Seebach: Beware of government's 'It's good for you' routine

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Saturday, April 15, 2006

Government "it's for your own good" paternalism is not innocuous, and not necessarily any more benign than the "do it or else" kind, says Edward L. Glaeser in a recent article, "Paternalism and Psychology," in the University of Chicago Law Review.

Such "soft" paternalism, which aims to alter what people choose to do without forcing them to change, "requiries a government bureaucracy that is skilled in manipulating beliefs," Glaeser writes. "It is not obvious that we want governments to become more adept at persuading voters or for governments to invest in infrastructure that will support persuasion. Governments have a strong incentive to abuse any persuasion-related infrastructure and use it for their own interests, mostly keeping themselves in power."

That's not the only problem. As people's opinions are molded over time, soft paternalism tends to turn hard. Smoking warnings become smoking bans, for instance.

Such political arguments are familiar, but Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University, draws on research from that field to argue that government decision-making leads on average to worse decisions than people would make for themselves (http://lawreview. uchicago.edu/issues/archive/v73/winter/ 08.Glaeser.pdf).

It's often a matter of cost.

"Although government bureaucrats may be strongly altruistic," Glaeser says, "few advocates of paternalism would really argue that a government decision-maker would be willing to pay the same personal costs to make a citizen's life better as that citizen himself would."

But citizens' efforts are also affected by costs, including the costs of becoming well-informed voters. "Individuals have stronger incentives when making consumption decisions than when taking part in an election to choose a leader who will make consumption decisions for them," he says.

Underlying all this well-deserved skepticism about the wisdom of letting other people decide what is best for us is the concept of "bounded rationalism," which means roughly that people are rational about many things, but only up to a point. It takes time and effort to learn enough about a subject to make rational decisions about it, and nobody has time enough to do that for everything.

And then there's all the evidence from psychology that what people believe can often be changed (regardless of the facts) by social pressures and the prodigious effort expended to change beliefs. And sometimes beliefs are just wrong.

There is, of course, a lively market in influencing beliefs, not only in consumer advertising but in attempts to influence political opinions and public policy. And at some level, they clearly work. Glaeser cites results from a 2002 Gallup poll that only 7 percent of Americans do not believe that Arabs carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But 89 percent of Kuwaitis believe that the attackers were not Arabs. As he says of another example, they can't both be right.

Also, problems may simply be too difficult for people to solve. If people make their own mistakes, they may at least learn from them, and other people might also learn to avoid those mistakes.

But when the government makes mistakes, then everybody is required to make them. Even if the government is right sometimes, which certainly happens, the consequences of being wrong are greater. And, Glaeser suggests, as the difficulty of problems increases, and the human ability to solve them decreases, "the quality of government decision-making decreases even faster than the quality of private decision-making."

If public policy mistakes come from the efforts of interest groups to persuade bureaucrats to enact the policies, and certainly some of them do, and if it costs less to persuade a few high-level bureaucrats than millions of consumers or thousands of local officials, then, Glaeser predicts, government decision-making will be particularly flawed.

If I understand this argument correctly, textbooks are an example. A very small number of people decide on statewide textbook adoptions in California and Texas, and what they like, everybody gets. Without them, we'd have better textbooks and a wider variety of textbooks. Publishers would be able to experiment, indeed they'd have to, in order to sell books to thousands of individual school districts, with widely varied opinions about what kind of books are good. Some books would emerge that are better than the government-adopted ones, and their value would be proved by experience.

I think that's happened with the Saxon math curriculum, actually, despite the hostility of much of the mathematics education establishment. It's been in use for years, and just recently it was among four curriculums chosen for a three-year research study to evaluate what kind of curriculum is most effective with at-risk students. Shouldn't somebody in the U.S. Department of Education have known that before endorsing just about everything else?

Anyway, Glaeser accepts that governments are going to be paternalistic and that it's not always bad. He'd just like us to be skeptical of claims that it is probably for our own good, and not to worry. You should worry quite a lot.

Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the News. She can be reached by telephone at (303) 892-2519 or by e-mail at .