An article titled Regulation for Conservatives: Behavioral Economics and the Case for Asymmetric Paternalism provides a fairly good perspective on how paternalistic laws should be evaluated, but is a bit weak on the public choice considerations that should make us skeptical of laws. They provide good arguments showing that cognitive biases imply that a government run by angels ought to be sometimes paternalistic, because we can imagine a wide variety of laws which provide significant benefits to people who are acting irrationally while having much less effect on people who are acting irrationally. The examples in this paper show that’s it’s not hard to imagine laws like that appear to do this by mandating defaults that rational people can override, by requiring better disclosure, and by requiring delays for certain purchases. But the examples also show that it’s hard to tell whether a significant fraction of those laws are beneficial in practice.
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