Timothy Taylor on Nudging and Public Choice

He writes,

think about elected officials and regulators in the spirit of behavioral economics: they often lack self-control; have a difficult time evaluating complex situations; tend to stick with rules-of-thumb and default options rather than accept the cognitive and organizational costs of re-evaluating their positions; do not evaluate costs and benefits in a consistent way across different contexts; are not good at evaluating risks accurately, instead often respond to limited information and hype; and are overly averse to the risk of taking responsibility for decisions that might turn out poorly. This perspective must have widespread implications for decisions involving the complexities of the tax code or government budgets, policies affecting the workforce and the environment, openness to new sources of domestic and foreign competition, and foreign policy as well.

He is riffing off a paper by W. Kip Viscusi and Ted Gayer.

5 thoughts on “Timothy Taylor on Nudging and Public Choice

  1. There is no such thing as nudge free though, the best we can do is consider nudges consciously rather than allowing them to be driven by marketers and special interests who most definitely consider them consciously. Lack of direct interest in the result can enhance objectivity over the distortion of narrow interest.

    • “Lack of direct interest in the result” sounds suspiciously like “I know better than you” and “distortion of narrow interest” is, in fact, what is being predicted. The idea that politicians and regulators do not have narrow interests is just wrong. They are not more “objective” they are just different.

      • It’s fascinating how intelligent people of the Left cannot internalize this.
        They’ll kind of agree when you point it out, then go right back to making assumptions that contradict public choice.

    • Politicians and bureaucrats are a subset of marketers and special interests, not an independent set.

      • So, one ,standard of evaluation is whether proposed nudges offset other nudges. The null hypothesis would have to be that no, like pushing people into housing, politicians will tend to be slaves to the zeitgeist.

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