Contributor David Balan and I meet next week (6-7pm Wed. Mar. 7, GMU, Mason Hall, Rm. D3) to debate "Paternalistic Policy: Altruism or Arrogance?" (I say "Arrogance.") Here let me start to set the stage.
You can open stores for banned products, but people whose sole fault was to be born stupid will shop there and get hurt.
Do the stupid themselves tend to favor or oppose paternalistic regulation? If they favor it, is it because they realize they need extra protection? Anyone know?
[Edit.]Impulsive is more apt here than stupid. What I'm getting at is this. Jon Elster proposed a justification for one form of paternalism as a rational way to deal with impulse control problems. The idea is that we can agree to use the state to curb our tendencies toward impulse gratification.
I don't know that Elster addressed the issue of impulsive minorities. But a critical question is whether those minorities want this protection. (Some might say they're too stupid to know what they want - which may carry some weight if stupidity rather than impulsivity were the issue.)
I agree with your point but not without reservations. I talk quite a bit to with the bottom 30% of the IQ spectrum and I find less susceptible to some types of disinformation than the above IQ people. You almost have to have an above average IQ to buy into some wrong ideas. For example the idea that all natural foods are health and unnatural foods are not, fear of GMO's, fear of the population explosion, fear of peak oil, ideas like vitamin c will cure the common cold and prevent cancer, anti-vaccination autism link, socialism and communism. All of the above seemed more prevalent among the up half of education and IQ people but who have never directly studied the relevant area.Also people are pretty tough they are unlikely to just die from these things before they realize that do not work.
This old post misses the central point of paternalism: Dominance.
"Protecting people from themselves" is not about protecting people. It is about dominating people.
A policy maker has no incentive to give a rodent's rectum about, say, strangers dying from drug overdoses. He just wants the status gratification of telling people what to do and being praised for it, at the same time.
> Would you support Would-Have-Banned stores with an min IQ rule? If so, what would that IQ be?
I would argue that that IQ depends on the IQ and Machiavellianist skills of any potential marketer dedicated to convincing people that the government is wrong to ban the product.
I.e., the "minimum IQ to disregard regulation" depends inherently on the maximum IQ being currently applied to convince people to disregard regulation. Since there's no incentive to accurately measure this, I don't see how an IQ minimum will help.
"Scott, if you can't prohibit resales, you can't prohibit sales, and so you can't ban in the first place. "
That seems a pretty flawed statement. It can be easier to ban manufacture of the goods that would go into the Banned Store than to ban resale of individual items. A bottle of sulfuric acid is nigh-untraceable, but the lab or factory making the acid isn't. If you're a teen who wants booze or cigs, you just have to find a friendly adult who'll bring them out of 7-11 to you; if you want pot or crack, you have to find a way to plug into the illegal drug networks. Obviously not impossible, or even super-hard perhaps, but certainly harder.
A lot of regulation deals with externalities not paternalism. Are there any cases of regulations not related to (at least presumed) externalities that aren't outright stupid?
Regarding the latest evidence suggesting food additives harm childrens health, Tom Watson says this:Until junior Watson was able to tell that not all food on the end of a small blue plastic spoon was the same, I’d not fully appreciated just h...
Paternalists aren't going to like this idea: "let anything the government would have banned be sold only at special 'would have banned' stores, whose customers pass a test showing they understand that regulators disapprove. The...
What a wonderful debate! I do so hope that there will be more. I was devastated to have arrived so late, when I left Arlington an hour ahead and it took me an hour and fifteen minutes, so I missed the whole first part which can be so important (the snow was what did it, and all the sirens!), but what impressed me so was how difficult! the whole issue is, and how well the two sides presented themselves, so that I was quite left hanging as to which side I should take; perhaps it's like juries, which I suppose we have to have because there are some things that are SO hard to decide, and yet Have to be decided, I wonder what it would be like to have something like the Oxford Union has for their debates, where you end up with a vote! I do hope you will announce when you are having more discussions or debates, because I think it is so important to have a real confrontation. Anyway, thank you so much for announcing it and giving us the opportunity to see it.
@Hansen: What I'm driving at is really that there are some ideas that have been dealt with rather well in political philosophy, but OB seems to be re-inventing from first principles in line with some participants' biases. "Paternalism" here is roughly equivalent to "government", but it's a negative framing technique to use this pejoratively value-laden term.
That externalities, tragedies of the commons, and such exist is both obvious and trivial. That something governmentlike is required to solve them is less trivial but as obvious.
But even more broadly, isn't one of the founding ideas of OB that we should be modest with regard to own beliefs? - in which case, the possibility of our own stupidity is well worth considering. Engineers who work with safety-critical systems assume that the users will, eventually, get it wrong, and therefore try to design so as to make it harder to make mistakes than to get it right.
I didn't discuss the benefit in further detail because my main point was that smoking is an unusual case that doesn't generalize to the broader paternalism debate.
As I understand it, the benefits are (i) a minor increase in productivity, since smoking apparently improves cognition in the short term, and (ii) a minor decrease in expenses supporting retired people. (This may, of course, be more than cancelled out by the drawback of people developing serious lung cancer long before they retire. I really have no idea how this amoral arithmetic works out; I just know that most other cases of paternalism are simpler.)
+1 for AlexThe majority of an individual's decisions have external effects that wouldn't enter his rational decision making process (side note: I don't think that normally exists anyways). So the gov's paternalism would be acting to minimize personal bias in favor of an objective pov (side note: I don't think that normally exists anyways).
I really would like to go balls to the wall libertarian and say "if you want to snort coke day and night, you obviously have a different metric for 'quality of life' than me and you are probably maximizing it, so bully for you". But I can't take that stance if that person is treated in an emergency room with public money.
I'd say if you argue that paternalism is altruistic you are arrogant - and that the government only exists (as per Balan's post) to correct market failures, where paternalism and redistribution exist only to the extent that they are a subset of that market correcting function. Consumers are acting only in their personal best interest; even with the regulators' bias they are closer to acting in society's best interest.
Of course, it is obvious that the Decision not to use the Would-Have-Banned stores does not eliminate Decision costs, since the Decision not to use the stores requires a Decision, which is obviated if ban is instituted.
Robin, am I to conclude that you accept that eliminating the information and decision costs is a desirable thing, whether it is done by banning paternalistically or, as you approvingly suggest, by deciding never to use the Would-Have-Banned stores?
And if it is a desirable thing, then wouldn't those who do it have done an Altruistic thing, whether or not garnished by Arrogance?
I plan to be at your debate, though it's not a fit night out for man nor beast.
You can open stores for banned products, but people whose sole fault was to be born stupid will shop there and get hurt.
Do the stupid themselves tend to favor or oppose paternalistic regulation? If they favor it, is it because they realize they need extra protection? Anyone know?
[Edit.]Impulsive is more apt here than stupid. What I'm getting at is this. Jon Elster proposed a justification for one form of paternalism as a rational way to deal with impulse control problems. The idea is that we can agree to use the state to curb our tendencies toward impulse gratification.
I don't know that Elster addressed the issue of impulsive minorities. But a critical question is whether those minorities want this protection. (Some might say they're too stupid to know what they want - which may carry some weight if stupidity rather than impulsivity were the issue.)
Actual teenagers typically report that access to weed is easier than booze.
I agree with your point but not without reservations. I talk quite a bit to with the bottom 30% of the IQ spectrum and I find less susceptible to some types of disinformation than the above IQ people. You almost have to have an above average IQ to buy into some wrong ideas. For example the idea that all natural foods are health and unnatural foods are not, fear of GMO's, fear of the population explosion, fear of peak oil, ideas like vitamin c will cure the common cold and prevent cancer, anti-vaccination autism link, socialism and communism. All of the above seemed more prevalent among the up half of education and IQ people but who have never directly studied the relevant area.Also people are pretty tough they are unlikely to just die from these things before they realize that do not work.
This old post misses the central point of paternalism: Dominance.
"Protecting people from themselves" is not about protecting people. It is about dominating people.
A policy maker has no incentive to give a rodent's rectum about, say, strangers dying from drug overdoses. He just wants the status gratification of telling people what to do and being praised for it, at the same time.
Smart and malicious people would buy stuff from the Would-Have-Banned store and sell it to stupid people.
Arise, ancient thread!
> Would you support Would-Have-Banned stores with an min IQ rule? If so, what would that IQ be?
I would argue that that IQ depends on the IQ and Machiavellianist skills of any potential marketer dedicated to convincing people that the government is wrong to ban the product.
I.e., the "minimum IQ to disregard regulation" depends inherently on the maximum IQ being currently applied to convince people to disregard regulation. Since there's no incentive to accurately measure this, I don't see how an IQ minimum will help.
"Scott, if you can't prohibit resales, you can't prohibit sales, and so you can't ban in the first place. "
That seems a pretty flawed statement. It can be easier to ban manufacture of the goods that would go into the Banned Store than to ban resale of individual items. A bottle of sulfuric acid is nigh-untraceable, but the lab or factory making the acid isn't. If you're a teen who wants booze or cigs, you just have to find a friendly adult who'll bring them out of 7-11 to you; if you want pot or crack, you have to find a way to plug into the illegal drug networks. Obviously not impossible, or even super-hard perhaps, but certainly harder.
A lot of regulation deals with externalities not paternalism. Are there any cases of regulations not related to (at least presumed) externalities that aren't outright stupid?
Should some additives be banned fromfood?
Regarding the latest evidence suggesting food additives harm childrens health, Tom Watson says this:Until junior Watson was able to tell that not all food on the end of a small blue plastic spoon was the same, I’d not fully appreciated just h...
Stores for selling banned products
Paternalists aren't going to like this idea: "let anything the government would have banned be sold only at special 'would have banned' stores, whose customers pass a test showing they understand that regulators disapprove. The...
What a wonderful debate! I do so hope that there will be more. I was devastated to have arrived so late, when I left Arlington an hour ahead and it took me an hour and fifteen minutes, so I missed the whole first part which can be so important (the snow was what did it, and all the sirens!), but what impressed me so was how difficult! the whole issue is, and how well the two sides presented themselves, so that I was quite left hanging as to which side I should take; perhaps it's like juries, which I suppose we have to have because there are some things that are SO hard to decide, and yet Have to be decided, I wonder what it would be like to have something like the Oxford Union has for their debates, where you end up with a vote! I do hope you will announce when you are having more discussions or debates, because I think it is so important to have a real confrontation. Anyway, thank you so much for announcing it and giving us the opportunity to see it.
@Hansen: What I'm driving at is really that there are some ideas that have been dealt with rather well in political philosophy, but OB seems to be re-inventing from first principles in line with some participants' biases. "Paternalism" here is roughly equivalent to "government", but it's a negative framing technique to use this pejoratively value-laden term.
That externalities, tragedies of the commons, and such exist is both obvious and trivial. That something governmentlike is required to solve them is less trivial but as obvious.
But even more broadly, isn't one of the founding ideas of OB that we should be modest with regard to own beliefs? - in which case, the possibility of our own stupidity is well worth considering. Engineers who work with safety-critical systems assume that the users will, eventually, get it wrong, and therefore try to design so as to make it harder to make mistakes than to get it right.
I didn't discuss the benefit in further detail because my main point was that smoking is an unusual case that doesn't generalize to the broader paternalism debate.
As I understand it, the benefits are (i) a minor increase in productivity, since smoking apparently improves cognition in the short term, and (ii) a minor decrease in expenses supporting retired people. (This may, of course, be more than cancelled out by the drawback of people developing serious lung cancer long before they retire. I really have no idea how this amoral arithmetic works out; I just know that most other cases of paternalism are simpler.)
+1 for AlexThe majority of an individual's decisions have external effects that wouldn't enter his rational decision making process (side note: I don't think that normally exists anyways). So the gov's paternalism would be acting to minimize personal bias in favor of an objective pov (side note: I don't think that normally exists anyways).
I really would like to go balls to the wall libertarian and say "if you want to snort coke day and night, you obviously have a different metric for 'quality of life' than me and you are probably maximizing it, so bully for you". But I can't take that stance if that person is treated in an emergency room with public money.
I'd say if you argue that paternalism is altruistic you are arrogant - and that the government only exists (as per Balan's post) to correct market failures, where paternalism and redistribution exist only to the extent that they are a subset of that market correcting function. Consumers are acting only in their personal best interest; even with the regulators' bias they are closer to acting in society's best interest.
Of course, it is obvious that the Decision not to use the Would-Have-Banned stores does not eliminate Decision costs, since the Decision not to use the stores requires a Decision, which is obviated if ban is instituted.
Robin, am I to conclude that you accept that eliminating the information and decision costs is a desirable thing, whether it is done by banning paternalistically or, as you approvingly suggest, by deciding never to use the Would-Have-Banned stores?
And if it is a desirable thing, then wouldn't those who do it have done an Altruistic thing, whether or not garnished by Arrogance?
I plan to be at your debate, though it's not a fit night out for man nor beast.