Robert Sugden, “‘Better Off, as Judged by Themselves’: A Reply to Cass Sunstein.” International Review of Economics 65(1): 9-13, March, 2018.
[Round 1 here; Round 2 here]
• Sunstein suggests that welfare is the goal, but that a person’s own preferences might not be the best metric of that goal. This interpretation allows pursuit of the nudger’s interests.
• The key isn’t preferences before or after the nudge, but rather, when preferences are or aren’t context dependent. If they are context dependent, then those preferences can’t be used to judge what context should be adopted. For "as judged by themselves" (AJBT) to be useful, it must “adjudicate between the judgements that the chooser makes in different contexts.”
• The acknowledged self-control cases are those in which AJBT seems to work. Are they rare? Sunstein’s survey itself involved a nudge that would lead people to admit to a self-control problem. (Though admittedly, people do take up options that are presented as helping overcome self-control problems.)
• Approving of nudges is not the same as wanting to be nudged, as the first is about a policy that applies generally.
• AJBT really is part of the defense to objections from anti-paternalists, despite Sunstein’s claim. Why else would one refer to voluntarily installed GPS devices as involving a form of paternalism?
No comments:
Post a Comment