to folks who want them, or for concessions on other issues altogether. Dick Puddlecote is livid (rightly so) but I'd be shorting the iPredict contract at prices higher than $0.35. It's pretty disgusting that a coalition that includes the Lib Dems would be even making noises in this direction.

I was wrong.

Since we're into the range of policies-I'd-previously-thought-implausible, let's turn back to my review of Nudge in the Christchurch Press a few years ago, in which I wondered whether Sunstein and Thaler would be happy with choice architecture at the ballot box.

While Sunstein worries about our decisions over investment plans or our weakness of will at the buffet table, I worry about our decisions at the voting booth. We vote infrequently, there’s no feedback from our personal voting decision to any policy outcome (unless you happen to hit Lotto by breaking a tie), the voting decision is complex and we may have little grasp of the issues at stake let alone our own positions on those issues. In my own research, I’ve found that only about half of voters in 2005 could place National, United Future, and Labour correctly on a left-right spectrum, for example, and that individuals’ political knowledge independently affects their policy and party preferences even after controlling for income, education, race, employment, gender, and other demographic characteristics. And so I think we (by which I mean you) need a nudge. Under my libertarian paternalistic voting system, your electoral enrolment would be linked to your census details. You’d then answer a brief questionnaire when entering a computerized voting booth, and I’d tell you, through the computer’s algorithms, for whom you should vote. Trust me: I’d be choosing the option that really would be best for you, if you only understood all of the policies supported by each of the parties and had a PhD economist’s understanding of the likely effects of these policies. You’d still be free to pick some other candidate or party, but you’d have to first reject the default choice I’d pick for you. The remaining options would then be presented in an order designed to maximize the chances of your choosing the next best option.

I trust that you find this kind of scheme repugnant. I’d find it great, so long as I got to be the choice architect.

I'd given this as reductio; I wonder whether Cameron mightn't be thinking about implementing it.

Ideas have consequences.

Update: James, in comments, notes that part of this is already up for mobile broadband:

This filter is already in effect in the UK for all "mobile broadband". It's called "content lock" - and about e.g half Lindsay Mitchell's blogroll is classified as adult content by the UK's current filter (Offsetting Behaviour is currently OK).
How do you unlock it - easy. Go to a website and enter your details. All you need is a credit card. A UK credit card. With a UK Postcode. Which, of course, I don't have.

I'm glad that Offsetting isn't on Cameron's banned list as yet.

Previously:

• UK Nudges
• Libertarian Paternalism Is An Oxymoron
• From Nudge to Shove
• Nudge Nudge
• Nudge thyself
• Wink Wink, nudge nudge, say no more (in which this porn nudge was first discussed)

Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more

You've always had the option to opt out of internet pornography. Lots of internet service providers advertise provision of specifically filtered services to keep porn out. Some ISPs provide nothing but filtered service. But you have to opt out: the default plans don't censor your pipe.

So most folks don't opt out unless they want to bind themselves against self-control problems, they want to keep the kids out of that stuff, or they want to make a symbolic statement against pornography and in favour of the ISPs that provide filtered service.

Some Brit MPs wish to reverse the default:

The biggest broadband providers, including BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk, are being called to a meeting next month by Ed Vaizey, the communications minister, and will be asked to change how pornography gets into homes.
Instead of using parental controls to stop access to pornography - so-called "opting out" - the tap will be turned off at source. Adults will then have to "opt in."

...

Claire Perry, the Tory MP for Devizes and a keen lobbyist for more restrictions, said: "Unless we show leadership, the internet industry is not going to self-regulate. The minister has said he will get the ISPs together and say, 'Either you clean out your stables or we are going to do it for you'."

"There is this very uneasy sense for parents of children that we do not have to tolerate this Wild West approach. We are not coming at this from an anti-porn perspective. We just want to make sure our children aren't stumbling across things we don't want them to see."

More wonderful libertarian "nudge" paternalism from the Brits. Those who enjoy the stuff would still get it, but only if they explicitly sign up for it and presumably get put onto some government list of known pornography viewers which will presumably get out via Wikileaks within a few years. Then the journos could have fun looking at the lists of which prominent people have signed up for the uncensored stream and folks can snicker about their neighbours' viewing habits.

The big difference between the two default rules is that the opt out rules allow folks with "deviant" tastes to pool with those who are indifferent, while opt-in only selects those whose preference intensity is strong enough to be happy about being on the list. Nothing is currently signaled by failure to opt out but opting-in would say rather a lot: you're either a consumer of the product, or a very strong civil libertarian.

I'm going to bet that this doesn't wind up being implemented. Here's Hansard of the debate. The Minister seemed pretty lukewarm on pushing through regulatory changes; I'll guess that the latest reports are bargaining position for either getting ISPs to do more to push subsidized Net Nanny variants to folks who want them, or for concessions on other issues altogether. Dick Puddlecote is livid (rightly so) but I'd be shorting the iPredict contract at prices higher than $0.35. It's pretty disgusting that a coalition that includes the Lib Dems would be even making noises in this direction.

Repudiating Jamie Oliver

The campaign summed up New Labour’s contempt for ordinary people, too. Let loose to do New Labour’s bidding, to state openly how the government really felt about working-class families, Oliver berated the masses for being ‘scrubbers’, ‘tossers’, ‘white trash’ and ‘arseholes’ who feed their children ‘shit’. He said plainly what ministers normally only say in code. And the campaign also embodied New Labour’s illiberal tendencies: tuckshops were forced to close down (by what some referred to as a ‘tuckshop Taliban’), chips and salt and other nice things were banned in schools, and the lunchbox-monitoring initiative spoke volumes about officialdom’s distrust of parents and its desire always to step in when mum and dad allegedly fail.

Celebrity-fronted, dodgy science-fuelled, fear-injected authoritarianism: that, in essence, is what the Jamie Oliver school-dinners initiative represented. The Lib-Cons deserve congratulations for putting that kind of patronising politics in the dock. Let’s hope they continue to do so, though there are some worrying signs that they won’t – David Cameron et al are already bringing in celebrities of their own to front campaigns and Lansley has talked about his preference for ‘nudging’ rather than ‘nannying’ in pushing forward ‘behaviour change programmes’. But for the time being, as Oliver and Labour bigwigs including Ed Balls and Andy Burnham turn on Lansley for daring to blaspheme against St Jamie of the Sun-Dried Tomato, let us crack open a bottle of unhealthy fizzy stuff and celebrate the possible passing of an irritating political era.

Brendan O'Neill on the new regime in the UK. Again, the proof will be in policy action, not talk. And, the UK is at a far worse spot than is NZ, making it easier to turn around. But I do wish that National here would be paying a bit more attention to the direction of change in the UK.

UK Civil Liberties [updated]

Look at what's happening in the UK and weep for New Zealand.



From a newly launched UK government website: Your Freedom.

We're working to create a more open and less intrusive society through our Programme for Government. We want to restore Britain’s traditions of freedom and fairness, and free our society of unnecessary laws and regulations – both for individuals and businesses.

This site gives you the chance to submit, comment on, or vote for ideas about how we can do this. Your ideas will inform government policy and some of your proposals could end up making it into bills we bring before Parliament to change the law.

So if there are any laws or regulations you'd like us to do away with, then submit your idea. If you see ideas here already that you like the look of, then rate them and get them moved up the list. And if there’s more you’d like to say, then talk to others in the comments section for each proposal.

It’s time to have your say. After all – it’s your freedom.

We'll have to see what, if anything, comes of the initiative. But at least the British coalition of Tories and Liberals seems to be heading in the right direction. Here, not so much. The Regulatory Responsibility Bill may yet wind up being important in slowing the growth of regulatory interference in personal liberties, but there doesn't seem there much scope for winding back existing restrictions:

Accordingly, the proper baseline to be used to assess whether a particular piece of legislation diminishes from existing liberty, personal security, freedom of choice of action or rights to property is the surrounding body of law and legal principles. It is only legislation which seeks to place additional restrictions on personal liberties, freedoms or rights that may be incompatible with the principle.

Winding back existing restrictions would require a bit more Parliamentary will than here exists. We'll see if the UK is up to it.

HT: Puddlecote

Update: Clause 16 of the Reg Responsibility Bill requires agencies regularly to review legislation they administer. But enforcement really still requires a rather strong constitutional spirit: the harshest penalty under the legislation is a statement of non-compliance from the courts. I'm not sure that much else can be done, given Parliamentary supremacy. I just don't get my hopes up too high.