Over the weekend there was an article about Cass Sunstein and the OIRA, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, in the New York Times that I wanted to comment briefly on:
Libertarian paternalists would have school cafeterias put the fruit before the fried chicken, because students are more likely to grab the first food they see. They support a change in Illinois law that asks drivers renewing their licenses to choose whether they want to be organ donors. The simple act of having to choose meant that more people signed up. Ideas like these, taking human idiosyncrasies into account, might revive an old technocratic hope: that society could be understood so perfectly that it might be improved. The elaboration of behavioral economics, which seeks to uncover the ways in which people are predictably irrational, “is the most exciting intellectual development of my lifetime,†Sunstein told me.
Following the nomenclature introduced by Joseph Nye, government operates by two different sets of mechanisms: hard power mechanisms, the mechanisms of coercion, and soft power mechanisms. When speaking of regulations, we are speaking of hard power: taxes, subsidies, incarceration, or execution. In almost every circumstance that is the way that government works. Whatever euphemism you’re using be it “nudge” or “push”, they are coercive means.
Although subsidies are the least coercive of the limited arsenal of means available to government, they are coercive nonetheless and, worse, they will inevitably be corrupted. Catsup will be defined as a vegetable. Politically powerful groups being courted will be offered subsidies regardless of their economic, social, or dietary implications.
BTW, do we really want legal scholars making judgments about diet? What a wonderful example of the perversion of technocracy! While putting the fruit in front of the fried chicken may at the margins result in more fruit being selected, I strongly suspect that we’ll see just what we see now: tons of fruit being discarded. There is ample scholarship demonstrating that for tens of thousands of years human beings have preferentially sought out the highest fat-containing food in their environments. Perhaps putting the fruit before the fried chicken will change that. Maybe that’s what Mr. Sunstein learned in law school.
It may also be worth mentioning that portion sizes in school cafeterias have been federally mandated for decades and they’re significantly larger than they need to be. Not only does this encourage waste, it encourages students to eat more than they should and to become accustomed to oversized portions.
There are other means by which government operates but they are subtle, hard to exploit, and work slowly: soft power means. The most significant of these are Teddy Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit”, persuasion, and leading by example. I wonder if they put the fruit before the fried chicken in the Senate cafeteria. And what the senators prefer to eat.
Alexis de Toqueville is that you?
Lets just finally admit it…we don’t want freedom we want parentalism and be done with it.
Steve,
Right, because it’s only one or the other.
Regulations, at least the environmental and workplace safety regulations I am most familiar with, all start soft with information sharing. Regulated entities are required to report about a topic; the information is gathered and disseminated with at least the plausible view that knowledge about health and safety practices in one’s industry can lead to better practices.
But what really ends up happening is that the regulators find out that Company A uses a more expensive practice A1, and then decides to mandate practice A1 for all the other companies. It may not necessarily be true that A1 is the best practice, but it is proven to be economically achievable by Company A and Company A is at a disadvantage to Companies B, C, D . . . who don’t employ the practice. In other words, information sharing is another word for data collection.
Let me also add that I was unable to find any study supporting the cafeteria line placement theory over the weekend. It’s described as a hypothetical in the book and on the blog site. If the government is going to be trying to influence intimate personal decisions, I would like to see an evidence-based approach used.
I did find some research compilations that indicated that intervention in the school cafeteria to influence eating decisions is notoriously short-lived.
Sam,
You mean we can have both freedom and parentalism?
Perhaps the term mutually exclusive is something you should familiarize yourself with.
And apparently rent seeking.
Who needs evidence when you’re a constitutional law professor?
Particularly a Constitutional law professor who is most widely known for writing hypotheticals in the most commonly used Constitutional Law textbook.
So help me, if there is not a study on this and a parent browbeats our PTA into spending its fund-raising money on reconfiguring the cafeteria instead of more computers, I might blow a gasket. Last year, we spent all of our fundraising on automatic faucets so the kids couldn’t catch Swine Flu when they touched the faucet handles. I bet the number of kids who actually wash their hands at that school is statistically negligible.
“intimate personal decisions”
Chicken vs fruit? Intimate? (J/K)
“BTW, do we really want legal scholars making judgments about diet? What a wonderful example of the perversion of technocracy! While putting the fruit in front of the fried chicken may at the margins result in more fruit being selected, I strongly suspect that we’ll see just what we see now: tons of fruit being discarded.”
Who makes the judgment now? What makes that person/persons so special? What are their incentives? Why do you blindly trust those people? I will note that based upon our cooking experiences for our son’s school events over the last couple of years, that kids seem to eat a lot of fruit if we bring it. I was surprised TBH. Also, BTW, they mostly wash their hands in the bathrooms. Maybe just when I am there, although I see the same at large tournaments where few of the kids know me.
I believe that there is literature on this, but I may be wrong. Our experience is that whatever we put first in the food line, as long as it is not turnips or such, goes disproportionately faster, even if it is not as good as other items.
OT- Good NEJM article.
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMsa0910881
Steve
steve, what do the cafeteria lines in your local hospitals look like?
where I live, they are kind of floral, with food styles in bunches, not at all linear. People generally know which petal they belong in, and some get quite cranky when their expectations are messed with.
I keep forgetting to get my sister, who is an NP, to teach my kids to wash good. I’m not succeeding; I figure she might make it seem more glamorous. I’ll admit I’m extrapolating from observations of men in restrooms over the years on the frequency of washing; not terribly evidence-based. But the hands-free sinks bothers about every parent that’s brought it up to me that didn’t feel comfortable standing up to the “our kids are all going to die” line. As far as I can tell, that’s who’s running things.
PD-Interesting analogy, and I guess appropriate. Our cafeteria is clumped, or in petals as you might describe. The salad section is in front, closest to the cash register. Entrees are in back, but they have a separate, healthy choice entree section up before the main part. Deserts are clumped with drinks. There is a separate sandwich area. That is the only place where I see people get cranky, mostly when they feature something weird.
On hand washing, I may also have selection bias. We do a lot with my son’s speech and debate team. This is clearly a brighter than average group.
Steve